I'm Doing a New Thing!

God is, and I am.

It’s been three years since I last released a book.¹ In that time I’ve changed quite a bit. I live somewhere new. I go to church somewhere new. My kids are less kids and more almost-adults. I have new wrinkles and new pains accompanied by new wisdom and new freedom. Past relationships are blooming. New relationships are sprouting. These days I think about God and relate to God in ways I never would have expected. I’ve seen things I can’t quite explain. I’m becoming someone I can’t quite explain. I’m becoming someone who doesn’t always feel the need to explain.

I told Justin the other night, “I’m happier than I’ve ever been.” Change can be very good.

Me, happy. Not exclusively happy. But very happy.

You’ve changed quite a bit, too. I’ve watched this community here on Substack shift and stretch (and sometimes shrink). I realized the other day, scrolling through names, that I know very few of you personally. That delights me. It means writing is working—these essays, sent out, are finding their people.

Anyway, in these three years of growing and wondering and letting God do His thing (without my hand on the wheel or my foot on the gas), I’ve been slowly receiving (and acting upon) what seems like both conviction and commission. After the dust settled and the Look to Love book tour ended, God seemed to gently grab me by the collar and remind me of a message He sent way back in 2011. That’s when He told me to write a book about my brother’s death (long story but I tell a little of it here).

In surrendered, contemplative prayer, I realized for the first time that God had told me to do something, and I had ignored Him for six years. Back then it didn’t feel like disobedience. It felt like waiting, like taking time to get better at writing, good enough to do the thing God had asked me to do. But now I knew, you don’t wait until you’re good enough to obey God. You obey, and God makes you good enough. That’s faith.

Every day after Look to Love, after our family’s time abroad, after The Great Resettling of our lives, I’d sit down to pray or read Scripture and find God drawing me to the story of Jonah. I understood that I’d been the prophet, running away from God’s instruction. But I also saw some seed of a new thought, a new way of thinking about hardship and confinement and the presence and work of God…

I did write a book about Bobby dying. I published it in 2018. If you’ve followed my writing for a while you’ll know that book was Swallowed Up. In light of the way God was haunting me, I figured I should pick it up and re-read it.

I was surprised to find I didn’t love it (I loved parts of it).

Maybe you think that’s just the way authors feel about their work, but in my case, that’s not the case. I love Look to Love, Prayer in Practice, and Fresh Start. Fresh Strength. I reread my Substack posts often to remember what God’s teaching me. I don’t hesitate to recommend my own work.

But with Swallowed Up, I knew something was off.

I read it again and made notes to myself in the margins. The notes turned into essays and essays turned into chapters and soon enough I’d written a second book in conversation with the first. I wondered if I could publish it this way, as a conversation between two selves. Imagine reading one chapter of Swallowed Up then a second chapter of new material, then back to Swallowed Up. Sometimes I’d drop interjections within chapters pointing out another way of thinking or another way of seeing.

Here’s the introduction I wrote for the book that never materialized:

This isn’t a second edition of Swallowed Up. It’s more like a second guest on a shared panel or a pulled-up seat to a lively dinner table conversation. Imagine having a talk with your past self and welcoming others to listen in. That’s this.

When, upon God’s invitation, I returned to Swallowed Up, re-reading, praying for eyes to re-see, I found it to be refreshingly honest about the pain of grief, and I was proud of the way it empowered readers to defy the enemy, Death. But I also found problems: sentences that only told one version of a prismatic truth, moments filtered to emphasize the darkness and downplay the light, a limited perspective, so much attention to self, and not nearly enough Yahweh.

I have no desire to unwrite what I wrote, only to have a chat with the younger woman who wrote what she did. What she said is true and needed and powerful. But she missed some things, things I think would bless you, things that are blessing me in ways I cannot measure. 

My hope is that watching this conversation unfold would pull back the curtain a bit on the mechanics of spiritual growth and on the ways we might honor our past selves (perhaps even opposing voices in our present selves) as we find ourselves drawn deeper into Christ, shedding skins and being transfigured.

My friend Bethany says this book, told in this way, helps us bear the “uncomfortable tension of being finite humans who desperately want to understand the world around us and ultimately won’t, not fully.”  I hope it gives you hope for better understanding tomorrow and grace for the understanding you had yesterday. 

I would have published it like this. A few early readers liked it. Thought it was meta and unconventional. But then my poet friend, Alison, read it and said, in essence, that it was self-important and prioritized form over the reader’s experience. She basically eviscerated it (while also highlighting writing she liked along the way). She wanted me to make sense of my two selves. To grow up. Wisdom isn’t the accumulation of perspectives but the synthesis of them. It’s more soup than stew.

Almost immediately, I knew she was right. I’d begun something good and interesting, but I hadn’t yet made something beautiful or generous. So I composted the project and started again.

This time I let something new take root…

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What is the new thing? Will you want it? When will you have it? These are good questions.

I have always hated election nights and thus have often planned parties, meetings, or dates to distract myself from the doom messaging everywhere I look. Tonight is no exception.

Join me on Instagram LIVE tonight at 9:30 central for a chat about all the things I’m not telling you in this email. I’ll tell stories, pray, and otherwise protect thirty minutes of your life from Fox or CNN.

See you there!

-JL

P.S. I know I’ve been a reluctant writer here on Substack for some time. Hopefully you understand why now—I’ve been making something. In the past two years I’ve written over 100,000 words. You just haven’t seen most of them. :)

1. With the exception of the Bible study I coauthored with Justin (Bonfire: A Guide to Encountering God in the Exodus). I suppose I’m not including that in the count, because I think of it as his before it’s mine. Either way, I do really love it. Have you read it? You should.