I have been excited to plan the content for this month as my first book, Teach Us to Want: Desire, Ambition, and the Life of Faith, turns 10! Though the book won the 2015 Christianity Today Book of the Year Award, it was actually published by InterVarsity Press in 2014. (Confusing, I know.)
There is nothing gimmicky about this month’s content, I promise. I’m not goading you to buy a book, though you certainly can if you wish. I’m grateful it’s still in print. I’m not even asking for a review of the book, though that always helps authors, too. In fact, to celebrate the 10-year anniversary of Teach Us to Want, I want to give away some content to the entire community that faithfully reads here, week after week. This includes previous interviews: with Uche Anizor (Overcoming Apathy), with Lucy S.R. Austen (Elisabeth Elliot: A Life), and with Andi Ashworth and Charlie Peacock (Why Everything that Doesn’t Matter, Matters So Much). This free community content will also include a July 1st 3pm EST/12pm PST conversation about desire with Luke Burgis (Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life) and A.J. Swoboda (The Gift of Thorns).Stay tuned for that conversation, which you’re invited to join live or to watch later.
Put simply, the goal for me this month, in offering content this month related to desire, ambition, and the life of faith, is to reflect, to remember, and to give thanks to God who has done far more than I might have asked or imagined ten years ago. It’s to properly celebrate, which is an often neglected spiritual practice.
As many time researchers have shown, we aren’t very good at looking back, especially when time often seems so scarce and planning for the future seems far more important. But looking back is an essential part of spiritual formation. It’s how we remember God’s active grace in our lives. For readers here at A Habit Called Faith, I want to look back at the provenance of this book in today’s post (June 3); I want to look back at the paradox central to the book and why it matters to think of desire as both and and (June 10); I want to look back at the content of the book and what I might write differently now (June 17); finally, I want to reflect on how desire shapes a rule of life practice (June 24). Whether or not you’ve read the book or plan to read the book, I still think all these topics can serve readers here.
In the months of July and August, there will be others invited to join in the celebration and reflection. The idea of a “festschrift,” or public commemoration of the book, was proposed by my dear friend, Laura Fabrycky, author of Keys to Bonhoeffer’s Haus. Laura was an early enthusiast of Teach Us to Want, and you can read our interview here for The Washington Institute for Faith, Vocation, and Culture. Yes, I might still feel a little bit sheepish for saying yes to her proposal for this round of public toasts, but I trust all of it will bear witness to the graciousness and generosity of God, who gave a trembling woman a little bit of courage to write. I trust it might also inspire courage for the good, faithful, holy, and risky desires to which God might be calling you. Because here’s the thing: God can grow a mustard seed of faith into the sanctuary of a shade tree.
Now, for the provenance of Teach Us to Want:
It was 2011 when our family moved to Toronto from the western suburbs of Chicago. My husband, Ryan, was offered a unique job opportunity, and we were excited for our children, then 10, 8, 7, and 3 (twins), to experience a cosmopolitan city like Toronto and to have the opportunity to learn French. We enrolled our older three children in a bilingual school, our younger two in preschool, and we found a house to rent nearby. We planned to stay three years, maybe five, and in the midst of all the change, I was stirred to write about it: to “not hide from our children but tell to the coming generation the glorious deeds of the LORD, and his might, and the wonders that he has done.” I understood memory as an act of obedience to Christ, and I wanted to be faithful to it.
I had been writing before, of course: in school, even for others. At the graduation of a group of high school girls whom a friend and I discipled when we were high school seniors, I wrote a devotional with all the wisdom I’d gained from my extensive two years of college experience. When, years later, my friends began having babies, I wrote a devotional compiled from reflections on my first year as a mother, and offered it as a shower gift. When our church entered a season of preparation for occupying a new building, I wrote 100 days of devotional content for our congregation. Even before I was given the advice by Calvin Seerveld, at a Toronto event in 2011, to write for my neighbor, I was doing that. (Since 2004, I had also been writing one or two issues a year for the daily devotional, Today in the Word, published by the Moody Bible Institute.)
I was writing before 2011, but the stirring that fall, after our move to Toronto, came to write more personally and also more publicly. The personal part had to do with memory; the public part had to do with courage. I was coming out of the fog of twins (children number 4 and 5), and I had the luxury of sending those little boys to preschool three mornings a week. I had NINE WHOLE HOURS TO MYSELF, and writing didn’t feel like a complete impossibility.
I had no initial ambitions to write a book or build a platform. I was simply moved to start a blog, where I could practice more regular writing and have some public accountability for that practice. It took some time to get over my hesitations about writing a blog (oh, the self-preoccupation! oh, the self-promotion), and it also took nudging from my husband to make the blog public to more people than him, my best friend, and my mother. But somehow, there was enough courage, enough commitment to begin and keep going.
That, my friends, is always grace: when fear has neither the loudest nor the last word.
What began as a blog quickly became a body of writing that circled around questions of desire. Was it wrong to want? Or, put more personally, was I wrong to want to write, which would necessarily compete with my responsibilities as a wife and mother? And could I even be trusted to write, what with my depraved heart’s inclination to vice? How would I handle failure in public writing, if it came? Success, if it came?
There were easy answers to give to the slippery questions of desire. Don’t want. Don’t trust yourself to want. But I could see, too, that this was its own breed of faithlessness. To what extent did I believe and trust that God was making me new in Christ? And what was this newness of life if it wasn’t also, at least in part, newness of desire?
Here’s the thing: I might have had multiple reasons to mistrust myself and my motivations to write, but the stirring didn’t relent. I find that’s often the way it is with God. God is patient, persistent. He’s got all the time in the world. I had remembered learning this—about stirrings you can’t shake—from Dallas Willard’s book, Hearing God. It made sense for me to pay attention.
Months into writing my blog and circling around these questions of desire, I was invited by a friend to attend a writing retreat in Cincinnati of all places (where I currently live). It’s there that I met Chris Smith, who had just been recently contracted to co-write, along with John Pattison, the book Slow Church: Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus for InterVarsity Press. That week, five of us ate together, prayed together, wrote in the isolation of our rooms, then returned to read together at the end of the day.
I went to that retreat not just with questions about desire—but with a nagging question about a book project. Trust me that while I was a reader of books, I knew nothing about publishing books. I had zero public platform, zero interest in becoming any kind of public person of influence. But I did have an important question to which I found insufficient answers. In fact, I was becoming more and more convinced that it was harmful to tell people to dismiss their desires wholesale as selfish and bad. Because how did we pray without desire? How did we change without desire? How did we move toward kingdom mission without desire?
To be human is to want. To be Christian is to desire to want well.
Two things happened that week. First, Chris Smith became a friend and early advocate for the project. He affirmed it was indeed a worthy idea and that he would help me navigate the publishing industry, even going so far to eventually introduce me to his editor at IVP, Dave Zimmerman. Second, a woman involved in the church community affiliated with the retreat center prayed over me one evening during that week of writing. She prayed what I came to understand as a prophetic word: Father, you want to be with us, and it is not difficult. Those were the opening words of her prayer, and I simply knew that I could trust God to be a good shepherd, even over my unruly heart. Didn’t her words confirm that God was a desire-er? Didn’t desire beat at the heart of the gospel, which proclaims the good news of God’s lovesick pursuit of his wandering children?
If God was for us, who could be against us?
I won’t catalogue the months that followed. You might be bored to follow the trail from idea to contract to publication date (though if you have questions, you can certainly ask them in the comments below. Just know that on the day this letter publishes, I’ll be celebrating two college graduations, so I won’t get to them immediately.) But perhaps I can simply end this reflection by reposting a question that Laura asked me in her interview for The Washington Institute:
There’s a real beauty—a kind of lovely symmetry—that we, as readers, get to participate in your risk of writing as we read your book, and in God using your desire to write as a means to explore desire. You’ve embraced that risk, and you are now shouldering some of its responsibility. How has that risk been for your family, and for the community of believers that you are a part of?
I had a particular answer when we talked to Laura then, and you can read my response in the interview. Ten years later, I think my answer might be a little different, though truthfully, risk and responsibility are two dimensions of the human life of faith that I’m always paying attention to. To be sure, I’ve held fast to my desire to write these ten years, and it’s the reason there are four books to follow Teach Us to Want—and seven years of these letters to readers! It’s also the reason for my current pause in publishing, when I’m evaluating changes in the industry and determining my own next steps. I do hope there is another book, and I do hope there will be an audience for it.
But whatever the future holds, I’m grateful InterVarsity Press took the chance on this project. Most of all, I’m grateful to a God who holds us fast.