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How My Daughters See Me: A Manifesto

I recently attended a sophisticated party. Beautifully adorned women, smartly dressed men. I sat and observed the wonder of human interaction. How we dip and pirouette in and out of conversations with sighs, laughs, and head curtsies.

Then I observed one elegant woman sit upon the out-of-the-way leather couch, off to herself, pull out her iPhone, and flip through, whatever.

Astounding, I thought. We, the sophisticated, turning from the real, to the virtual. Then I thought how most of these beautiful men and women will return home, check their children (if they have them), dress for bed, and sit up looking back on the evening via news feeds from the social.

I marveled at how we can transition from the delights of fellowship, into the gorging of narcissism. This thought sent me reeling. I wondered how I looked within the grand context of human interaction. Was I checking my phone when e’re I could? Did I return home simply to hop in bed and hop online?

Then I thought, How do my daughters see me?

They pop into our room during the pre-sleep, I-need-a-snack time. What’s Daddy doing? Flipping through the social? Binge watching? On the laptop?

What legacy am I creating each morning, noon, and night?

What am I etching into their hearts via my actions and inaction? Do they see me rush to the virtual world when the physical world demands my attention?

Certainly, digital/social media serves some purpose in our lives (probably not). But what struck me was how it has moved from simple augmentation of the real to a weird kind of co-inherence with one another.

So, I scribbled down my manifesto, a declaration of my organic humanity and its relationship to the most important mentoring project I’m a part of: fathering my daughters.

My Manifesto

I want my girls to see dirt under my fingernails. Grease in my fingerprints. Grass stains on my jeans.

I want them to see me build a fire. Cook them s’mores. Pitch a tent.

I want them to see me work, hard. And then play, hard.

I want them to be overwhelmed with the wonder and beauty of books. To be humbled, intrigued, and inspired by human thought, because I, myself, respect all humans and their unique and varied thought.

I want them to read poetry, love poetry, write poetry, because I, myself, value poetry and its place in human discourse.

I want them to see me take on adventures. Travels, hikes, bike-hikes, day-hikes, back-yard-capades.

I want them to see me fail. I want them to see me get back up. And try again.

I want them to see me give mercy. I want them to see me accept grace. I want them to see me talking with their mom, in the quiet of the mornings on the porch.

I want them to find me playing my guitar when no one is looking or listening. I want them to know how beauty roots in solitude and blooms as an affront to chaos.

I want them to find me talking to God as if he hears, and wants to talk back, because he does.

I want them to hear my laughter shake the rafters.

I want them to hear my sobs resound in the quietness of my closet.

I want them to find me napping, under a tree, in a hammock.

I want them to find me by the fire just looking at stars, way past midnight when they should be in bed but can’t sleep.

I want them to see me heading out on my mountain bike. Cleaning my mountain bike, fixing my mountain bike. I want them to ask me if they can come along.

I want them to see me bleed.

I want them to hear me tell stories.

I want them to feel free to crawl up into my lap, even while I’m working.

I want them never to have to wait until I post something to hear their inquiry.

I want them to be in the world, rather than spending time curating a virtual one.

I want to binge-watch THEM.

As a culture, our attentiveness has succumb to the glam of immediacy. I want my daughters to see me attentive, to them, to our life together, to the moment. I don’t want them to see me rushing it off to the internet.

I didn’t post any pictures from the party. I wanted to keep the images in my memory, private, and special. And the same goes for this Saturday when I planted pansies with my daughters. Life events don’t have to be posted to be special. In fact, hiddenness enriches our lives with the value of intimacy.

The Printable Version

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Resources I Created For You

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The Beauty Chasers: Rediscovering the Wonder of the Divine

Who Loved Enough to Fight

Timothy Willard — Thu, 28 May 2026 13:54:36 GMT

A Note to you, the Reader

If you are new here, welcome. Today’s newsletter post is something personal that I wrote for and to my oldest daughter, Lyric. I have kept it in its original form—written to her. She graduated a couple of weeks ago. She is the first of my three daughters to do so. Thus, my sporadic posting during May. My cultural post series, The Great Sabotage, will return in June.

This weekend, we are throwing her a party. A hundred people have RSVP’d. I asked my wife, “What did we get ourselves into?” It should be fun. I’ll report back.

I read this piece to her in front of an audience at the ceremony. We both love Ernest Hemingway’s book, The Old Man and the Sea. And so I wrote from that common place of love and affection. You needn’t have read the book to read this little post. At its heart, it’s a challenge and a bit of inspiration to take risks and fight for your dreams.

If you don’t know, we homeschool, using the classical approach (Classical Conversations). The high school years have given us countless opportunities for spirited and rich conversations about God, life, culture, literature, science, purpose, and the beauty of staying curious throughout life. You can read more about my family’s journey in my book The Beauty Chasers. And now, on to the post.

Lyric, defending her Senior Thesis, the defining final project of her education. Her thesis was titled "From Above the Sun: How Digital Media Erodes Meaning."

Wallace Stevens and Ernest Hemingway exchanged blows in the Florida Keys. Hemingway, they say, broke his hand on Stevens’s jaw and sent him careening into a puddle. Stevens should have known better than to pick a fight with the man who created the character Santiago.

You and I cry at The Old Man and the Sea, not because Santiago embodies fortitude, which he does. We cry because Santiago shows us the soul of heaven: Love.

And here today is the final lesson of your high school career: A man can be destroyed but never defeated.

The world will tell you that through habits and self-discipline, you can achieve anything. But that is a half-truth and a whole lie told from the back of the world. Santiago embodied the virtues and obtained deep knowledge of fish and the ocean. But something else grew in him—he dreamt of the lions. And the lions are your secret.

The Greeks Gave Us Habits, God Gives Us Lions

Plato and Aristotle gave us the essential actions of human beings for the flourishing of civilization. But it wasn’t until Jesus that we were given the means to touch heaven. Giving to the deserving poor in our society is labeled charity. But in doing so, we are only balancing the scales of justice.

Christian charity, however, is an unmerited favor—it is far more than justice. This is what the Apostle Paul outlines in Corinthians. He gives us faith, hope, and love—the great paradoxes of the world. G.K. Chesterton, in Heretics, paints these paradoxes as only he can:

“Charity means pardoning what is unpardonable, or it is no virtue at all. Hope means hoping when things are hopeless, or it is no virtue at all. And faith means believing the incredible, or it is no virtue at all.”

Plato’s Republic gave us prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance—all able to be achieved by habit and reason alone.

But Paul’s great paradoxical virtues build into us the capacity to live in relationship with God. The Greeks gave us the paideia, which describes a person’s upbringing, training, and moral cultivation. We get our idea of education from it (paideian). But as you can see, education is far more than a right answer or the memorization of facts.

The Christian virtues give us lions. You may forget algebraic formulas and the capital of Kazakhstan, but you will never forget Santiago.

Santiago drank a beer with a friend and talked about baseball like it was a living thing. Santiago did not back down from a fish too large to catch nor from oceans too deep to navigate. Santiago fought sharks with an oar and dreamt of playful lions on the beach. We cry for Santiago not because he is a modern hero with a superpower, but because he is a true hero who is nearly, if not completely, annihilated.

And yet, with a broken body and only a carcass as his prize, he rests. For Santiago did not live in fear of the ocean or the great fish or unsettling distance—no, he loved all of it. And that is why he was not defeated. Because through it all, he ran with the lions on the beach—playful, regal, loyal, and fierce.

You are not finishing a journey today. You are beginning it. These last years were not the journey; they were just about gathering data, forming habits of mind and body.

Now you are stepping into your boat with only two oars, food for one day, and a dream of a marlin. And the questions you must ask yourself are;

“How far out am I willing to go?

How deep will I cast my line?

What price am I willing to pay?

How savagely am I willing to love?”

God is waiting for you. Not in the pews of a church. But on the beaches of your dreams. And he is romping like the great cat—the Lion Heart of a broken fisherman, who revered enough to cast, and who loved enough to fight.

I love you. I am proud of you. Now, it’s time to fish.

We Are Buried With Meaning

Timothy Willard — Tue, 05 May 2026 17:42:12 GMT

“Farmhouse in Provence,” 1888, Vincent van Gogh. National Gallery of Art.

Sometimes you wake up, and you’re there. Where you always thought you wouldn’t, couldn’t be. But there you are. It’s not a bad thing. It’s a good thing, a thing that holds itself there in front of you like the dangling crescent on a spring twilight burnt light with orange and indigo.

They say, “Be careful, or life will pass you by.”

But you know, there’s also another option. For life to fill you up. For you to be there for all of it.

And that’s what I woke up feeling a few days ago.

“I’m here,” I thought. “My oldest daughter is graduating.”

And all the life that led up to this point unfolded before me. I don’t have to list it for you, because it’s just for me and my thoughts; it rolls before my inner eye like the scratchy film of a projector from fourth-grade movie days.

She prances before me in the same glory at one as 18. She’s still her and her plus it all. All the days from then till now, all the conversations, all the teary realizations, all the triumphs, the hard lessons, the belly laughs, the midnight snacks, the volleyball games.

Sometimes I want an unreliable narrator to tell me the story of my life and lie to me about the ending so I can live in the crescent indigo light of memories old and not yet lived.

Ours is the great nonsense language of life—we live Lewis Carroll day after day, waiting for the rabbit-hole fall to end. But it doesn’t end, it melts into something new—not a fall but a glide. Not a glide but a snatch, not a snatch but a zoom, until we find ourselves too big for the tiny house we started in; a giant Alice trying to get back home.

But we are home, because here we are, where we always wanted to be, staring at the radiant immortal before us through blurry eyes and choked sobs.

Life doesn’t pass us by. It buries us with meaning. And this is only the beginning.

Fin.

Lumen et vita

Bits & Bobs

A few weeks ago, my wife and I were talking about spiritual formation. I went on and on about how I care for my soul. Like, the questions I ask myself, how I think about the month ahead, and what I’m actually doing with my time and energy. She told me to write it down and turn it into something she could use in her morning quiet time.

So I did. And then I made it into something you can have, too.

The Soul Planner is eight beautifully designed, print-ready pages built around the rhythms of formation rather than productivity. Four sections: Soul, Season, Month, and Making.

Download once. Print on repeat. Use it on the deck while sipping your coffee and waiting for the world to begin.

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Or read a little more about it first, here.

The Great Sabotage - III

Timothy Willard — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 19:16:33 GMT

A fun announcement: We just crossed a milestone! One hundred of you are paying for this now! I’m so grateful.

To celebrate it, for today only, get 30% off an annual subscription to The Beautiful Destruction. Essays on formation, aesthetics, and the attentive life. Printable PDF articles. When you upgrade, you’ll get The Soul Planner free—a $10 value—with your subscription. (See below for a sneak peak of The Soul Planner)

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Tim.

Part I

On Time Unmeasured and Soul Unplanned

A Lyrical Meditation on the Power of the Imagination

I once took a walk into the Oxford countryside with my daughter, Lyric. She was seven. I don’t remember the occasion. But we seldom needed one. I walked daily for the two years we lived there. And it changed my life. On this particular walk, Lyric and I talked the entire time about her imagination. At one point, when we crested the hill of the Seven Sisters and took a break to climb a low-limbed oak tree, she explained to me why climbing a tree was better for you than playing on a jungle gym at the local park.

As we wound our way through the woods and across the hay field, aside the blackberry patch that grew on the side of a hill, we discussed how cloud shapes affect your imagination. Of course, we were not consulting a recent psychology study or the new research of neuroaesthetics. We were simply intuiting the physical world before us and pulling on thought-threads as they emerged.

Lyric, who is 18 now, often recounts that walk. She refers to it as a “core memory.” And neither one of us fully remembers our extemporaneously brilliant moments in the commentary. But we do remember the walk itself and the tree-climb, the blackberry patch, the fields, and the clouds.

England’s clouds move like island clouds because that’s what they are—I have to remind myself of that fact. One is always racing clouds. And that is not a bad thing. In fact, it is a very good thing.

View from the Seven Sisters, Cumnor Hill & Boars Hill, Oxford.

Our tree-climb-cloud walk does not remain in our memories because it accomplished any great thing. We did not “have to” walk. We did not time our walk or measure it in miles. Though when I sit here and think on it, it was probably at least an eight-mile walk. But we did not log it anywhere.

Lyric would tell you that she “loved” that walk. And so would I—a walk with no agenda, naked of ambition, full of surprise, and timeless. If I pressed you, you could probably recount a similar experience—some indelible moment with a friend or loved one you treasure.

And if you pressed me, you would discover dozens of such walks—with a loved one, alone, at dusk, in rain, through snow, at dawn, under stars. And I’d tell you that the best things in life often happen in tree-climb-cloud moments of aimless happenstance.

And those moments keep their patina the more one thinks about them, writes about them, and learns from them. Not a school-learning. Such walks are not homework. But a different kind of learning. Lyric keeps the walk in her memory as core to her life, not because it helped her figure out a life-cipher, but because it figured her life.

In that sense, tree-climb-cloud walks teach us far better than new principles in neuroaesthetics. And maybe they don’t teach us at all. Maybe they learn us.

Maybe the landscape is telling the skyscape the mythology of Fathers and Daughters—a mythopoeia where the humans, through gesture, laughter, and thought, give to the world of cloud and tree and peacock and fox, the delightful lesson of Nothingtime. A time unmeasured and unplanned, a time re-collected in other times, of tranquility and peace. There, the trees and clouds learn of patience, grow sturdier with joy, and sing the virtue of holy participation. We, the myths of the Land.

Ever since I sat down to write you this note, I’ve grown more shy. How could I tell you all that sits on the tip of my pen?

And what of this mythos and its history? Slowly, the hills and blackberry patches dig deeper, crafting theses and novels illustrating the profound impact Fathers and Daughters and Mothers and Sons had upon the earth. They are not the terra incognita but terra luminosita—the great human light (lucis), the splendor all living things hold their breath to see, hear, and touch.

Even the rocks cry out in rhapsody, giving their petra-verse to interpret these creatures roaming the land with their souls ablaze, intuiting the mysteries with the angels search. The Logos itself, Jesus the Wise Architect, dances alongside Yahweh singing his delight in this new myth made of ancient thought, crafted with the richest philosophy, carved out of the marble of God’s imagination.

And the woods would write treatises in honor of the great myths of the land, building constitutions from the universal virtues found in the bedrock of the human intellect. And all the leaves clap, marveling how out of the simplicity of time spent came the strength to end wars and wisdom to cut new paths where the old ones had grown over.

Lyric would tell you there is power and mystery and beauty in a walk. All the land agrees.

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Part II

On the Firelight of Our Souls

The Year We Set Sail

When I sat down to write this post, I intended to write something straight on cultural. But what came out was slant. After I finished, I sat back in my Adirondack chair and felt a kind of peace. I didn’t know if it was peace in the writing, the telling, or a moment of joy recalled, revisiting me. Maybe it was all the above. And I write this andendum now only to tell you that I believe we need more meditations in the world. And fewer hot takes, fewer “You should” articles, and more “Come with me” essays. If you read Chesterton much, you’ll find that he is doing something deeper than explaining how he came to faith or what faith is. He’s processing our world in real time. And he’s arguing a point he believes passionately. And he’s enjoying himself. That’s why his writing feels like he just wrote it yesterday. I find that I don’t have much time for “You should” … but I have all kinds of time for the firelight of our souls. I want to stoke those coals. I want to fan into flame the human heart. I want to harness the moonlight and fuel a countervision to all that yells and screams at us these days. What if this year, which is still young, wasn’t the year we fell mute in our anxiety of wars and AI, but was the year we set sail? My friend Ethan once wrote that to me on a big hardback copy of Robert Frost’s Collected Poems. “To Tim—the year we set sail.” And we did. And we can too. This is not an apology for a certain kind of writing; it is a setting of a new horizon for a certain kind of living. Living on purpose. Not living accidentally. Accidentally noticing how the days fill up with more than we name in our prayers of thanksgiving. Not living as a totem—that solitary figure of pagan idolatry that collects the wailings of a people angry and haunted and hopeless without knowing it. Totems do not journey anywhere. They eat entropy and fall away in the wind. The rain doesn’t water them; it wastes them. Totems do not sail because they cannot navigate the stars. And the breath from the ancient wind—Ruach—that stirs the oceans, the great waters where no ships wander, totems do not hear. But we do. We sail the pneuma-gales, we interpret the paths of the stars, we harness storms, and drink the rain, we run hard toward the horizon line, sprinting past entropy into everlasting and everlasting. The pagan world of the corporations and governments? It is they who are the totems, signaling the path to the pagan temples, where the priests, dressed in the cape of bird feathers, heat the blades, readying them for the blood sacrifice. This language of paganism and temples and sacrifices is not a farce, it is not a myth, it is the reality we’ve forgotten. Because we’ve listened to these totems for too long, and we think we are now too sophisticated for child sacrifice and the blood rituals of Dark Lords—even though we’re drowning in a culture that revels in both. And that’s exactly what they want us to believe. When C.S. Lewis gave a lecture at Durham and prophesied to his audience that we were castrating ourselves, abolishing ourselves, conquering nature, and giving our souls to those in power, it was hailed as one of the greatest lectures on ethics and the Moral Law. We don’t know what the Moral Law is because we’ve destroyed it. But Lewis wasn’t content to let his lecture sit in libraries of the learned. He wrote That Hideous Strength and showed, in a bloodbath scene that ends the book, how the evil minds of the age will not stand, in the end, over Nature. Because God is not silent on the matter of totems. And he does not tarry in ancient patience, letting the innocent be slaughtered. He will send an Alejandro. And the reckoning will come in all its fury. And we will gape and wonder how this God we thought was light could bring such a dark sword. But we’ve forgotten that we’ve only ever known the back of the world; it is brutal in the shadows, while the sun also rises. We pine for the front of the world, we set our chins and reach for the light, and find that the light comes with darkness added in, with darkness rounding the world, even as the light gives us the day to breathe—carpe diem! Yes, seize it! Gather ye rosebuds while ye may! For this is the year we set sail. This is the day we hoist the main sail. This is the day we step from the back of the world into a countervision. From anxiety to hope. Ah, hope, there is the word we’ve forgotten. Faith, _________, and love. Faith, the word of dogma—the dividing line of denominations. Love, the virtue that wins—the erotica of the world and the salvation of sinners. But what of hope? If faith is the sea, then hope is the fury of wind in our sails. It isn’t the peace on the coastline, it is the maelstrom upon the high waters. We are harnessing it while the totems rot. We are riding on the whitecaps, nearly rising from the reaching heaving waves, and we are shouting into the storm—eating its fury and crying out for more. And it comes—the storm does. We’re racing it to the end of the world, where the streets have no name, where the totems burn in our morning fires along the beach, for we are not the dead ones, we are not the hollow men, we are children of the still point, the raucous band of poet warriors alien to the world while treading the dawn like it’s our palace court. We are running into the high mountains of our hope, getting thicker with every step, leaving our ghost condition behind. Our fast ships are beached below the tree line. And the saints descend the high pass to greet us. And the great poets sing with us. And the great warriors salute us. And the stars burn with us. We, the Children of Hope.

Thank you for being here. For disrupting. Not with shouts, but with something more resonant and rebellious. Beauty.

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The Productivity Advantages of Dilly-Dallying

Timothy Willard — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 16:54:28 GMT

We don’t dilly-dally to get more done later. Pausing in your day is not the same as swimming the English Channel—each head-up-breath gets you closer to Cap Gris-Nez. A head-up-breath in your day, a string of dilly-dally moments, is itself the point.

We are so addicted to our left-brained world that we actually believe resting is part of productivity. Imagine what that perspective does to the world. It makes stopping to smell real roses a productivity hack. It makes a dusk walk on the greenway one of your atomic habits. We rush about to slow down so we can rush some more.

Possessing a breathless soul is not a status symbol. Rushing to produce is the easy path. The real hack of the human soul is not free swimming the English Channel. It’s participating fully in the intellectual rigor of observing a flash rainbow hover in and out of reality in a lawn sprinkler.

Wondering how rainbows float in sprinkler cascades is like reckoning the wonder of a pelican squadron wave-slope soaring. The squadron positions itself inches from the wave, which acts like a rolling hill, pushing the air above it upward. This “upwind” is what those pelicans master. By gliding on the upwind side of the wave, they surf updrafts—those invisible cushions of air for incredible distances. Pelicans surf the upwind to eliminate drag. The result? Just inner-pelican-peace. They can go for miles—effortless in flight, stoked in their bird-ness.

Life is an aesthetic endeavor.

The dilly-dally of a sprinkler rainbow gives you a bit of magic. It’s not you receiving a marvel as an object to your eye; it’s you participating in light, air, body angle, and water. The rainbow might be visible to you and not your best friend sitting beside you on that chunky old rocking chair. Your body position and sight mingle with the clarity of the air, as the bending light moves through the thousands of water droplets, presenting you with a hovering rainbow. The rainbow remains stationary while the water moves. And it vanishes when you move back and forth from your sightline.

Participating with pelicans and reveling in rainbows isn’t a detour from productivity. It’s not a waste of time. It’s saving your “self.” J.I. Packer once said we were meant to run on soulish things. Our fuel as humans comes from intentional times of dilly-dallying. But dilly-dallying is more than fuel. It’s the point.

The world we live in every day is not a greenscreen for the film of You. It’s a gift too beautiful to rush through. God didn’t create the Pileated Woodpecker so we could slip it on stamps and lick it off in the mail to a friend. He created it for you to ponder how, in heaven’s name, it evolved from a non-pecking bird to one with a specially encased brain, uniquely designed to withstand intense pounding per second without its head exploding. The joy of such knowledge isn’t only too wonderful for us, it’s the actual architecture of meaning itself. Life is an aesthetic endeavor.

These are the things that pepper my mornings with delight. Like how the berries we eat begin as flowers that magically fill up with uniquely sugared water for the sole purpose of being spread on ice cream and spreading a smile on our faces.

Like anything atomic, dilly-dallying is cumulative. Daily blossom-berries, upwinds, and hovering rainbows don’t help you get something done. It gets done inside of you.

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The Soul Planner

A few weeks ago, my wife and I were talking about spiritual formation practices. I shared with her how I care for my soul. I went on and on. Are you surprised? Not in a woo-woo way, but a way that involves a few real questions I ask myself, a way that includes how I view the month ahead, and what I’m purposefully a part of or doing with my time and energy.

She encouraged me to take the questions I rattled off and turn them into something she could use in her morning quiet time. So, I did. And here it is for you, too. This dilly-dally reflection was part of my processing. All of it brought me joy to write and create.

I hope it brings you joy, too. It’s not necessarily my “anti-productivity” tool, but it’s my answer to all the productivity hacks and habit trackers roaming around the ether.

So, I give you: The Soul Planner. Just a few honest questions to sit with on the deck while the coffee cools and the world hasn’t started yet.

If that sounds like your kind of morning, you can explore more about The Soul Planner here.

Or, if you want to add it to your Q2 routine, just jump to the purchase-and-download-immediately page, go here.

Lumen et vita

How Dog Hair Helps Me See Better

Timothy Willard — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 16:07:12 GMT

Tonight at midnight, our 2026 Kickoff Discount ends. Get 50% Forever when you upgrade to a paid plan. Thank you all for supporting my work here at The Beautiful Disruption.

I own a Goldendoodle named Cash. Yes, after Johnny Cash. If I could name him after a Johnny Cash song, it would be “Ring of Fire,” “I Walk The Line,” or Folsom Prison Blues or one of his covers that everyone believes is one of his originals. Cash is a long, non-curly-haired doodle. He’s 50% poodle — his Sire, Rocky — and 50% golden retriever — his mother, Ginger. So, he sheds. A lot. Anyone who tells you Goldendoodles are “hypoallergenic” is the same person trying to sell you a bridge.

Because Cash sheds so much, I must vacuum often. My daughters are assigned to vacuum as part of their chores—a different daughter each week—but I love our Dyson Ball Animal 3+ so much, I just run it for them.

Yesterday, I was running the Dyson and reveling in the magical extension arm—this extension allows me not just to dust, but to annihilate all dust and debris stuck on my bookshelves. So, I kept going.

I pulled my old leather chair away from the wall.

Piles of dog hair.

Sucked it right up.

The chair told me to tidy it as well. So, I ordered all the papers on it, which means I threw most of them away. I stacked the books neatly on the shelf and took my volleyball bag to the mud room. Then I looked at my long window—the lone window in the room. It was flanked by two tall bookshelves and my rower.

“What if I jammed my chair over there instead of in the corner where it’s seldom used except for a large and expensive valet,” I thought to myself.

I did it. And it did not look right.

So, I pulled and repositioned the carpet.

Better. But still odd. Plus, it overloaded the room.

One of Myquillyn’s full rooms, hushed.

Then I thought about my friend Myquillyn Smith—The Nester. What would she do?

Myquillyn? She’s a rule breaker. Oh, I fully realize she published a book titled House Rules, so technically, she’s a rule creator. But make no mistake: her brilliance lies in her unconventional mind. She sees a space not how it’s supposed to be, but what it could be.

She also created this interior decorating philosophy called “House Hushing.” It’s when you remove objects from a room and let it breathe for a bit. I wasn’t removing the chair from the room, just from its former corner. So, I was half-house-hushing.

Then, I sat in the chair, crammed as it was in the window. The morning sunlight poured on me. My view of my larger bookcases danced with the fresh silver morning. Instead of sulking behind me when I sat in the chair, they waved to me from the front, inviting me with their playful multi-colored spines.

Half-hushed-corner. And yes, the painting is for sale.

There I sat, bathed in sunlight. And I saw my study anew.

Over the last several weeks, I’ve been writing solely in my journals—even for my client work. I know—dangerous, what will the machines think? But the low yellow light of my study, or other lamps in the house, makes it challenging to write longhand inside. So, I’ll write in the sunlight outside.

Sitting in the window chair gives me that fresh sunlight. Now I can write in the sun from my so comfortable valet-chair.

Curious, I did a quick exploration of the differences between sunlight and lamplight, and why I don’t need my readers in sunlight when I write, unlike when I write by lamplight.

Newton, Opticks notebook sketch, New College, Oxford.

If you look up the difference between sunlight and lamplight, you’ll find a new appreciation for sunlight. We all know this, but I must say it out loud. Lamps fake it.

Even a good bulb only gives us 300–500 lux. But when I write outside, even when it’s cloudy, I’m getting 10,000 lux of light. Sunlight, of course, contains the entire spectrum of light. See? Lamps are con artists.

These cons also trick our pre-loaded circadian rhythm. Sunlight is about 5500–6500 Kelvin. It’s a crisp blue-white, which tells our bodies, “Hey, sit up, stay alert, there’s work to be done!” Lamplight—those tricksters—falls in the 2700–3000 K range. They whisper, “Hey, it’s too cozy to work in here. Just relax.” They are physiologically lying to us. Our brains in low light think, “Ok, time to wind down, maybe pour a drink.”

In this light-dance, I noticed something else.

The light falling into my half-hushed corner looked less like something to see and more like something to breathe. It revealed the book spines well, but it also unveiled the empty space as a thing in itself—something to inhabit. I sat in my valet-chair, marveling at my half-hushed corner, smiling in gratitude for Cash’s hairballs.

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The Great Sabotage Issue 2: The Pickax and the Cathedral

Timothy Willard — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 19:45:55 GMT

Introduction from Jon Haidt…

My apologies for missing last Thursday—the third Thursday—to post The Great Sabotage. I had it ready, then pitched it. This is what it has become. Enjoy.

There is a word I came across recently that has stayed with me. Anemoia. John Koenig coined it in The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. This is a wonderful little book that does the rare and beautiful thing of giving language to emotions we already carry but don’t know how to put into words. He defines anemoia as a pang of nostalgia for an era you never lived through.

The writer Freya India, who covers girlhood and Gen Z culture for Jonathan Haidt’s After Babel Substack, applied it to something she’d noticed among her generation: a grief for a world they have only ever seen from the outside. She pointed to a YouTube video. It’s a home video of the last day of school at a San Diego high school in the 1990s, captioned “Phones? No. We had each other.” It’s garnered close to thirty thousand comments, many of them from people in their twenties, longing for a world that was already gone before they were old enough to enter it.

After Babel

A Time We Never Knew

2 years ago · 2734 likes · 197 comments · Freya India

One commenter wrote: “The whole concept of a real childhood is completely out the window at this point in time, and that’s extremely sad to me.”

I watched the video and got goosebumps. Then I felt grief. But different in kind from Freya India’s generation. Because I was there. I lived it—a “Last Analogue.” That’s the term I give to our generation, GenX, the last generation to have experienced childhood, our teens, and even early twenties before we had phones in our hands.

When Living was the Old Posting

I grew up in an era where “posting” was called “living.”

I submit this story as Exhibit A:

A buddy and I put a La-Z-Boy chair in the back of his pickup and drove around our small town filming it. We ordered food at the McDonald’s drive-thru. We staged a get-pulled-over-by-a-cop scene with an actual cop who laughed and played along. I have the VHS somewhere, I think.

After every home football game (well, maybe not “every”), we’d go toilet-paper houses. We once used ninety-two rolls on a single house.

Sometimes, we’d get a group together and drive up to Pumping Station Road at the entrance to the state game lands and hike back to “The Rock” — a small ridge with boulder outcroppings. We’d build a massive bonfire and just talk or gallivant in the dark under the moonlight, or hike down to Hammer Creek and jump over the falls with makeshift torches planted in the creek bank.

When I tell my daughters these stories, they laugh and dream of doing the truck-lazy-boy-thing. Then one of them says that they’d be arrested for even trying that today.

Traveled to Southern Ireland and toured cafes and churches from Galway to Dublin. No phone. Circa 2000 (after the end of the world of Y2K), County Cork.

And now, Exhibit B:

I toured the country in my twenties before smartphones existed. And, don’t fall over, but we used … wait for it … a map to navigate.

Long live Rand McNally.

When I finally got a little flip phone for the band, we had to be vigilant because we had to pay for each individual text message.

Texting was an event, not a reflex.

But I remember thinking, “Someday, this will be how we communicate.” Now it’s ubiquitous with language itself, morphing an entire generation’s capacity to speak, write, and think from poetic-human to machine-rot.

Homemade band poster made by collaging various pieces of artwork together.

One summer night, after a tour to New England, we drove to ole Pumping Station Road with bamboo tiki torches and spent hours launching into the dark, shallow water over the falls. I don’t have a digital photo of it. And I can’t show you the text thread of our plans. But it happened. My own real-life secret memory, hidden from the algorithm forever.

Don’t poets write about those times? Driving New England roads in the fall. Rendezvous in the mountain dark. “The View Between Villages,” and walking “The Long Road.” It all “felt like home somehow … an unpredictable wonder.”

No one looks for a book of poems until prepping for a funeral—so they say. But life, so often, feels like lived lyrics. We live, and the memories stack up like they’re written to a score, and a verse, here comes the bridge, now back to the chorus. And we daily sing—ringing out the lines of our lives.

Poiesis is the ancient word for the action of living itself. It’s the making that happens when humans interact, participate, touch the world with their hands, and look each other in the eye.

Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding

Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

“The achieve of, the mastery of a thing”—that famous Hopkins line as he watched a kestrel hover in the wind—that’s us being human beings; being and doing what we were created to do.

And we can hover in the wind. We know, despite the iron left-brained-ness of the world, we were made to. If we could just find our wings.

The mastery is life itself. Living it without surveilling ourselves. It’s Pumping Station Road in the summer dark. Can we go back there? Anemoia says we cannot. It’s gone to us forever. Because the machines will never go away.

Finding the Pathway to Hovering

But here is where the word “hope” helps us.

Hope is not optimism about things getting better. It’s not positive therapeutic self-talk. That’s the modern world’s lie. Positivism doesn’t change the structure of your life.

Hope holds so much wisdom for us. And part of that wisdom is agency—the belief that you can initiate movement toward a goal. We need a pathway to reach the goal.

But what is it? We must be able to see this new-old-yet-familiar world, this mastery of a thing, this life lived in the summer dark, this “old way” Jeremiah talked about—that prophet of tears sent from God.

Maybe the pathway involves us acting as prophets to one another. To remind each other, through tears of nostalgia, that we can initiate movement toward a better tomorrow, and it starts today. And maybe the pathway isn’t another Benedict Option where we throw up our hands, move to the hills, and plant gardens, leaving the machine world for good.

The balance of the rustic life isn’t found in the casting away of our tools. It’s found in the willingness to set them aside and dig in the dirt with our hands for a time. Only to hoist up the pickax once again for the heavy work.

The pencil is technology. So is the typewriter. Both give us books and articles and the news. One is the quiet friction of lead on paper—that coarse skin of the trees, beautiful in smell and texture. The other is metal and clacky.

Cormac McCarthy pounded keys in rhythm in his Santa Fe Institute room, giving us millions of words of brutality, hard truth. So did Hemingway. His Royal Quiet De Luxe gave us Santiago and the truth that we can be destroyed but never be defeated. Nietzsche bought a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball as he was going blind, suffering from migraines. His writing changed, a friend told him. He replied, “Our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.”

Source: Britannica

And yet C.S. Lewis advised young writers: Don’t use a typewriter. The noise will destroy your sense of rhythm, which still needs years of training.”

Maybe what we need is the wisdom to know how much training we need before we hoist the pickax or the typewriter or the smartphone. Maybe we need to write longhand and learn the rhythms of words before clacking any keyboard. Maybe we need to paint with brush and canvas before we plug in Adobe. Maybe we need to read well, think well, synthesize well, before we Google “what is nostalgia,” before we prompt Claude, “summarize The Iliad.”

I am showing my girls “Pumping Station Road.” Not the actual gravel of that place. But the beauty of what “summer dark in cold falls” can do to a person, an imagination, a soul. I’m teaching them to hold a pencil and scratch on paper. I am showing them the clacking of a Smith-Corona Classic 12. I’m giving them paint to press into a canvas.

And eventually, the pickax.

Because The Anarchist who runs this world likes to bend Dogwoods into machines. The brilliance of the God who speaks from the Whirlwind is that he uses the tools of The Anarchist to burn him to the ground. A hammer pounds a cross spike, but also builds a cathedral.

The Great Sabotage cultural deep dive happens every third Thursday of the month. Upgrade to a paid subscriber and receive The Sabotage File and join the community.

The Sabotage File (for paid subscribers)

I believe the “Exiters” of AI and Apps have the right grief but the wrong remedy. Here are my thoughts, and what I'm teaching my daughters instead.

God's Silly Extravagance of Birdsong

Timothy Willard — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 17:00:25 GMT

A small meditation for you from the woods.

Why did God choose to include birdsong in our daily reality?

He didn’t have to. But he did.

Imagine if the paths and parks contained no song. If forests always stood solemn. If the mornings broke open into silence. Maybe he knew we needed song.

On the sad days.

The down days.

The days when hope feels thin.

The birds still sing.

Do you hear that?

It’s a woodnote just for you.

And just above the treetops, the sound carries back to its Maker.

The world could end—but music would endure.

For we live in a song.

Adagio.

Allegro.

Crescendo.

A few years ago, I reflected on what it means to live as a “woodnote.” If you'd like to go deeper, here’s the conversation.

How I Study the Bible

Timothy Willard — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 21:31:38 GMT

Once a year, I open these doors a little wider. This is the only 50% discount I run all year. I’ve asked management about bringing it back at Christmas. Apparently, the elving schedule is non-negotiable. Paid subscribers receive full access to The Great Sabotage (monthly cultural deep dives), commenting and full archive, behind-the-scenes research and commentary, private audio reflections, and occasional video dispatches. So if you’ve been circling the paid tier, this is your moment to step inside.

Most Christians are never actually taught how to study the Bible. They’re taught how to follow a devotional or how to join a study. They’re taught how to underline what feels encouraging. But they’re seldom taught how to sit with the text itself.

In seminary, the first discipline we were given was simple: start with the text. Not with a theological system or a cultural issue or with what a famous pastor says. Sounds rebellious, I know. Imagine that.

That training shaped me more than almost anything else. Because once you learn to read with care, to see the context, and to regard the Scriptures for their literary value, the Bible stops feeling fragile and foreign. You realize that it doesn’t need to be rescued by ideology or softened by the next greatest cultural trend. It needs to be read.

This article continues my “How I …” series. I love sharing the things I’ve learned over the years, whether it’s note-taking, journaling, or deep study. Writing these articles helps me assess my own processes and ignites a fire to go do more of it.

What follows isn’t complicated. It’s just a simple, no frills approach to enjoying deep, fruitful Bible study. Here’s my method.

I Start With Posture

Before I open the text, I pray.

“Lord, show me what’s here. Reveal Yourself to me. Guide me through your Holy Spirit.”

That’s it. No performance. Just palms-up receptivity.

If you take anything away from this article, remember this: Bible study isn’t about extracting information. It’s about communion. If I begin in a hurry or in a posture of defensiveness, I’m already off, and I’ll miss the moment. I’m asking God to show me his heart for my life through His Word. I want to be with Him. I don’t want to siphon information out of him. And hearing Him takes time, patience, and a willingness to go deep.

I Add Desire

If you’ve read my book The Beauty Chasers, you might remember a section where I talk about one of my early mentors in Koine Greek. Dr. Randolph tutored me privately for a few weeks one summer between semesters. The first week together, he asked me, “Tim, why do we study Greek?”

I thought it was a trick question. And, I didn’t know how to answer. The truth was I was studying Greek out of arrogance—to get a good grade, to be in “the know.” After a few awkward moments, and me muttering something, he said, “We study Greek because we love God’s Word.”

That stopped me dead in my tracks. Because I didn’t love God’s Word. I didn’t even know what that meant. I was still caught in performative Christianity. I was doing things out of obligation and recognition. Not out of desire and love.

So, if you’ll let me, I’d like to ask you the same question. Not as someone who has it figured out, but as your big brother. And, let’s make it more basic. Forget the Greek. “Why are you studying the Bible?”

Can you say because you love God’s Word?

I know, it’s a hard question. And let me say something else. I don’t always pick up my Greek New Testament and say to myself, “Man, I love this.”

The emotion of love will not always be there. But here’s the good news about love. It’s an act of steadfastness. So, some days you may not feel like picking up your Bible. When you do, that’s the steadfastness. Let the consistency of study do its work on you.

Over the last year, I’ve grown so much in my absolute love of translation. If you listened to last fall's podcast, you got a healthy dose of it. What happened was, I just kept at it. And God wooed me with a delight that only he could produce in the quietness of my study.

Ok, onward.

I Read the Whole Passage Straight Through

I don’t stop. I don’t analyze … yet. And, I read out loud. The Bible was meant to be heard, not skimmed. You might feel odd reading aloud, but trust me, it not only helps focus, but it’s enjoyable and comforting. If you walked into my living room in the early mornings, you’d see me with my Earl Grey, sipping, and reading aloud. There’s something powerful about reading God’s Word out loud.

Think about it. It’s His Word to you. It’s living. It’s not inert. It’s not some article from The Atlantic. It’s real, thick, and dangerous.

What translation do I use? I use two primary texts. First, an English version. I choose a translation that reads clearly. I’m not trying to win a translation debate. I’m trying to actually read the thing. My go-to is the New Living Translation. Don’t get caught up in the “best translation” game. Pick one and read.

I also use my Greek New Testament (more on this below). My journey and training over the years have given me rich tools, and I try my best to steward them. I’m no Greek scholar, but it’s true what they say: if you don’t use it, you lose it. So, I use it. And it brings me a lot of joy.

But you don’t have to read from a Greek New Testament to study the bible well. Modern tools have taken bible study to new heights—and we all benefit from these wonderful tools.

To the reading. Ok, the first pass is simple. I let the text land. I listen. I take it in. I do my best to be receptive to the words, ideas, and fire. Remember, palms up, heart open. And yes, that’s harder than it sounds. I agree.

This is my calf-skin heirloom, Tyndale Publishers New Living Translation. A few years ago, a year after I bought it, I left it and my journal out by the fire pit—I study there often in the cold months, early. It rained. And ruined both. But I’ve kept it and still use it. I keep notes from my daughters as bookmarks. This is an old one from Brielle when she was much younger. I use watercolor pencils for underlining.

Then I Read It Again—This Time Paying Attention to Structure and Words

On the second reading, I slow down.

I look for repeated words.

I notice contrast words like “but” or “yet.”

I circle logic words like “therefore.”

I ask who is speaking—and to whom.

I ask what kind of literature I’m reading.

You don’t read Psalms (Hebrew poetry) the same way you read Romans (a first-century letter). You don’t read Ecclesiastes the way you read Proverbs.

When you see “therefore,” ask the old question: what is it there for?

These small words carry weight. They reveal movement and expose structure.

This is where most people stop too early. They read once, grab an encouraging phrase, and move on. But Scripture is not a collection of fortune-cookie lines.

It’s argument.

It’s poetry.

It’s narrative.

It’s theology unfolding over time.

If you don’t learn to observe, you will always be dependent on someone else’s interpretation. Just because a famous pastor says it doesn’t mean we should swallow it hook, line, and sinker. Iron sharpens iron. We should do our own study and press into the deeper pools ourselves.

As we do, we recently left a service and broke down the sermon on the car ride home. My daughters asked what I thought about it, and I asked them what they learned, what spoke to them. When they asked me, I told them about an error I heard.

Now, this is not me criticizing the pastor or being an armchair preacher. It’s just me, noticing something I had previously studied in the text. I always approach Sunday worship, again, with palms up, ready to learn and hear from the Lord. But I’m also aware that we all need to be in the Word ourselves, studying. If I rely on someone else’s study all the time, I’m missing the depth of communion offered to me by God.

Sorry for that digression. Ok, back to paying attention and observation.

Years ago, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David McCullough explained a note he kept on his desk to The Paris Review. It read: “Look at your fish.” McCullough explained that it reminded him to observe, to see. He said:

“Insight comes, more often than not, from looking at what’s been on the table all along, in front of everybody, rather than from discovering something new. Seeing is as much the job of an historian as it is of a poet or a painter, it seems to me. That’s Dickens’s great admonition to all writers, “Make me see.”

What McCullough believed was essential for historians and writers is equally important for readers of the holy Scriptures.

Take your time.

See.

This isn’t a race. Quiet time with God is not some performative ritual. It’s a lived relationship that requires your attention, your passion, and your patience.

I Ask Questions—And I Don’t Stop Asking

Ok, this is where your Bible study comes alive.

Take John 1: “In the beginning was the Word … ”

Maybe you’ve read that verse a hundred times. Me too. But you know what? I was in the first several verses of John’s Gospel for several weeks this past year. It is deeply profound. I always learn something when I return to it. And you will discover that too when you ask questions about it. Questions like …

Why begin there?

Why not Bethlehem?

Why not the Jordan River?

Why go back before Genesis?

John is not reporting events. He’s not a biblical stenographer. He is theologizing the life of Christ. He’s telling us what it means.

When I hit a phrase like “the Word,” I don’t nod as if I understand it. I sit with it. I ask why that word was chosen. I trace how the concept develops. I let the question linger.

When Billy Graham died, one of his daughters said something beautiful: her mother made sure they read the Bible regularly. But her father made sure they asked questions about it. That’s the difference. Reading regularly is necessary. But questioning deepens understanding and communion.

And, remember, questioning is not doubt (that’s another post). It’s hunger.

I Read Whole Books When I Can

Especially the letters: Philippians. Colossians. Galatians. James.

They were written to be heard in one sitting. When you read them that way, you start to see the argument and logical flow. You see the problem being addressed and how the “therefores” connect.

And with books like Ecclesiastes, this matters even more.

If you proof-text Ecclesiastes, you’ll walk away confused. If you read it from beginning to end, you’ll realize it has a strange, unsettling coherence. It’s building toward something. And yes, Ecclesiastes is one of my favorite books in the Bible. Can you guess my other one?

Reading whole books guards you from isolating verses and building conclusions the author never intended.

I Journal What I See

And no, it’s not polished writing. It’s thinking on paper. I’ll jot down observations, questions, or patterns I’m noticing, or connections that might be forming.

Writing forces clarity. Writing is thinking.

If you only read and never write, your thoughts stay foggy. When you write, you discover what you actually understand and what you’re assuming.

Don’t overthink this step. Get a journal dedicated to your ponderings and let yourself go free in it. Think of God looking over your shoulder, saying, “Ah, yes, good question. Let’s tackle that together.”

Or …

“Yes, that’s a tough one. It’s not going to be an easy answer. Get it all out and let’s discuss.”

I Think Longer Than Is Comfortable

This may be the most neglected discipline.

In seminary and graduate school in England, the best advice I ever received wasn’t a technical insight. It was simple: “Tim, go have a think.”

Not for ten minutes. Not for an afternoon. Sit with it. My doctoral supervisor once told me to go have a think … for the entire summer. It was wonderfully freeing to give myself permission to study a concept for three whole months.

Here’s what I do when I “have a think.” I’ll go for a walk and let a phrase follow me. I’ll record a voice note as I process what I’m seeing. I’ll let a difficult passage sit unresolved for a while. I’ll even call my Dad to discuss it. An outside perspective, especially from someone who’s studied the bible decades longer than I have, is illuminating.

Depth rarely appears in the first five minutes. It arrives almost unnoticed. I’ve had verses or passages make sense to me after a nap or when I least expect them. Sitting with Scripture flies in the face of our culture. Speed is the only thing that counts. Immediacy!

But sitting with something of such rich importance has a way of carving new lines into your soul. It is after I sit with something for a while that the questions overwhelm my thinking, and I need to go deeper and get more precise.

Only Then Do I Reach for Commentaries

I am not anti-scholarship. Of course not! I spent a good portion of my life pursuing it. I am deeply grateful for it. But I try not to consult commentaries first.

If I go there too quickly, I risk inheriting someone else’s framework before I’ve wrestled with the text myself. (See above.)

Commentaries are best used to refine, sharpen, or challenge what you’ve already seen—not to replace the process entirely.

Most confusion around Scripture doesn’t begin with ill-intent. It begins with dependency. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wanted to scream when I hear someone post or talk about how their thinking changed on something biblical after hearing so-and-so-scholar say this-or-that.

If your understanding of the Bible is built primarily on what others say about it, you will inevitably absorb their assumptions—some faithful, some cultural, some reactive. It can get dangerous, in a bad way, quickly.

The only way to discern the difference is to become literate in the text itself.

Here’s A Simple Way to Begin

If you want to try this without overcomplicating it, try this:

Pick a short chapter.
Pray.
Read it straight through.
Read it again and observe. List your observations.
Ask questions.
Write down what you notice.
Sit with it tomorrow.

Remember, you don’t need a theology degree. You need attention, patience, and a willingness to stay. Start small. Pick a chapter. Sit down tomorrow morning and actually read it—slowly, with your questions turned on. Fight for ten honest minutes and build from there. It’s okay to spend a week on one verse, on one word—like Logos. Sitting with God’s living Word is more rewarding than we know. All it takes is some dedicated time, persistence, and the heart that yearns to know more of God.

Going Deeper Without Getting Weird

Above, I mentioned that I read from a Greek New Testament. What I didn’t unpack is the layer I explore before I ever open a commentary. This is the step most people skip.

Below, I’ll show you exactly what I look at, and how you can do it too.

The Great Sabotage

Timothy Willard — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 23:22:56 GMT

1895, Loïe Fuller watercolor - Loïe Fuller depicted as a bright “S” swirl of cloud. Photo by The New York Public Library

Once a year, I open these doors a little wider. This is the only 50% discount I run all year. I’ve asked management about bringing it back at Christmas. Apparently, the elving schedule is non-negotiable. Paid subscribers receive full access to The Great Sabotage (monthly cultural field reports), commenting and full archive, behind-the-scenes research and commentary, private audio reflections, and occasional video dispatches. So if you’ve been circling the paid tier, this is your moment to step inside.

"LOOK UP" Disclosure Is Upon Us

Issue No. 1 — We are Not Alone

Disclosure, Mystery, and the Fever of Modern Imagination

We are not alone.

We inhabit a world that is practical and material, yes, but also mysterious and metaphysical. The Christian faith has always held that reality is populated by both physical and spiritual beings. Until recently, this was not controversial. For most of human history, the world was understood as animated, alive with presence. Something existed beyond the human frame, call it God, Allah, the Tao—something not contained within matter.

But the modern era redefined the conversation.

The “material” view of the universe has dominated our imagination for centuries. Thinkers like Iain McGilchrist have long argued that we have lost our sense of depth and beauty. Perhaps that’s why we’ve finally begun to reacquaint ourselves with the sky and are looking up again.

Literally.

We’re looking up and are finding “signals” or “signs” as we wean ourselves away from looking down and swiping at notifications. Our febrile culture, long numbed by machinery, seems hungry for transcendence again. And this is what I’m noticing. The conversation about UFOs and extraterrestrial life isn’t happening on just one level. It unfolds across three frames at once: scientific observation, theological imagination, and technological culture. This essay isn’t an attempt to prove or disprove alien life. It’s a venture to understand how those three frames shape what we think we’re seeing.

House Inhabit

“Mystery creates wonder and wonder is the basis of man’s desire to understand…

5 months ago · 151 likes · 142 comments · Jessica Reed Kraus

I ran across the “Look Up: Disclosure is Upon Us” article, and I was caught not just by the alien-ness of it all, but also by the cosmic instinct behind it. It was a melding that I loved. This world of ours is far stranger than our modern frameworks allow. And larger than mathematics alone can capture. It’s more alive than physics by itself can account for.

And suddenly, the conversation has shifted toward the sky.

UFOs and extraterrestrial life are no longer fringe science fiction. Our government is addressing the subject. Hearings are being held, and entire media ecosystems are forming around them. Entire religious subcultures now orbit the supernatural, the apocalyptic, and the possibility that we are not alone in the universe.

I half expect Buck Rogers to reappear on Netflix. Or for Elon Musk to start clicking the next time he talks about Mars.

Materialism, in philosophy, posits that reality is entirely composed of matter. According to this perspective, everything that exists is physical, and all processes, including mental states and consciousness, arise from material interactions.

The Kraus piece reminded us that our times already feel apocalyptic and surreal. Against that backdrop, the alien/UAP talk seems right on time. She pointed to the recent (2023) Congressional Whistleblower hearing, which shows the seriousness this topic has become. It’s worth watching.

What I appreciated most, though, was Kraus’s decision to invite a Christian voice into the discussion: Allie Rae. Allie’s words struck a chord. She encourages us to “Look up.” If we all did more looking up, she says, we’d be better off as a society. I agree.

Her journey began humbly enough. She began taking night walks and looking at the stars—one of my favorite things to do. She started this liturgical skywatching, not to see UFOs, but as a therapeutic ritual—reenchantment walks, I’d call them.

Over time, she learned to watch the sky and began to notice anomalies … during daylight hours, and it unsettled her. It forced deeper questions: What does this mean for my faith, my theology? How would I relate this to my children?

She writes:

As a Christian, I had no idea how to categorize this within my theology, and no one in the church had answers for me. I was disturbed but determined to understand the new reality unfolding before me. And throughout this 10-year journey, these discoveries didn’t pull me away from my faith; they expanded it.

I love how her journey expanded her faith.

The further she ventured, the more cautious she became:

… peeking behind the curtain can create a profound paradigm shift—one you’re never fully prepared for. It can be jarring. So take it from someone who’s walked this road: proceed with caution. Have an open mind, but guard your heart. Because the deeper you go into the UFO subject, the more it becomes less about lights in the sky and more about life’s biggest questions: What is the true nature of reality? What do you believe about the unseen? How anchored is your faith?
This knowledge has a way of holding up a mirror and demanding answers to questions you may not be ready to ask. So step in, but stay grounded—and hang on tight.

Her question: What is the true nature of reality is something I want to come back to, because it hums beneath all of this.

Kraus also mentioned a prediction circulating: that government disclosure had just a 10% chance of happening before 2027. Little did she know how prophetic her piece actually was. The very next day on Truth Social, President Trump said he would direct the Department of Defense and other federal agencies to “begin the process of identifying and releasing Government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and unidentified flying objects (UFOs), and any and all other information connected to these highly complex, but extremely interesting and important, matters.”

So, the volume of reports on aliens and UAPs continues to rise. But remember, louder is not the same as truer.

My question at this point is, are we now infatuated with the possibility of something beyond our planet being real, or are we finally coming to grips with the mystery that floods our existence in the first place?

Culturally, has our media conditioned us to automatically look at celestial anomalies and think, “Aliens,” or has our innate yearning for transcendence latched onto science fiction tropes and said, “It feels good to not be alone”?

There’s a natural human curiosity about these questions. The further we see into our universe, the more our curiosity swirls. That’s good. But does the size of our universe imply the possibility of distant life or something more personal to us and how we relate to its Creator?

Why for us men more than others? If we find ourselves to be but one among a million races, scattered through a million spheres, how can we, without absurd arrogance, believe ourselves to have been uniquely favored?

—C.S. Lewis, “Religion and Rocketry,” in The World’s Last Night and Other Essays

The Cosmic Frame: All Things Visible and Invisible

The Christian imagination has never required a small universe. Long before modern science speculated about extraterrestrial life, Scripture described a cosmos already alive with more than human presence. Biblical writers give accounts of angels, principalities, powers, heavenly hosts, and unseen realms.

Christianity does not begin with the assumption that we are alone. Quite the opposite. It begins with the claim that reality is fuller than what we see. And that reality is held together by a person: Jesus Christ.

Paul writes that Christ is the one …

through whom all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible … and in him all things hold together.
(Colossians 1:16–17)

John opens his Gospel with the same cosmic perspective:

Through him {Jesus} all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.

And Hebrews declares that Christ is …

upholding all things by the word of his power.

But my favorite is the more nebulous passage in Proverbs 8 where The Teacher describes how “Wisdom” was side by side with God at creation, delighting in the work of creation, and rejoicing in the whole world and delighting in mankind. Many scholars attribute this description of Wisdom to the Logos—Jesus Christ. It shows us the intimate side of God’s creating through wisdom, through Jesus, his most precious creation: the human race.

And in the delight of creation, there is the unseen realm. “All” that has been made includes the invisible spiritual realm we cannot see, though we do sense1 and encounter it through the physical senses.

So, before we ever ask whether life might exist elsewhere, Christianity has already placed the entire universe—known and unknown—within the sustaining authority of Christ. We inhabit a cosmos “brim full of existence”2 because God himself is. He is such that “He can give existence away, can cause things to be.”3 And what we know of existence begins with humankind, animal, and vegetable life, right here.

Does that mean Christians can’t be curious? Absolutely not. But curiosity is different from being unmoored in our faith because of the possibility of life on other planets in other galaxies.

The cosmos can be strange without being godless.

If we were to find life elsewhere, the universe would not suddenly expand beyond Christ’s reach. It would simply give us a deeper understanding of the universe he already holds and sustains.4

1952 First U.S. Edition, in which you can find “Religion and Rocketry.”

C. S. Lewis anticipated this conversation decades ago. Above, I included a quote from his essay Religion and Rocketry asks:

“If we find ourselves to be one among a million races scattered through a million spheres … how could we, without absurd arrogance, believe ourselves uniquely favored?”5

The line is sometimes used to suggest Lewis believed in extraterrestrial life or civilizations. But Lewis isn’t declaring belief in extraterrestrials here. He’s staging an objection—something he often does in his writing—then examining it. It’s a thought experiment.

Lewis argues that we simply do not know:

whether other rational beings exist
whether they are fallen
whether redemption would take the same form
or whether Christ’s incarnation, rooted in one world, could still be cosmically sufficient

His conclusion? Christian theology, he suggests, does not need to rush ahead of revelation or evidence. It has room for mystery without surrendering coherence.

At timestamp 49:21, Dr. Wiseman grapples with the question of whether there is life on other planets.

And if there is room for mystery and the uncanny, do we really need to rename what already exists? I mean, here, angels and demons. Some Christians want to take the UAP/Alien conversation and baptize it in modern lingo. We’re now using terms like “interdimensional” beings. Why?

Christianity has always affirmed the existence of the “unseen realm.”6 The tradition accepts the view that angels are intelligent, personal, spiritual beings created by God, and that demons are fallen angels, with the Satan being the prince of the fallen angels.7

The question, then, is not whether unseen realities exist. That has been Christian orthodoxy for two millennia. The question is what our experiences actually warrant us to conclude. This was Lewis’s point; the presence of mystery doesn’t give us permission for open speculation without discernment. And the existence of the supernatural does not license sensationalism.

But let’s pause for a moment.

Can we step back and take all this in?

What I’m saying here isn’t new information. It’s the belief of billions of people for the last 2,000 years. Indeed, up until 300 years ago, the existence of the supernatural realm—and not just the existence, but its active participation in human life was a given for all cultures dating back to the earliest civilizations. The “world view” was known as cosmic piety.

But go beyond belief. It’s a lived reality. Here we are, on Substack, saying that angels, demons, and an entire invisible realm exist and participate in our lived reality.

Does anyone else think that sounds crazy?

It does. And that’s why it’s also beautifully and wonderfully and mysteriously amazing. That’s why we can look at the sky and gasp—because we have no clue what exists out there in terms of animal or vegetable life. We have no idea whether intelligent life exists or whether any such creatures have a soul.

And yet at the same time, we know that somewhere behind the veil of material reality, Cherubim exist and guard the throne room of God.

Who needs aliens when we have Cherubim?

The Great Sabotage cultural deep dive happens every third Thursday of the month. Upgrade to a paid subscriber and receive The Sabotage File and join the community

Our Place Among the Stars: The Technological Shift

If you do a quick Google or AI search, you will find that sky-sightings date to pre-twentieth century. Here’s a quick list:

medieval “sky shields”
1561 Nuremberg celestial event
1896–97 “airship” sightings in the U.S.
Victorian “phantom balloons”
religious sky visions across centuries
a clarifying moment in UFO history - *Note: I included this one because I found it while researching Victorian phantom balloons. This article documents the China balloon surveillance of 2023, the same year as the congressional whistleblower hearings.

The modern UFO imagination didn’t emerge in a vacuum. It rose alongside the most dramatic technological explosion in human history. Flight, radar, nuclear testing, satellites, drones (the first drones date to WWI), digital imaging, and global information networks (World Wide Web, thank you Tim Berners Lee) all reshaped how we see the sky. What earlier generations might have interpreted as omens, angels, or natural phenomena, we now interpret through the language of machinery, surveillance, and extraterrestrial technology.

The heavens did not suddenly become busier. How we interpret the sky changed.

In the twentieth century, the sky became technological. We traded natural and supernatural wonder for science fiction. Because of Hubble, the James Webb Space Telescope, the Euclid Space Telescope, and others, we take space imagery for granted.

If you add the proliferation of personal computers, global connectivity, smartphone cameras, and algorithmic distribution systems, we get a world that whirs in an unprecedented feedback loop. An anomaly in one corner of the world now travels globally in seconds via TikTok or Instagram. Interpretation spreads faster than verification. Speculation becomes community. Community becomes conviction.

And what happens? In such an environment, mystery multiplies. Why? Is it because the universe changed? Or is it because information transference made it so?

Unlike pre-modern civilization, we live in a world of noise: profuse light pollution, an orbital field trashed by satellites, and digital noise—visual and aural. We can barely see the stars, but we’ve convinced ourselves that something is hiding in them and coming for us.

Here’s what astounds me. And I think it astounds me more about Christians obsessed with UAPs and aliens.

It’s that we seem to be more obsessed with the inevitable arrival of extraterrestrial life than with an ancient sky that holds the light from the beginning of time itself.

The anomaly isn’t floating rectangles. Its that the night sky has remained stable to human eyes for millennia.8 We walk beneath the beginning of the universe every night—there it is, in still mode, while we scroll and text. We look down, craning our necks for the next dopamine hit, when our ancestors spent their time looking up, navigating oceans by the stars and planting crops by the constellation rhythms.

Take a moment and think about what our world of mimicked light creates. We pack into cities aglow with the wash of screens and lights that never turn off. The flood of fake light removes scale from our environment. We can’t see the sky, so we don’t know how to interpret its massive size and depth. What is there to fear in a world of constant (fake) light?

But step into the Utah wilderness, and suddenly the world grows uncomfortably large. There is cold, darkness, thunder, and silence. That kind of scale creates humility. That’s what awe does. It creates a creaturely awareness. This is what Rudolf Otto called the numinous—the sense of the divine in natural phenomena.

Dvořák and the Whale Stars

As I was thinking through this piece one night, I sat at the fireplace and listened to Antonín Dvořák’s cello concerto in B minor. Yo-Yo Ma was the cello soloist. The piece is 50 minutes long. As I listened, I thought, “How can we think of aliens when no one has figured out the mysterious power music has?” Music is a physical and metaphysical anomaly. The stars of the universe literally hum in tonal chorus.

Music is a language—not just in mathematical scales, but in spiritual resonance. Even atheists and agnostics describe Bach’s cello suites as “transcendent” and “touching the divine.”

To me, the possibility of alien life speaks to the human desire to touch what lies in the beyond. I don’t know where the power of music comes from, but I know it is not a human invention. God created it and imbued the world with it. This is why Dvořák’s cello concerto can captivate the mind and body. Because it feels like it’s coming from somewhere beyond us—beyond what human reasoning alone can produce. We sense a presence; we scramble to describe it, paint it, capture it in verse, but alas, our feeble imaginations can only grasp at metaphor to describe what is both in our world and outside it.

My daughters keep hounding me to take them to Utah. I’ve told them many stories of the stars there and in Durango. Stars I called “the whale stars” because they look as though they are breaching reality. They want to look up and see. But what they really want to do is feel—they want to feel the stars. Their presence in the sky, their vastness slung out over the horizon, the Milky Way dripping into the desert unencumbered.

They want an alien experience.

And so do we all.

The Sabotage File

If our culture is febrile—always one headline away from panic—then the question isn’t just what we believe about the sky. It’s how we train our attention beneath it. In this week’s Sabotage File, I want to share how I personally manage fertility through beauty.

Once a year, I open these doors a little wider. This is the only 50% discount I run all year. I’ve asked management about bringing it back at Christmas. Apparently, the elving schedule is non-negotiable. Paid subscribers receive full access to The Great Sabotage (monthly cultural field reports), commenting and full archive, behind-the-scenes research and commentary, private audio reflections, and occasional video dispatches. So if you’ve been circling the paid tier, this is your moment to step inside.

The Truth of the Last Tree

Wed, 18 Feb 2026 20:02:23 GMT

Subscribe to The Beautiful Disruption

Once a year, I open these doors a little wider. This is the only 50% discount I run all year. I’ve asked management about bringing it back at Christmas. Apparently, the elving schedule is non-negotiable. Paid subscribers receive full access to The Great Sabotage (monthly cultural field reports), commenting and full archive, behind-the-scenes research and commentary, private audio reflections, and occasional video dispatches. So if you’ve been circling the paid tier, this is your moment to step inside.

It doesn’t matter when you start your year. It just matters that you start.

What do I mean?

I spent the last six weeks off-grid. It wasn’t intentional. I wrote, produced, and distributed one of my favourite projects to date: O Night Divine. It was beautiful—and I mean that for me. It was such a rich project, and the response from readers exceeded my expectations. You can go over here to read/listen about how I did it.

Well, the long and short of it? I wrote a 1,000-word essay every day for 26 days. Sometimes posting at 4:30 a.m. I did all this while keeping my normal work/client load. Can you guess what happened to me after New Year’s? You got it.

Sick. Really sick. So sick that I lost my voice for nearly 10 days. That’s never happened to me.

I walk, ruck, or work out regularly. Nope. I could hardly walk around my neighborhood.

I didn’t feel myself till the first week in February. I surfaced on Instagram on January 31. Why? Because a beautiful thing happened. It snowed 10 inches in Waxhaw, North Carolina. So I had to walk our trail in the snow. After that. Sleep.

“I tell you this, that you will have found out the truth of the last tree and the top-most cloud before the truth about me. You will understand the sea, and I shall be still a riddle; you shall know what the stars are, and not know what I am.”

—G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday, the character Sunday speaking to the “dynamiters.”

And then, another beautiful thing happened. I started cooking. That’s what you do when you have no strength. You roast tomatoes, peppers, garlic, and onions, then make tomato-basil soup, and impress yourself (and your wife). Now I can’t stop making soups, steaks, and purees. I’m cooking so much that my wife bought me the Ninja food chopper and a new cast-iron skillet for my birthday. I’m so excited about it that I created a Notes folder: Tim’s Storm King Recipes. Who is the Storm King?

I am. 🌊

{And yes, I will be posting some recipes on this Substack. Are you ready for that? 🍲}

Something happens when you’re sick. You stop. You stop everything. And you start listening. You start looking. And, if you’ve followed me for any amount of time, you know where I look when I listen. Up.

A few years ago, I purchased massive stargazing binoculars so my daughters and I could get just a bit closer to the Pleiades. How far can we see into the stars?

If you were part of our Advent series, O Night Divine, you heard me opine about UY Scuti and the cosmic frame of our universe. Even on ordinary nights, stepping outside and lifting your gaze changes something in you.

Your perspective widens. The world slows down. And something mysterious seeps into you.

During my recovery, I reread The Man Who Was Thursday. I was on my way to the grocery store, and I listened to the final two chapters and wept. In these chapters, Chesterton transitions from a full-blown spy-mystery-thriller to a metaphysical mind-bender. It’s riveting.

At one point in the final chapter, the main protagonist, Gabrielle Syme, realizes that, in all the chaos of the adventure he’s enduring, he’s been seeing the world all wrong. He experiences an epiphany of perspective.

He says,

“Listen to me,” cried Syme with extraordinary emphasis. “Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of the world. We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal. That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud.
Cannot you see that everything is stooping and hiding a face? If we could only get round in front—”

This one passage in the novel sums up two of Chesterton’s most beloved books: Orthodoxy and The Man Who Was Thursday.

I could not stop thinking about Syme’s line: “We have only known the back of the world.” The trees, the clouds, the ocean—it can all look brutal, feel harsh and unforgiving. The whole world can look bruised.

What Syme says implicitly is that there’s another side to the world. The side of the dawn, where the light makes everything look new and reborn every day. If we turn our gaze, shift our perspective, that same brutal world looks radiant.

For months, I’ve felt like I’ve been living in the back of the world. Striving, pushing, pulling, producing. Have you ever felt like that? That in the midst of doing the very thing you know is good and true to you, can also be brutal and harsh? But then, sickness forced me to stop. To cook. To listen. And, look up. And change my perspective. To seek and to know the front of the world.

And so, here I am. Beginning again. And you can, too. Ours is not a back of the world reality. It’s one of light and dazzling delights.

Notes on The Man Who Was Thursday

This has to be Chesterton’s strangest (in the best way) and most prophetic novel. Every time I return to it, I’m struck by how joy, sanity, and courage are framed as acts of rebellion. It’s a book about infiltration. It’s about discovering that the fight for God’s order often looks like chaos from the outside. This novel is winter reading, if ever there was such a thing.

And yes, I have three versions. I have several versions of many books by Chesterton, Lewis, and MacDonald. What can I say? It’s a thing.

Some fun facts.

The Man Who Was Thursday was published in 1908, the same year as his book Orthodoxy. The center version is the 1972 Penguin Edition. Rare first editions (not pictured) are crimson covered wth just the title and author on the front; the spine’s “G.K Chesterton” reveals it is a true 1st because the “K” did not receive a full stop on the first print run. You can find first editions for around $600+. It’s perpetually on my birthday list.

The Great Sabotage
Metaphysical Counterintelligence — Third Thursdays

In the coming weeks, I’ll be writing about the back of the world from the front of the world, hope, culture, the sky, and why it matters, our longing to see the front of things, and yes, occasionally, what the Storm King is cooking. Plus a new, monthly culture series (Hint: The Great Sabotage).

Sometimes the most important shift isn’t forward. It’s turning the world just so, until the light catches it and shows the whole world ablaze … with wonder.

I’m glad to be back.

Enemy-occupied territory—that is what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us all to take part in a great campaign of sabotage.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

What’s the first dispatch of The Great Sabotage series? Well, I thought we’d start with something light.

Aliens.

Or more precisely, why so many people are suddenly looking up again.

See you next Thursday.

Cheers,

🛸 Tim 👽

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Cultural deep dives, metaphysical counterintelligence, and the recovery of wonder in an age of collapse. If you’ve been meaning to step inside, this is a good week to do it. For a limited time, subscriptions are 50% off — forever.

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A Conversation with Sara Hagerty on Advent rhythms, favourite books, and walks in the woods

Timothy Willard — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 22:22:46 GMT

Hi Everyone,

I asked my friend Sara Hagerty to join me for what was supposed to be a short chat about Advent rhythms and traditions. Well, it turned into a one-hour conversation about Advent, our favourite books (Jane Eyre), and everything under the sun. That’s what happens with old friends. Chris and I have known Sara and Nate for over 11 years, and we love them so much. They’re the kind of friends you text when you find a great book or a rare find—you know, those secret-sauce books.

Sara is so inspiring. She’s a homeschool mom, resource connaisseur, and a wonderful writer. I’m so excited to share our conversation with you. Keep in mind that this was a live video, so I offer it to you in all its quirky, unedited goodness. You’ll see me trying to figure out how to get the “live” feature to work, and my phone dying unexpectedly at the end. Yes, I know. “Tim, get a new phone. It’s an iPhone 12 for crying out loud.” 🤓

Also, my apologies for my audio—Sara sounds great! I have no idea what…

My Peace I Give You

Timothy Willard — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 17:38:00 GMT

Episode Summary

In this week’s episode, Chris and I sit down in her study to talk through the heart behind Oh Night Divine, my new Advent series. It’s a short, intimate conversation about the power of nostalgia and how hope acts as a structure for our days. Enjoy this quiet companion to today’s reflection.

Buy My Advent Series Oh Night Divine

My Peace I Give You

We step now into the second week of Advent, the week of Peace. But the word “peace,” as Jesus uses it in John 14, is so layered and so full of divine fullness that it’s almost impossible to hear it the way his disciples heard it unless we recover what he actually meant when he said, “My peace I give to you. I do not give as the world gives.”

Here’s the full verse:

“Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.” (NIV)

That word for peace is eirēnē, and it is not the Greek equivalent of “no conflict” or “good vibes” or even the sentimental peace on earth, goodwill toward men that we all hear this time of year. Those phrases live on the surface of things, and they aren’t necessarily “bad.” Of course, we want peace in our world—the end of conflict.

But Jesus is speaking of something more dynamic.

He is giving us His peace. Which means: whatever this peace is, it originates from the divine life itself. Take a moment and think about that. I think we too often buzz by these words without considering their actual depth.

This is where C.S. Lewis’s idea of transposition becomes helpful and a necessary theological grammar. Lewis argued that whenever a higher reality enters a lower one, the lower realm can only express it by analogy.

And this, Lewis believed, is how God meets us. He is not reduced to humanity; he is transposed into it. That means he doesn’t lose the fullness of who he is; he is both fully God and fully human. It’s mindbending.

I like to think about it like the full ocean entering the narrow fjord (we discussed this a few weeks back on the podcast). When that happens, it creates a tidal current: the ocean water is still the ocean water, but narrowed into this small space, forming maelstroms, and causing the water level to rise.

That’s a transposition; the infinite (ocean) pressing itself into the finite (fjord) without ceasing to be infinite. This is the shape of the Incarnation. And it is also the shape of the peace Jesus gives.

He is not offering the world’s kind of peace: the negotiated ceasefire, the absence of trouble, or the temporary relief from chaos. He is offering a heavenly peace, originating in the Trinity and given as a gift to humanity through the miracle of the Incarnation.

It is cosmic in scope.

This is the time of year when we celebrate the ultimate transposition of the higher going into the lower. The peace we find through Jesus is his peace. Not the world’s version, but His own. It is not about a feeling, but about a way of being, rooted in his wholeness.

When we have that kind of peace, we can face trials of many kinds because it is a peace not based on human acts. It is the steadying nature of God himself, giving you the peace of mind to endure as you rest in his divine fullness. So, it’s not the absence of trouble, but the presence of Himself.

Today and this evening, take a short walk and reflect on God’s peace; where it comes from, what it contains, and the potential for it to shape your life.

Is it even possible that God has offered you peace, but you have yet to partake of it? We do this, as humans, don’t we? We go out of our way, almost, to muscle through hardship on our own, all the while, Jesus stands there saying, “Here, take my peace. Let it renew and restore you.”

I love how Eugene Peterson frames this notion of peace in his New Testament paraphrase, The Message:

Don’t fret or worry. Instead of worrying, pray. Let petitions and praises shape your worries into prayers, letting God know your concerns. Before you know it, a sense of God’s wholeness, everything coming together for good, will come and settle you down. It’s wonderful what happens when Christ displaces worry at the center of your life. (Philippians 4:6-7)

A sense of God’s wholeness—he nailed it. In other versions, the final part of verse seven reads like a doxological blessing.

May the peace of God guard your hearts.

Doesn’t that make more sense now, when we understand peace as God’s wholeness? That’s how peace guards your heart. It is him guarding your heart with a divine tranquility that surpasses our comprehension.

Isn’t the Christian life so wonderfully cosmic?

An Invitation

If you’d like to walk through the rest of Advent with me—day by day, under the stars, in Scripture, and in the wonder of Christ’s coming—you can join Oh Night Divine anytime. Each morning brings a fresh reflection, an audio reading, and a simple printable to mark the day.

Join Oh Night Divine

The Slow Dawning of Hope

Timothy Willard — Sat, 29 Nov 2025 19:49:34 GMT

Savour, Breathe, and Rest

Timothy Willard — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 13:44:07 GMT

Dear Friends,

I am writing to you all from western Pennsylvania, just outside of Johnstown. My wife’s hometown. It’s a small town surrounded by mountains. The leaves have long since fallen, and you can feel autumn shifting in her shawl.

The North Wind comes.

It is my favourite time of year. I think God made me for cold and storm. The mist and grey days don’t bother my heart. They invigorate it. An amble in the twilight is regular fare. A walk in the rain, a treat. A snow jaunt—a gift from heaven.

This evening, it was rain.

My Petzel headlamp was glowing red as I ran/walked to the country road, then to the creek beneath the pines, then up the hill near the misty pasture.

The misty pasture.

Tomorrow, we make the three-hour drive to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. For those of you who are new here, though I was born in Lexington, Virginia, and lived in Brooksville, Florida, until I was 12, I would tell you, if we were having tea together, that Lititz, Pennsylvania, is home.

Most of my siblings—there are five of us, three boys, two girls—will assemble tomorrow at Papa’s house, which is attached to my youngest sister’s farmhouse. All totaled, there are 16 grandchildren between the five of us.

My oldest sister will stay in Fort Collins, Colorado. But it will still be a raucous house for a few days. Just the way we like it.

Breathe in the Moments

Are you driving tomorrow?

Are you prepping Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow—local grocery runs, Trader Joe’s, Costco—snagging that cheap live garland roll on your way to the checkout?

Are you already in wintering mode and staying home?

Are you just starting your holiday traditions this week—newly married or newly on your own?

I remember even when I had my own apartment in my twenties, living with my bandmates, and back from a fall tour, I’d always be at Mom and Dad’s, doing, well, not much of anything, except taste testing on kitchen fly-bys.

Maybe you’re like me, and you come alive right about now, embracing cold walks like your morning cup of coffee.

The beauty of this season, and really, any season, is the variety of it all. We all have our “thing” we do. It’s what makes us, us.

And that is comforting because it reminds us that God is the God of variety and abundance.

But I also know that, as nostalgic as the season is and gets, we all face the very real pull of weariness. Almost like gravity pulling us into the floor.

We fill up the weekends and weeknights. We're running everywhere.

And living and doing is part of the loving, part of the being, part of the fun, part of the season.

But if we’re not careful, the wave of rush-rush-rush can sneak up on us and pull us under.

So, this is your slightly eccentric big brother whispering in your inbox today:

Hey friend, take a breath. Don’t miss the moment on account of the sale at Home Goods.

Be here, now.

Because these are the misty days. Stark with browns. Stars high and shimmering—winter constellations moving into place.

The rhythms of creation speak to us. God made it so. And the rhythms possess purpose, a telos, and aim.

That’s why all of the deep and cozy “feelings” are not for nothing. They are, quite literally, for you.

In the season, savour—be in the moment. Let it speak to you.

And you’ll hear the tender voice of God. The field-brook voice calling you to breathe and rest.

And do you know what else?

Stars and Auroras above my house in Waxhaw, North Carolina

Pale twilight dappled with sunset in the back woods.

Nostalgia leads to thanksgiving.

If you’ve been tracking with me the last few weeks and had the chance to listen to my podcast with my dear friend, Edie Wadsworth, you will have heard me discuss the power of nostalgia.

Read My Post on Nostalgia

When I recount my walk to you, I’m not just waxing poetic.1 I’m remembering.

In the Hebrew idiom, remembering was central to their theology. They remembered to keep God’s goodness to them ever-present when things were hard.

On my walk, I experienced an overwhelming sense of “the moment.” I felt the memory being made, which fired a chain reaction in my mind. Each step in the rain threw me back to my time living in Oxford, England. How many times did I walk in the rain at twilight?

A lot.

As I remembered that blessed time, a smile stretched across my cold, wet face. And I whispered, “Thank you, Lord.”

Thanksgiving doesn’t need to be complicated. Just look around you. And look around the halls of your memory. Remember.

Remember God.

Remember his kindnesses to you. Remember how he carried you when the hard times came.

Maybe today, you’re waking up, and you’re not very excited for Thanksgiving because you are suffering quietly, alone. Maybe your family feels distant. Maybe your work has you feeling defeated.

This, then, is the exact moment to lean in to thanksgiving. Nothing fancy. Just a “Thank you, Lord,” for the good things rising in your memory.

If you need inspiration, read these verses aloud, and let their simple words of gratitude wash over:

Psalm 9:1: “I will thank you, Lord, with all my heart; I will tell of all the marvelous things you have done.”
Psalm 28:7: “The Lord is my strength and shield. I trust him with all my heart. He helps me, and my heart is filled with joy. I burst out in songs of thanksgiving.”
Psalm 34:1: “I will praise the Lord at all times. I will constantly speak his praises.”
Psalm 86:12: “With all my heart I will praise you, O Lord my God. I will give glory to your name forever.”
Psalm 95:2: “Come into his presence with thanksgiving; sing psalms of praise to him.”
Psalm 100:4: “Enter his gates with thanksgiving; go into his courts with praise. Give thanks to him and praise his name.”
Psalm 107:8-9: “Let them praise the Lord for his great love and for the wonderful things he has done for them. For he satisfies the thirsty and fills the hungry with good things.”
Psalm 136:1-3: “Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good! His faithful love endures forever. Give thanks to the God of gods. His faithful love endures forever. Give thanks to the Lord of lords. His faithful love endures forever.”
Psalm 138:1: “I give you thanks, O Lord, with all my heart; I will sing your praises before the gods.”
Psalm 150:6: “Let everything that breathes sing praises to the Lord! Praise the Lord!

I am remembering with you, this week, friends. I am taking the time, even with the pressures of life looming and doing their best to divert me from the present and The Presence.

I am singing in my heart of all the wonderful things God has given to my family and me. And I’m thanking him for what he has given all of us, through his beautiful works of creation.

Happy Thanksgiving to you all! May the Lord bless you and keep you—his face shine upon—his goodness be upon you and your family.

All the best,

Tim.

A Special Advent Series for You

You can still get the pre-launch discount of Oh Night Divine. I am so excited to bring this daily series to you. It will be cosmic, inspiring, and encouraging—something your whole family can read together.

Buy Now

I’ve been overwhelmed by how many of you purchased it and by the kind words about the work I’m doing here. I’m so grateful for you all.

Buy Now

Right now, when you purchase my spiritual formation course Marveling, you get Oh Night Divine for free. Click here to get the bundle.

This is one of my favourite words in Greek. Because it is the verb poieo. We get our word poem from it. But in Greek, it’s a verb for doing or making, and it’s used all the time by the New Testament writers. There’s also a noun version, like when Paul reminds us that we are God’s “workmanship.” That word in Greek is a form of poieo. So, if you think poetry is just for literary types, think again. YOU, my friend, are a work of God’s poieses—a living poem, and everything you do contributes a line to your verse.

Chasing Beauty in Advent

Timothy Willard — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 18:54:58 GMT

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Hello Friends,

Today, the podcast is in a truly special place.

My friend, Dr. Edie Wadsworth, invited me on her podcast to share about Oh Night Divine. Dr. Edie is a dear friend of mine and one of the most inspiring people I know. If you’re looking for joy, wisdom, and fun on the internet, you should check out her neck of the woods at House of Joy.

That’s the name of her podcast: House of Joy.

You can click here to listen to the special episode where we break down what you’ll be receiving with my new series, Oh Night Divine: Chasing Beauty During Advent. We had a blast.

Get the pre-launch sale: Regularly $20, now only $16 for a limited time.

Get the Sale

For the Joy

Back in 2022, Dr. Edie invited me to speak at her fantastic event in Knoxville, Tennessee. It was part of my Road Trip Book Tour for The Beauty Chasers. The event blew me away.

It was fun, sincere, joy-filled, and deeply nurturing. Before I left, I told Edie, “Man, this was so good. This should exist for men!”

I said that because it was unique. Edie’s event wasn’t a place for shaming or guilt-tripping you into some new behavior pattern. It was a place of inspiration. I felt guided into God’s love and into the person he intended for me to be.

I felt joy unlike I’ve felt at any other event I’ve attended or spoken at.

When you listen to today’s podcast, I think you’ll feel that same energy from Edie. She is so encouraging, and she really wants to help people experience God’s love and joy in their lives. You can get a little video glimpse of the event, Love is Magic, here.

I got to open the event with a keynote out under the tent.

The Beautiful Work of Nostalgia

I want to touch on something Edie and I briefly spoke about on the podcast.

Nostalgia.

Nostalgia gets a bad reputation sometimes. People dismiss it as sentimentality, as if looking back somehow weakens us or distracts us from “real life.”

But nostalgia — true nostalgia — is not kitsch, and it’s not escapism.

Nostalgia is remembering. And remembering is one of the holiest acts a human can do.

The Difference Between Sentimentality and Sentiment

One of the reasons nostalgia feels confusing is because we blend two very different things: sentimentality and sentiment.

They sound similar, but they belong to different worlds.

Think of sentimentality as embodied in the mass-produced knick-knacks, the plastic ornaments, the commercial “holiday cheer” that tries to manufacture a feeling.

It’s nostalgia turned commodity. It’s shallow because it asks nothing of you—and beauty, by the way, does the exact opposite. It requires something of you. Sentimentality is just decoration layered onto the noise of the season.

But sentiment, the kind C.S. Lewis defends, is something altogether different.

Think of sentiment in the same realm as ordered affection. It is the capacity to feel rightly about what is worthy.

This is the ordo amoris Augustine loved to talk about. It’s the cultivation of love so that our hearts respond to the beautiful, the good, and the true. For Aristotle, this was moral formation.

Lewis called it the training of our emotions.

Advent actually depends on this.

You can’t receive the beauty of the Incarnation with a hollow heart. You need awakened affections to recognize the miracle hidden in the ordinary.

And that’s where nostalgia becomes a gift again. Not the sentimental plastic, but the memories that shaped you. In the episode, I mention a few of them, and I’m sure you can list your own:

… the candlelit sanctuary,

… the sound of laughter from another room,

… the smell of mulled wine in a British pub (this was for my friends Leah and Sarah 🇬🇧,

… the wrapping of gifts in a quiet upstairs room,

… the small beauties that formed your sense of home.

These shape your affections, form your heart, and prepare you to receive Christ.

Nostalgia becomes holy when it teaches us how to love again. That’s the difference. And that’s why it matters for Advent.

Your Stirring Memories

Think about this season.

As the year winds down, most of us are running hard, finishing work projects, juggling school/homeschool events, planning travel, buying gifts, navigating complicated family systems 🌲, trying to squeeze meaning into the margins of our fatigued lives.

And yet, woven through the exhaustion, something else begins to stir.

Your memories.

Think about how many Christmases we’ll experience; seventy, maybe eighty. But only a handful will remain vivid in our hearts. And they will be the ones marked by laughter, warmth, belonging, ache (that good kind of longing), or grace.

You don’t remember the plastic trinkets. You don’t know the mass-produced decorations; in fact, you can’t wait to trash them. And you certainly don’t remember the sale you chased or the Amazon box you opened.

You remember people. You remember moments.

You remember the song on a playlist that awakens something tender in you.

You remember wrapping presents upstairs while hearing the hum of laughter beneath you.

You remember candlelight services, frost on windows, bonfires in the dark.

You remember the jokes, the tears, and the late-night storytelling.

You remember love and the embodied moments where something in the air reaches out to you. And it whispers … “Remember.”

That’s nostalgia; holy memory, the recovery of something that mattered.

In The Abolition of Man and The Weight of Glory, C.S. Lewis famously wrote that the problem with modern people is not that we feel too much, but that we feel too little.

We are taught to distrust our affections. We are trained to live in what he calls “a desert of feelings,” where good emotions dry up and life becomes a flat, pragmatic march. Our world pushes noise, numbing, and nonchalance.

But nostalgia pushes back against that. It wakes us. It reminds us that there is a way to feel rightly. Nostalgia reminds us what good feels like. It reminds us what beautiful feels like. It calls us back to the things that shaped us in love.

One of my own clearest memories — I talk about it in my “The Sound and the Fury” essay, which you’ll find in Oh Night Divine — comes from a winter night in Johnstown, Pennsylvania.

There I sat on our bedroom floor. The window was cracked open, and the cold air came through, chilling the room just right. Outside, the moon lit up a blanket of snow. I was upstairs alone, just listening.

My family was downstairs laughing, telling stories, clinking plates. The smell of pie and roasted pecans drifted up the stairs.

That moment did something to me. It still does.

It taught me what “home” feels like. What belonging sounds like, what beauty tastes like, and what goodness whispers like.

And even now, a decade later, that memory shapes how I make a home for my own kids. It shapes what I want our holidays to feel like, the traditions I choose, and the atmosphere I try to cultivate.

Nostalgia has become a guide, a telos, a way of directing my life toward what matters.

That’s what nostalgia is for. It’s remembering what is worth repeating.
It’s a compass, a quiet guide toward the abundant life Christ promised.

The beauty of nostalgia is that it helps us pay attention to what was, so we can recognize what is.

And Advent, of all seasons, is the place where nostalgia turns into worship. Because every small, beautiful memory points us toward the God who enters our ordinary lives with extraordinary love.

Have a blessed weekend, everyone. Enjoy your family, friends, and make some holy memories.

Talk to you soon. 💙🦃

Cheers,

Tim

Bits-n-Bobs For The Week

—> Next week, the podcast will be on Thanksgiving break, enjoying the nostalgia of the season. 🦃 It will return the following week. Get caught up here. 🌲

—> The Marveling / Oh Night Divine Bundle: When you purchase my Marveling course, you get Oh Night Divine totally FREE.

—> Buy Oh Night Divine: Chasing Beauty During Advent

—> Gift Oh Night Divine to a friend. ‘Tis the season.

—> I am down to four books in my vault 🤓. If you would like an inscribed edition of The Beauty Chasers: Recapturing the Wonder of the Divine order now.

—> Join our rabble-rouser community here and be a disruptor. Upgrade to paid and get 25% off forever. It comes out to one grande Americano a month. Or, there abouts.

The Crisis of Modern Love

Timothy Willard — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 21:44:21 GMT

Episode Summary

What if love isn’t a moral checklist but the shape of reality itself? In this episode, Tim contrasts the world’s idea of love with divine love by exploring agapē as the self-emptying gravity of God—the Trinitarian life that holds the world together—and how our own speech, identity, and action regain weight when we participate in that divine motion.

The Beautiful Disruption is a reader-supported publication. Join the disruption and be part of the machine resistance 🤓. The Big Fall Discount is still available. Get a forever discount today.

Hello Friends,

Why the cosmic night sky photo? Because, as you’ll hear in today’s episode, love—God’s love—is cosmically big. And, as it’s turned out, our exploration of agape has now brought us to the big self-emptying moment of the incarnation. That will be next week’s episode. I can’t wait.

Let me break down what we covered and give you a few questions to ponder related to today’s episode.

Oh Night Divine

We are in the season of the incarnation. And Advent draws near. In today’s episode, I talk more about my new Advent series, Oh Night Divine. It will be great for spiritual reflection, family discussion, and personal enrichment.

Will you join me for this special Advent series that explores what it looks like to chase beauty during the Christmas season?

—> Oh Night Divine — Chasing Beauty During Advent is available now for presale. Buy today and get 20% off: $16.00

Buy Now

Many people are opting for the spiritual formation route. When you buy my Marveling course, you get Oh Night Divine free.

This is my favorite project right now. I’m honored and humbled so many of you are resonating with its theme and are joining the journey.

Riven—When Light Pours In

I mentioned—as the oversharer that I am—my dream of Riven. Over the past few weeks, as I’ve returned to the rhythm of weekly podcasting, I’ve been thinking about what it means to build something that’s more than just a recording schedule.

The reason I moved my family to Oxford was to be equipped; to learn what it was that God wanted me to say and spend the rest of my life saying it.

My new revived rhythm of public writing and teaching has reignited this dream. I keep imagining a small space on our property—a 26x26 studio tucked among the trees. A place to paint, write, teach, record, pray, and gather. The Riven Studio 🥰.

“Riven” means split open, but not in a destructive way—it’s the kind of opening that lets the light in. Christ’s body was riven; the temple veil was riven; and through those openings, life poured into the world.

That’s the kind of work I want to build—work where beauty and truth meet us at the level of the heart.

I’ve always envisioned Riven as a re-imagining of what a 21st-century L’Abri might look like—not an institution, but a small fellowship of beauty, imagination, and sincere searching. A place where people could come to ask questions, to heal, to make things with their hands again, to rediscover the presence of God through beauty.

Whether Riven becomes a press, a creative space, or one day even a retreat house, the dream is simple: to carve out a haven where the riven places of our lives become doorways for grace.

If this inspires you—stirs something in you. Please drop me an email or leave a comment below. Or click over to my website and read more about the dream and ways to give towards it

I’m only in the early stages of developing the vision statement, but you’re welcome to review it and prayerfully consider how you can be part of what we’re planning. —> Click here.

Questions & Reflections from the Episode

Which “dimension” of God’s love is hardest for you to believe?

Height — God’s transcendence and sovereignty
Depth — Christ’s descent into your grief
Width — God’s embrace of the whole world, including you

Why? Journal about it or discuss with a friend, co-worker, or loved one. This is what I discussed with my parents. It was fun and very encouraging.

What would it look like to “empty” something this week? Not in a self-negating way, but in a Christlike way:

A preference?
An agenda?
A need to control?
A hidden resentment?

What would creative relinquishment look like? I’m referencing here what I described as God withdrawing himself to create—the higher into the lower (Lewis’s “transposition”).

In what ways has sentimentalism shaped your understanding of “love”? I know, that’s a hard one. Now think about culture. How has culture’s version of love:

Softened its cost?
Drained its power?
Replaced holiness with niceness?
Emphasized preference over truth?

Where is God inviting you into the real thing?

What kind of “beauty” do you chase? Like Psyche: a beauty that leads upward into transcendence—outside and beyond yourself? Or like Orual: a beauty you want to possess—like a commodity, like a thing you control?
Which part of the divine-life invitation stirs you most?
- Participating in God’s self-giving life
- Being drawn into the Trinity’s eternal exchange
- Seeing love as ontology, not ethics
- Becoming a person of weight and substance
- Entering the “riven” places where the light gets in

Why? Journal the answers. Discuss with a trusted friend.

Ok, that’s all for this week. I’m excited for next week, and plunging into the incarnation and Oh Night Divine. I’ll see you then!

And, for paid subscribers. Be looking for another “live” posting. We’ll go behind the scenes and discuss more about love and the Advent series.

Cheers,

Tim

The Deconstruction Video

Check out from 1:43 onward—and definitely around 1:55(ish). That’s where Rhett talks about the greatest of these—love. And then ask yourself. What love are you talking about? What does that mean? If faith and hope matter less, then define the love that should rule the faith and rule the world.

TBD Library

“Transposition” — C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory (An Essay Collection)
Till We Have Faces—C.S. Lewis
Confessions—Augustine, “… my weight is my love.”

Oh Night Divine - Innercircle Live with Timothy Willard

Timothy Willard — Sat, 08 Nov 2025 21:20:18 GMT

Dear Innercircle,

{We need a cool name for The Beautiful Disruption inner circle 🤓.}

Love you guys. I recorded this especially for you today to fulfill my promise of the deep discount you are getting for my new Advent Series: Oh Night Divine.

So, watch the short video (don’t mind my manic energy! Ha) and click over to my website to claim the discount of 60% off.

The code is INNERCIRCLE2025.

Link to MARVELING BUNDLE: Purchase MARVELING, get OH NIGHT DIVINE for free.

Email me if you have any trouble getting it. All pre-release discounts are available for a limited time, so be sure to take advantage of them while you can.

As I gushed in the video, thank you for your support, love, and encouragement over the years. I'm looking forward to exploring things further with you this winter and the coming new year!

Have a great weekend!

Cheers,

Tim

P.S. If you don’t have the Substack app, it’s quite lovely and makes viewing lives convenient. Check it out 👇.

Available for iOS and Android

Through the Narrows

Timothy Willard — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 10:02:51 GMT

Photo by Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa

Episode Summary

What if love’s absence is more than heartbreak—it’s collapse? In this episode, I explore Paul’s haunting triad in 1 Corinthians 13 —speech without love, being without love, and action without love —and follow it through the narrows, where divine self-giving holds the world together.

If The Beautiful Disruption inspires you, join us and become a paid subscriber. If 10% of all my subscribers upgrade, I'll leap to full-time writing, teaching, producing, and speaking—bringing beauty to a world in search of meaning. Thank you all for your support. I’m here in this space because of and for you.

Hello Everyone,

This week is special. I promised something for Advent, and today I’m making it available for pre-sale:

O Night Divine: Chasing Beauty During the Christmas Season

O Night Divine is four weeks of meditations on the journey of Advent and what it means to chase beauty during the Christmas season. I’ve loved creating this project for you. The journey begins on November 30th.

Oh Night Divine will include:

22+ reflections during Advent
Audio reflections
Bonus seasonal essays for reading by the fire
I’ll compile all the reflections into a neatly designed, downloadable, and printable PDF
Price: 20$.
Today’s Pre-sale Discount: 20% off, now $16.

So, here’s the special I have for you. Well, actually, there are three ways to receive a pre-sale discount:

By purchasing Oh Night Divine by itself today, you will get a 20% discount for a limited time. So, this one is for anyone and everyone. Click HERE to purchase.
When you join Marveling —my signature three-chapter course on cultivating wonder—you’ll receive O Night Divine, free, totally on me. Click HERE to purchase.
Paid Substack friends: check your inbox tomorrow for your inner-circle discount link. Just a hint, there’s a six and a zero in your discount. So, if you’ve considered upgrading to a paid subscriber, now is a great time to do it.

Advent is coming. Let’s prepare our hearts for the Light together.

Finally, my art shop is live. I’ll be adding new pieces regularly. Click on over and explore. If you have a question, DM or email me.

Brook, 36 x 48, oil on canvas

Brewing, 36 x 48 oil on canvas

Low Country Sound, 36 x 48, oil on canvas

Explore My Art

Photo by The Cleveland Museum of Art

Through the Narrows

What happens to the world when love withdraws?

In this episode of The Beautiful Disruption, we return to Paul’s opening verses in 1 Corinthians 13. He begins not by giving us emotional sentiment. He invites us to consider a very important possibility: the world without love.

Without agapē, Paul says, our words deform into noise, our being collapses into nothing, and our actions lose weight. It’s a sobering reality for us who live in the machine world.

Love is what holds reality together. Because we all know, “all you need is love.”

Think about our unraveling culture: our content-saturated speech, our curated identities, and our performative activism. We are a culture devoid of heavenly love, the costly kind of love, the high mountain pass of love.

But there is hope. And it comes through the narrows. It’s the way love creates through self-limitation. Simone Weil and George Steiner describe creation itself as divine withdrawal, the torrent of infinite being pressed through the constriction of finitude.

Like a massive river flowing into the narrows, it’s reduced to a small area, producing a glorious spectacle of raw power and beauty.

Like the tidal current at Saltstraumen, Norway, God’s self-giving love surges through the narrows to carve beauty into the world.

This is the withdrawal of the loving one: the withdrawal creates a givingness in the world. This is the power of love's presence. When love enters, truth, goodness, and beauty cohere again.

But when love is absent, everything collapses.

One thing I loved thinking about was how all this relates to us in our everyday lives. I like thinking of myself as a tidal current, don’t you? For artists, makers, parents, pastors, craftsmen, entrepreneurs, and well, basically everyone, this is a call to live through the narrows—to pour ourselves into acts of love that give form and radiance to others.

How can you live through the narrows today, this week, next? How can you pour yourself into others, into your craft, into your daily work that gives radiance to others?
For the artists here, it is not about self-expression. That is the lie of modern society. Art is about withdrawal. Your challenge this week is to create through this lens. Create one thing that expresses beauty—that radiance beyond—so when others see your work, they see that which is hidden and wonderful in our world expressed in your creation.
Evaluate your speech, your gifts, your actions. Are they full of the high mountain pass withdrawal nature of love? Or are they loaded with void? That's a tough question, yes, I know. But it’s what I ask myself all the time.

Ok, that’s all for today. Love you guys! Please leave a comment below with your thoughts. Or shoot me an email or DM. I love hearing from you guys.

Head on over to my fresh site and pre-order the Advent special, Oh Night Divine, and tell a friend about it.

I’ll see you next week!

Cheers,

Tim

Links to the Advent Special:

Pre-Order Oh Night Divine HERE.
Explore my Marveling course HERE.

Links Mentioned

Explore what a tidal current is here.
The Narrows— “where the trail is the Virgin River.”

What I’ve Been Watching

Alex O’Connor & John Lennox: Why this Oxford Mathematician is Confident God Exists

Listen + Share

🎧 Listen on Substack
🎧 Listen on Spotify
🎧 Listen on Apple Podcasts

If this episode stirred something in you, I’d be honoured if you shared it with a friend or left a five-star review. Every little bit helps new listeners discover The Beautiful Disruption.

Thanks for listening! This episode is public, so feel free to share it.

Support My Work

This podcast and publication are 100 percent listener-supported. If you believe in work and want to help me make it full-time, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

For a limited time, get 25% off a paid subscription for life.

Word Study

γίνομαι / γέγονα – gegona, “I have become,” “to become,” denoting change of state. Used here to show the deformation of the speaker.
εἰμί – eimi, “I am,” “to be,” the core verb of existence; without love, ontology collapses.
ὠφελέω / ὠφελοῦμαι – ōpheloumai (the verb that was too long for me to pronouce:), “I am profited,” “to profit, benefit, be helped”; Paul uses it to deny the moral utility of loveless deeds.

Without love, speech, being, and action collapse. This is literally what is happening in our culture at every level. Speech: rhetoric, communication, writing, education, reduced to mere content. Being: identity, existence—confusion and distortion of what is real; we no longer know who we are as individuals, male, female. Action: virte signaling, activism without heart. See how when you look at the verbs, you can place an overlay of cultural distortion over it and see how important it is to follow the more excellent way … of Christ, of love.

From the TBD Library:

Real Presences & Grammars of Creation, by George Steiner
Gravity and Grace, Waiting for God, The Need for Roots, by Simone Weil

Coming Next Week

We’ll get into—finally!—what love is. Until then, gush your presence through the narrows and love like Christ.

The High Mountain Pass of Love

Timothy Willard — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 16:05:46 GMT

What if love isn’t sentimental—but structural? In this episode, I explore Paul’s “more excellent way” in 1 Corinthians 13 as a high mountain pass—the narrow, risky, breathtaking road of transformation. Love, it turns out, isn’t comfort; it’s ascent. It’s the way that changes the air you breathe.

The Episode

Love is the most overused word in our world—and the least understood.
Paul’s words, “I will show you a more excellent way,” aren’t about feelings. They’re an invitation up the mountain, a call to the “beyond-measure path” where beauty, risk, and endurance meet.

In this reflection, we trace:

Faith, Hope, and Love as the architecture of existence—the divine geometry that orders our being.
Tolkien’s “eucatastrophe” and why hope is the structure of time itself, bending us toward reunion.
Paul’s “hyperbolic way,” as the noble path that elevates and refines.
Why our culture’s definition of love—mere affirmation—falls short and can lead to isolation.
How true love carries the grit, endurance, and thin-air beauty of a mountain pass.

“Love is the mountain pass. Love is the “way beyond measure.” Love is the geometry of God’s own heart.”

This isn’t a how-to on relationships. It’s a pilgrimage—a way of seeing again.
When Paul speaks of love, he’s describing the very curve of divine being: a love that ascends, stretches, and never stops reaching.

Listen + Share

🎧 Listen on Substack
🎧 Listen on Spotify
🎧 Listen on Apple Podcasts

If this episode stirred something in you, I’d be honoured if you shared it with a friend or left a five-star review. Every little bit helps new listeners discover The Beautiful Disruption.

Thanks for listening! This episode is public, so feel free to share it.

Support My Work

This podcast and publication are 100 percent listener-supported. If you believe in work and want to help me make it full-time, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

For a limited time, get 25% off a paid subscription for life.