Good morning, friends, and deep peace to your hearts today…
At the risk of “dumping,” but with a hope you might find some needed solidarity, I am going to share that in many respects, this has been a pretty hard year. It hasn’t been one thing. There have been some difficult challenges with my body that seem to be getting harder. Some exhausting and confounding situations in our family. Ongoing grief I carry, especially walking alongside my mom with Alzheimer’s as she makes her way to heaven in pieces.
But added to this, there are many, many people I really care about for whom 2026 has been an absolute fire. They are wondering if life might actually break them in half this year. Or if it already did.
It was this summer while we were traveling that I cracked open Anglican priest Tish Harrison Warren’s new book, What Grows in Weary Lands: On Christian Resilience. I didn’t realize as I began it just how it would bring manna to my own desert. Writing vulnerably and compassionately from her own experience with burnout, dryness, and despair, Tish offers some scaffolding of truths and practices from which to frame a renewed perseverance; an ongoing and gritty faith.
One of the most potent parts of the book for me was her description of a motto she and her husband, Jonathan, say to each other in moments of difficulty or challenge.
“Numb out, flame out, or go deep.”
Tish shares that, “as life stretches on and we begin, more and more, to meet with suffering, sadness, or simply the cussedness of daily living, I’ve come to think that people can respond in these three ways.”
Numbing out is probably the most common response. When things become overwhelming and hard, we can expertly anesthetize ourselves in whatever way we can, using whatever we can. Of course it’s the things we think of — substances, food, screens, work, shopping. But it can also be a slow and steady withdrawal into the self, or an inability to ever let yourself feel. You can keep yourself so distracted and your surroundings so noisy you never need to look what is tearing at you squarely in the eye.
Flaming out is the dramatic option, just as it sounds. People feel trapped in the despair of their lives and seek to escape by blowing everything up, with no care for the damage it may cause. We know and have witnessed the real pain of of this — affairs, arrests, secrets, scandals, or an utter and very public breakdown…
But the third option — the one Tish and Jonathan point each other towards, and which I keep thinking about in my own stretch of struggle, is this invitation to “go deep.” Tish writes —
“Go deep. To go deep into God, into mystery, into self-understanding, into repentance, into relationships with others, into the practice of faith. Deep into grace. To go deep means looking with unflinching honesty at the truth of things — the pain in our lives, the sins and weaknesses in ourselves and those around us. It means learning to receive anew the love of God and the rich goodness of life. To go deep requires us to remain with difficult questions, relationships, practices, and commitments, while also remaining alive to God and to ourselves. It requires us to learn to exist, and to thrive, in places of incompleteness, unfulfillment, liminality, and uncertainty.*
This is what resilience looks like.
To go deep, is to stay in it all.
You don’t turn away from it. You don’t burn it down. You open you arms, take a deep breath, and let yourself plunge into what feels unknown and unceasingly hard, because even though you may not see, God is in that darkness with you.
We’re fed continual cultural messages and images that if you’re doing things correctly, progress in life is an eventual direction of up and to the right, amid a few squiggles. That there are formulas to this (#control). But we could open up our Bibles to pretty much any page and see that for the people of God, the opposite is true.
There’s imprisonment and famine and barrenness. There’s death and betrayal and a lot of shaking fists at God. I think of how Jesus’ own story began (with a teen mother very few people would have believed) and seemingly ended (death on a cross is not what one would picture as things moving in the right direction).
But what I would say ties so many of these stories together is that in the midst of the pain, our mothers and fathers in the faith choose to stay and go deep. It doesn’t mean their circumstances necessarily changed or they got what they waited for. But they chose to trust, as Tish says, there was the possibility to find God, and thrive, “in places of incompleteness, unfulfillment, liminality, and uncertainty.”
We can muster courage to suffer through a lot if we know when it ends and that there will be some kind of redemption for what was suffered. We’re drawn to stories of people who went through terrible trials but then “everything worked out” because some kind of seeming success — be it power or money or a relationship or societal adulation — creates the spin that everything happens for a reason, and what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
But…
What I think going deep actually means, what staying steady and resilient in your suffering actually looks like, is saying, “I have no idea how this will all turn out. But I know God is here with me, and there is transformative wisdom here if I can keep crawling through this darkness and finger-feeling my way forward.”
I have to intentionally remind myself what I most need is not relief, but God’s presence. And that promise fills our Scriptures too.
“I will strengthen you, and help you. I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.” (Isaiah 41:1)
“Even to your old age and gray hairs I am he, I am he who will sustain you. I have made you and I will carry you; I will sustain you and I will rescue you.” (Isaiah 46:4)
“I will never leave you or forsake you.” (Hebrews 13:5)
And from Jesus himself…
“And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” (Matthew 28:20)
Stay in it, friends. Go deep. You are not alone.
***
*Tish Harrison Warren, What Grows in Wearing Lands: On Christian Resilience, New York: Convergent, 2026, p. 23, emphasis mine.
A Prayer
Here is a prayer for waiting, perseverance, and resilience, from my book, Ash and Starlight: Prayers for the Chaos and Grace of Daily Life, Second Edition.
When my waiting needs a shift in focus
Oh, God,
The waiting is getting long.
So long.
Too long.
I can’t help but focus every day
on the thing for which I’m waiting,
or all the obstacles preventing
what I’m waiting for from happening,
or my own inability to make
what I’m waiting for happen,
or the fact it feels as if everyone
around me hasn’t had to wait, but I do.
You are right.
Focusing here only increases my
feelings of hopelessness
and helplessness.
So, gracious God, patient God, trustworthy God,
please help me consider the facts,
but not make those my focus.
Keep my mind’s eye and
my heart’s trust on you,
the One Who has made promises—
and keeps them.
Make your presence tangibly felt
in the midst of silence and longing,
in early morning hope
and late evening tears.
Thank you, God, for fueling
my endurance today.
This too will become
an occasion for strength.
Amen.
Exodus 15:2 * Isaiah 40:29–31 * Romans 8:24–25
“[B]ut those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength,
they shall mount up with wings like eagles,
they shall run and not be weary,
they shall walk and not faint.”
—Isaiah 40:31
Something that nourished me recently…
*If you need a soothing, gentle piece of music to put on and just rest in, this is one of my favorites. My husband and I have been listening to for years, and I’ve been playing it more in recent days. This single piece is nearly forty minutes long…
*Last year, my daughter’s cross country season began with her in a boot for her ankle and a wrist brace. This year, her body and spirit are in a completely different place. Her first meet last week was a true bright spot.
*Our family has gone every fall to Apple Holler, ever since the years of wearing the kids in baby carriers (minus COVID 2020). It’s one of my favorite fall traditions, followed by making applesauce (and all the kids fighting over who gets to spin the peeler and corer).
Ash and Starlight, plus other good things…
* MY ETSY SHOP ~ New originals, prints, and fall items to come soon, I hope! Check out my Etsy shop for clothes, prints, pillows, and more. You can view the shop here . I send a portion of sales in my Etsy shop to Feed My Starving Children.
*SECOND EDITION OF ASH AND STARLIGHT ~ Find the updated edition of my book here at Chalice or at the Bookshop link.
*MONDAY MANNA ARCHIVES ~ Monday Manna each week is free! Supporting supporters of Monday Manna can view previous Monday Manna reflections here, or for the really old stuff, go to my website.
*WHAT DOES MANNA MEAN? ~ Check out an earlier post to learn how this little bit of “daily bread” got its name…
My husband reminded me recently of the beautiful lines from Rilke’s poem, “Go to the limits of your longing.” So I’ll leave you with these…
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going.
No feeling is final.
Love and Light,
Arianne
I love hearing from you! You are manna. Reply to this note to send a message directly to my inbox.
Thank you, thank you. Your words are food for my soul and a refocus for my mind. Peace and love to you 💛
Beautiful! 💙