Love Beyond Fear

This morning began with a letter.

I was sitting in the chair where I often pray when I noticed an old letter on the table beside me, buried beneath several other things. I had written it during one of the most painful and traumatic seasons of my life but never sent it.

I began to read. What surprised me was not that the memories had disappeared. They haven’t. I still carry grief from that season. I still regularly pass places and people that remind me of relationships lost and conversations that never happened. There are things I may never fully understand, and things I may never completely get past.

But the letter no longer held me in quite the same way.

Something had changed.

Then I noticed what had been lying directly on top of it: a booklet I had printed more than a year ago called A Definitive Guide to Shadow Work: How to Get to Know Your Dark Side.

I had to smile at the serendipity. And then I began remembering—not just the last few years, but a much longer story.

Nearly forty years ago, after a pretty messy adolescence, a youth director named Lisa saw something in me that I couldn’t yet see in myself. She invited me to attend a Peer Ministry train-the-trainer. Circumstances changed soon afterward, and the program was never able to be launched in our youth group the way we had hoped.

By an outcome-based measure, not much came of it.

And yet it changed my life.

Today I serve on the board of that same organization, and the Ministry of Presence training I have taught for years is a direct adaptation of what I first received there. Lisa gave me one of my earliest experiences of something I have come to believe deeply:

We all need people in our lives who will remember and remind us of who we truly are when we forget—and stop living it.

She didn’t put something into me. She recognized something already there.

The Long Path

Years later, around 1999, I walked a labyrinth for the first time. Almost immediately, its path brought me surprisingly close to the center. It felt good. I thought I was getting somewhere.

Then the path turned.

It began taking me farther and farther away from the center, winding back and forth until I found myself near one of the outermost points of the labyrinth. And there I stopped in my tracks.

Something happened that I still struggle to put fully into words. I experienced the presence of God in a profound way—not at the center, but out there, at the very place where the path seemed to be carrying me farther away.

That experience became deeply connected to what I call Rhythm of the Soul—an understanding of spiritual formation that has continued to unfold in me for more than twenty-five years.

The spiritual journey isn’t a straight path toward competency. Sometimes the path seems to move inward. Sometimes outward. Sometimes we feel centered and sometimes scattered. What appears to be movement away may still be part of the path.

And perhaps even that doesn’t go far enough.

God isn’t waiting at the center for us to arrive. God is present everywhere on the path—in every turn and every moment of life. Perhaps the invitation is to open our hands: to recognize that Presence, receive what is already here, and respond from there.

A few years later, during a deep depression, I did something unusual for me. I doodled an image in my journal: someone spinning plates. It captured something about how I was living—doing, managing, anticipating, keeping everything moving, making sure nothing fell.

And, if I am honest, performing.

Be capable. Be dependable. Be useful. Do it well. Make sure I am enough—and perhaps make sure others can see that I am enough.

Months later, sitting in another labyrinth roughly 650 miles from the first, I found myself doodling again. This time the image was someone more like a server, calmly carrying plates on a tray.

I wasn’t thinking about the earlier drawing. It was only as I sat with this new image and wondered where it might have come from that I suddenly remembered the plate spinner several pages earlier in my journal.

I went back and looked.

The plates were still there.

But the relationship to them was entirely different.

From that unexpected connection came language that has stayed with me ever since:

To be a host at the table of the Lord.

I can see now that I have spent much of my life learning what that means. And forgetting. And remembering.

And learning it again.

And again and again and again.

The Layers We Carry

One of the gifts of the Enneagram tool in recent years has been helping me understand that some of our greatest strengths also carry their own shadows.

I have sometimes playfully described part of my understanding of spiritual formation as my “Shrek theology.”

We, like ogres, are like onions. We have layers.

At our deepest level, I believe there is something more foundational than personality, role, accomplishment, wound or failure. We bear the image of God—Imago Dei. And there is the mysterious reality Paul names so simply: “Christ in you.” (Colossians 1:27)

But layers accumulate. We inherit things biologically and relationally from generations before us. Experiences shape us. Trauma leaves its marks. We make choices—and even those choices don’t happen in a vacuum. They are influenced by what we have inherited and experienced. Choices made from fear can add still more layers.

Eventually, we can have difficulty seeing what lies beneath them.

Perhaps this is one way of understanding shadow. The shadow isn’t always some terrible thing lurking inside us. Sometimes fear wraps itself around something genuinely beautiful until the gift begins carrying something it was never meant to carry.

I care deeply. That is part of who I am.

But care can become carrying.

Attentiveness can become vigilance. Preparation can become an attempt to prevent every problem. Responsibility can become ownership. Empathy can become responsibility for someone else’s experience. Helping can become needing to be needed. Service can become performance or proof of usefulness. Belonging can become abandoning something of myself to preserve connection. Even vocation can begin carrying the weight of identity.

The answer isn’t to reject the gifts. Nor is it to despise the layers. Many formed for understandable reasons. Some may even have helped us survive.

Perhaps the work is allowing those layers to loosen—bringing what fear has wrapped around us into Love—so that something deeper can become more freely revealed.

I have carried a reminder of that invitation on my arm for years:

Love Beyond Fear.

It began as a theological conviction and became something of a covenant: an invitation to notice the ways fear leads toward distrust, protection, withdrawal and control, and to trust instead the Love already present.

Maybe much of formation is exactly that—not manufacturing a better self or becoming worthy of Love, but allowing Love to loosen what fear has wrapped around who we already are.

Belonging

In 2019, I developed a six-week formation experience at Hixson United Methodist Church called Belong. One of its weeks carried a simple title:

All of You Is Welcome Here.

Belong was a pilot curriculum. I wanted to explore something I believed was central to Christian formation: people are transformed not simply by receiving more information about faith, but through relationships and communities where they can bring their stories, questions, differences and whole selves into genuine connection with God and one another.

I had experienced enough of that at Hixson to know something of its beauty. I wanted us to embrace it more intentionally—to deepen it within our own community and perhaps create something that could eventually help others experience it in theirs.

For nearly twenty years, Hixson had been home. I taught, preached, created, led, loved and was loved there. I believed deeply that Christian community could hold meaningful difference without requiring sameness—that our common life in Christ and our shared mission could be larger than the things about which we disagreed.

Then disagreements around human sexuality and the United Methodist Church became inseparable from my own family.

And what became so destabilizing was not simply wondering whether I could still belong. I began discovering that something I had trusted about us might not have been as true—or at least as durable—as I had believed.

Could significant difference really remain within relationship? Could we move toward one another when disagreement became costly? Could the shared ground beneath us hold?

These weren’t abstract theological questions. They touched someone I deeply loved. They touched my family, my conscience, my faith, my livelihood, and a community into which I had poured almost twenty years of my life.

As the conflict deepened, some people I loved worked increasingly toward a particular future for our church—a future in which there seemed to be less and less room for meaningful difference. Eventually, many of them chose to leave. And things said directly to me along the way made the implications painfully personal: their departure could threaten my own future on staff. It was a strange and painful tension, because I also knew how deeply many of those who remained wanted me to stay.

There was another grief beneath all of this that I am still learning to name. When people we love conclude that our differences mean we can no longer worship and share life together, those who were willing to remain together in the difference are left to make sense of that separation too. The words you are welcome can become complicated when we can no longer remain together in the same room.

Some relationships changed without conversations I desperately wish we could have had. Things I tried hard to communicate seemed to go unheard. And because being unheard touches something much older in me, I worked even harder: explain, clarify, document, understand, repair, hold things together.

Again, I was caring.

And I was carrying.

In the midst of that uncertainty, looking elsewhere began to feel less like something I wanted to do and more like something I needed to do. And while I was reluctantly looking, something unexpected appeared: Tennessee Donor Services.

I don’t need to make what happened at Hixson good in order to recognize that goodness continued to emerge afterward. I don’t need to believe God caused the wound in order to believe God was present within it. And I don’t have to be completely free from its pain to recognize that I am freer.

This morning’s letter reminded me of that.

Presence Without Control

For nearly two years, organ donation placed me alongside families during some of the most devastating moments imaginable.

It was sacred work.

I witnessed people, in the midst of profound grief, make courageous and extraordinarily generous decisions that offered life and hope to people they would likely never meet. I watched families hold grief and generosity together in ways difficult to describe unless you have stood close to them. And I worked alongside people whose commitment, skill and perseverance helped make those gifts possible.

I will always be grateful for that work and for the people who allowed me to share it. It mattered deeply to me. Perhaps that is precisely why it formed me so deeply.

The work called upon so many things I already carried: presence, attentiveness, empathy, crisis response, the ability to read a room, comfort with grief and uncertainty, careful preparation, and a willingness to remain alongside people when nothing could make their circumstances okay.

And because the stakes were so real, it also exposed the shadows of those same gifts: don’t miss anything; anticipate what could happen; protect the family, trust and process; be ready for what comes next; carry enough so nothing important falls.

The plate spinner had found an environment where spinning plates could sometimes look remarkably like faithfulness.

And yet families, colleagues and hospital rooms kept teaching me something I had been teaching others for decades:

Presence is not control.

Sometimes there is nothing to fix. Sometimes love cannot change the reality in front of us. Sometimes the most faithful thing we can offer another human being is our willingness to remain—to notice, to listen, to come alongside, to be with.

Those two years didn’t teach me an entirely new way of being.

They took truths I had carried for decades and moved them deeper into me.

Something I Wasn’t Looking For

Then something very different happened.

Tennessee Donor Services entered my life when circumstances had made me feel I needed to look elsewhere. This time, I wasn’t looking at all. An opportunity with the Tennessee Department of Health seemed almost to find me.

I am deeply grateful that it did.

I am still at the beginning, with much to listen to, learn and discover. But already there is something surprisingly natural about this work—an opportunity to bring together presence, listening, relationship, formation and other strands that have mattered throughout my life. I am genuinely excited about what lies ahead and grateful for the people who saw something in me and invited me into it.

And perhaps the serendipity of arriving here when I wasn’t looking has helped me recognize something larger.

It would be easy to look backward across everything I’ve experienced and say:

This is what my whole life has been preparing me for.

There may even be some truth in that.

But this morning I think I see something more important.

My life has not primarily been preparing me for a job.

Perhaps my life has been forming me into myself.

And perhaps even that doesn’t go deep enough.

Because if Imago Dei and Christ in me mean what I believe they mean, then the deepest work of formation may not be creating an identity at all.

Maybe it is remembering one.

Maybe it is learning to recognize and trust the Life already given—allowing the layers accumulated through inheritance, experience, wounds, choices and fear to loosen enough for the life of Christ within to become more freely revealed.

Lisa didn’t create something in that messy teenager; she recognized something. The labyrinth didn’t make God present; God was already there, even when the path seemed to be moving away from the center. The host didn’t create the table; it was always the table of the Lord.

The choice of others to leave did not determine whether I had a place. But their leaving left something behind, too—a wound made more complicated because the difference we could no longer hold together touched someone I deeply love.

Organ donation did not create my capacity for presence, though it tested and deepened it profoundly. And this new vocation does not finally tell me who I am.

I can receive it with gratitude, enter it with curiosity and give myself fully to the work without asking it to carry the weight of my identity.

Perhaps that, too, is part of the formation: to care without carrying; to be attentive without believing I can control the outcome; to serve without needing usefulness to establish my worth; to belong without losing myself in order to preserve belonging; to receive vocation without making it identity.

To be a host at the table of the Lord while remembering that I, too, have a place at the table.

The Rhythm of the Moment

There was a season when I wrote a number of simple prayer songs. Looking back at them now, I am struck by how often I was already praying toward things I am still learning:

Be still.

Give me rest.

Help me see the good in me—who I’m made to be.

Love beyond fear.

In 2017, I wrote a song called The Rhythm of the Moment. Its words weren’t about someday arriving somewhere. They were about today: seeing and choosing, walking and trusting, learning and loving, grieving and breathing, living and giving. And beneath all of it, being embraced by God.

I don’t think I understood then all the ways I would need those words.

Maybe I still don’t.

We sometimes speak of formation as though wisdom is something we acquire and then possess. My experience has been much less linear. Sometimes we write the prayer years before we understand how much we need to pray it. Sometimes we teach what we are still learning.

Sometimes we create Belong before discovering how deeply our own belonging will be tested. Sometimes we teach a Ministry of Presence while still learning that presence doesn’t require us to carry everything. Sometimes we tattoo Love Beyond Fear onto our body and then spend years discovering all the places where fear is still wrapped around our gifts.

And sometimes we draw a host carrying plates and spend the next twenty years learning what it means to trust the table to the Lord.

And learning it again.

And again and again and again.

Maybe that isn’t failure to learn.

Maybe that is rhythm.

An Ebenezer

This morning I picked up an old letter expecting to revisit an old wound.

Instead, it became a window.

I could see the teenager someone believed in before he knew how to recognize what she saw. I could see myself walking surprisingly close to the center of a labyrinth and then being carried outward, only to discover that God had never been confined to the center.

I could see the exhausted plate spinner—and recognize not only his care, but his fear, his performance, and how desperately he wanted to keep everything from falling. And I could see the host carrying a tray.

I could see the person who spent years trying to create spaces where people could bring their whole selves, and the grief of discovering how difficult it can be for a community to remain together across meaningful difference. I could see the caregiver whose care sometimes became carrying.

I could see sacred work in organ donation that taught me about generosity, grief, courage, presence and the limits of control. And I can see a new vocation I am deeply grateful for and genuinely excited to begin, without needing to know yet what place it will ultimately hold in the story.

And beneath all of it, I can see something that has been there all along.

Not a straight line. Not a divine plan requiring every wound. Not an arrival.

A rhythm.

Inward and outward. Recognizing and receiving. Forgetting and remembering. Gift and shadow. Fear and Love. Carrying and releasing.

Losing sight of who I am and discovering that the deepest part of me was never entirely lost.

Maybe that is why we need Ebenezers—ordinary things that become markers along the way, reminding us of what, for a moment, we have been given the grace to see.

Today mine was an old letter buried beneath a guide to shadow work.

There will be more turns in the labyrinth, more layers to loosen, more shadows to encounter, more things I will be tempted to carry. There will be more moments when I forget.

And more opportunities to remember.

But this morning, I remember.

This is where I really am.

And God is here.

Not because I finally found my way to the right place on the path.

God was here all along.

Perhaps the invitation has never been to become someone else.

Perhaps it is to open my hands—to recognize and receive the Presence already here, and to trust the image already within me, Christ in me, enough to let that Life become more freely revealed.

To remember who I am.

And, today, to live from there.