It was my rhinestone sunglasses season.
Shortly after that and a few similar books later, I moved into a place of full spiritual deconstruction. God upended my family’s life, and we moved from megachurch to missional church. Everything unraveled, and I was plagued by hard new questions I’d never asked, much less answered. I was tortured and undone and burning everything to the ground. My spiritual tension was at an all-time high, and my words were tinged with angst, disillusionment, skepticism, and no small amount of self-righteousness. I was pretty sure the American church was on the fast track to ruination and the poor “would always be among us” because Christians were a bunch of selfish nationalists with allegiance to Mammon. Delightful. I penned a whole book about it if you’d like a dose of anxiety with your morning coffee. Like I gently wrote: “Hey, here’s something crazy: In the Word, poverty, widows, hunger—these are not metaphors. There are billions of lambs that literally need to be fed. With food.”1 It was a really fun time to be around me.
That was my Interrupted season.
Born from that place of critical analysis, I swung a big bat at consumerism for the next few years. I invited (forced) my family into a yearlong social experiment called 7 in which we evaluated and reduced our consumption of food, clothes, possessions, media and technology, spending, waste, and stress. And not like, Hey family, let’s have a little meeting about recycling, but more like, We are all going to wear the same seven pieces of clothing for a month (halfhearted is not an adjective ever wasted on me).
We ate the same seven foods for a month, wore the same seven pieces of clothing for a month, gave away seven things a day for a month, eliminated seven forms of media, spent money in only seven places, and adopted seven practices to care for the earth. I mean, we did not even play. I reduced my closet by 80 percent. I constantly worried over ethical supply chains, the wealth gap, landfills, and the next doomed generation of Xbox fanatics. I was afraid to buy a twelve-dollar shirt for fear of hypocrisy. I wrote a book about our experimental mutiny, which was responsible for roughly one hundred thousand readers canceling their cable (I’m sorry, husbands).
That was my simplification season.
And here I am today. I carry less angst and am not caught in the grip of as much turmoil. I’m in a season of joy, honestly. After several years of spiritual upheaval, I’ve seized some contentment, and grace has worked its magic. When people read my books out of order, they are like, Wait, what? Looking back over the last ten years, I still embody vital pieces of every season—I am still passionately for the poor and crave a truly Good News church for the world—but I’ve also continually shifted forward in new ways, into different head spaces. There is a clear trajectory in my life through changing seasons marked by new ideas, new burdens, new focal points, and new leadership.
You know what that is? Good, right, healthy, alive.
I thought long and hard about how I wanted to start this book, this twelfth book, this next iteration of who I am and who we are together, dear reader. What opening note did I want? How do I want to launch these next few hours and days with you as you hold these pages and we create shared space together? And I decided my first words to you would be these:
You don’t have to be who you first were.
That early version of yourself, that season you were in, even the phase you are currently experiencing—it is all good or purposeful or at least useful and created a fuller, nuanced you and contributed to your life’s meaning, but you are not stuck in a category just because you were once branded that way. Just because something was does not mean it will always be.
Maybe part of your story involves heartache, abuse, struggle, loss, choices you wish you had back. Those are particularly sticky labels to unpeel. Those seasons tend to brand us permanently, at least to others, maybe especially to ourselves. Once we are that one thing, it is hard not to be. Whether self-imposed or foisted upon us, we are assessed through that specific lens: damaged, failure, addict, victim, broken, unhealthy, abuser, quitter, injured, frail. These identities stick long after they’ve lost their staying power. They are particularly grim ashes to rise from in beauty.
Someone dear to me was abused at a fragile age. The details unspeakable, the situation unfathomable. Without question, that abuse had the capacity to permanently wound. I sat this person down, mustered up every bit of authority I’d ever claimed in Jesus, and said, “This is not who you are. This happened to you, but it does not define you. You are not broken. You are not ruined. You are not destined to a lifetime of sexual dysfunction. You will become the exact person God intended all along, and you will be stronger in these fragile places than you were before it happened. This is a part of your story, not the end of it, and you will overcome. Not only that; you will thrive. If God is truly the strongest where we are the weakest, then He will win in this place.”
You are far more than your worst day, your worst experience, your worst season, dear one. You are more than the sorriest decision you ever made. You are more than the darkest sorrow you’ve endured. Your name is not Ruined. It is not Helpless. It is not Victim. It is not Irresponsible. History is replete with overcomers who stood up after impossible circumstances and walked in freedom. You are not an anemic victim destined to a life of regret. Not only are you capable, you have full permission to move forward in strength and health.
And if you are prepared for a new, fresh season but others refuse to let you grow into it, sister, shake the dust from your feet and move on anyway. You may need to live a new story before others are willing to bless it. Let them see you laugh again, come back to life, dream new dreams, embrace healing. It can be difficult to envision a new start but impossible to deny one. This is your work. No one can do it for you. God created us to triumph; we are made in the image of Jesus, who has overcome the world. We are never defeated, not even when all evidence appears to the contrary. If you are still breathing, there is always tomorrow, and it can always be new.