Part of the series: Living, Loving, and Leading in a Liminal Season
Five years ago, while on vacation and in the midst of having no vision for our church, I remember journaling and praying something like, "God, why does every step forward I attempt become a quick dead end?" Over the previous 12 to 18 months, I had felt a return of pastoral and ministry energy. It was strange because it happened right in the middle of the COVID lockdowns. The world was hibernating, and I was itching to move. But almost every move I made, every idea I had, went nowhere.
Prior to this vacation, our family had decided to try something new, something we had wanted to do for years: two straight weeks of vacation. It was awesome. Week one slowed me down. During week two, I began to contemplate.
And somewhere in the midst of prayers like, "Why do I have no vision? Why aren't my ideas sticking?" I felt God whisper: "It's because these aren't your decisions to make anymore."
It freaked me out. Even though, for years, I had communicated to our Leadership Team that I wasn't sure I wanted to continue pastoring, they disagreed with me. And they were right. FYI: Discernment is arrived at in community.
But now, standing ankle-deep in the waters of the Atlantic Ocean, my happy place, I was crying as I nervously shared this prompting with my wife. She agreed. It was time for our church to have fresh voices leading it. We had started this church together, and now we both felt it was time to hand it off to other leaders.
When we returned from vacation, we met with our Leadership Team and shared what we were sensing. Each of them supported the decision. It was time.
I wish I could say the next four months of transition were great. For the most part, people in our church received the news with graciousness and support. Along with our Leadership Team, we listed all of the core members of our church and met or talked with them one-on-one to share the news. We felt it was important for people to hear it relationally rather than from a stage. It was more than 40 conversations in three months. I was completely drained and exhausted.
Rather than resting well each week and tending to myself during this transitional, liminal season, I white-knuckled my way through it. I buried my wounds, my grief, and my need for care and focused on guiding our church community through this.
On our final Sunday with our dear church community, I was numb.
A year or so later, I was at a movie with my family. There was an emotional scene, and I felt nothing. I remember thinking, "Hmm. For a guy who tears up pretty easily in movies, this is strange."
I know now that it was a warning light on my emotional and spiritual dashboard. Something was wrong inside.
The years that followed our transition were some of the hardest years of my life. Like any difficult season, there was joy, laughter, and plenty of great memories. But the lows were incredibly low. I had experienced depression before. This felt different. These lows were often brought on by circumstances: deeply painful parenting experiences, extreme financial stress, job stress, and eventually my wife being diagnosed with cancer.
I've been thinking lately about two different ways of describing parts of my spiritual journey: Dark Night of the Soul and liminality. I'm not sure the categories divide neatly into separate years. In fact, they probably overlap quite a bit. But they feel different to me.
The Dark Night felt like a dismantling. Things I thought I understood about myself, God, faith, ministry, success, and identity stopped working, or I began intensely doubting and questioning them.
Liminality has felt more like living between worlds. Something has ended, but whatever comes next has not fully emerged. In the dark night, I felt lost. Liminality feels more like a "guided drift" - a term Fred Rogers lived by. (Yeah, "won't you be my neighbor?")
I'm still reflecting on both and curious about both. More than anything, I'm grateful for them. My faith, emotional life, relational life, and pastoral life are ALL healthier because, eventually, I stopped striving, resisting, and white-knuckling my way through. I went inward with God.
The image that comes to mind is God as a surgeon, operating on my insides, with me somehow having a camera attached to the scalpel so I could watch where He was going and what He was repairing. That's one of the strange things about both the Dark Night and liminality: you often don't know exactly where you are wounded or where God is taking you. But there can be something sacred about learning to lie still and let God work.
Here are some of the "lie still" habits that helped me during each season:
Dark Night
Counseling
Good Doctor
Prayer - all the disciplines, contemplative, liturgical, praying the Psalms, Listening and Healing Prayer, etc.
Sabbath - I really started to learn how to rest, something I've written more about in You're Probably More Tired Than You Think
Vacations - real ones. Not holiday weekends with extended family or friends, but actual vacations of at least a week with just my wife and kids, and sometimes just my wife. We usually take at least two a year, sometimes three.
Retreats - 2-3x a year, Karrie and I go away for 3 nights to a beautiful place and rest, be still, hike, enjoy nature together.
Journaling - do not underestimate the power of reflection, it's a key practice of life and faith
Studying my Grief, something I explored more in When Grief Interrupts…
Liminality (All of the Above Plus…)
Attachment Theory Work - reading about this and processing with my counselor has been a game changer for me. It affected everything else on this list (Above and Below). Some books I would HIGHLY recommend on this subject: Sacred Attachment: Escaping Spiritual Exhaustion and Trusting in Divine Love by Michael John Cusick, Try Softer: A Fresh Approach to Move Us out of Anxiety, Stress, and Survival Mode—and into a Life of Connection and Joy by Aundi Kolber, Strong Like Water: Finding the Freedom, Safety, and Compassion to Move through Hard Things—and Experience True Flourishing by Aundi Kolber, and Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up by James Hollis. I don't give out a ton of advice, but if any of this resonates with you, I highly recommend reading these four books and processing them with a clinical mental health counselor and trusted friends.
Identity Work
More Counseling - especially on self-differentiation
Spiritual Direction
Enneagram
Studying my Anxiety, something I dug into more in Anxiety and Faith (Part 1)
Some quotes from my journey that stuck out to me:
"We won't be able to hear the whispering voice of God when we are allowing the storms of anxiety to run our lives." I'm not sure if I wrote this or heard it from someone else…but it's true :)
"Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom" - Kierkegaard