Which Direction Are We Walking?

When my husband and I were first married, we had no money. He was no longer in his band, and the only job he could get was stocking shelves at Camelot Music. I was an art student with no income. We lived in an old apartment, packed our lunches, and watched every penny that we spent. Children were definitely not part of the picture. We were barely keeping our heads above water.

And then my husband got a full-time job as a programmer at a life insurance company, and suddenly everything changed.

We felt like we were rich - we definitely weren’t - but it is amazing what the move from an hourly wage to a salary makes in a young couple’s life with no children. We went to the movies, we ate out, and we explored the city. In the evenings, I would read while he played guitar. Life was easy, life was simple, we were free, and we were in no hurry to change any of it.

During that time, nobody challenged us. The choices we were making, waiting, enjoying our lives, building financial stability before adding the complication of children, were so very sensible, so responsible. Everyone around us was making the same kinds of choices for the same kinds of reasons, and there was not a single voice in our lives asking us to examine whether sensible and responsible were the same thing as faithful.

My husband and I had begun reading a lot of theology during that season. One of the gifts of that quieter, simpler life was the time it gave us for reading, and somewhere during that period, we came across a book that changed things for us. The funny thing is, it was not a book either of us had wanted to read for the reasons it ended up mattering to us. But in it, we discovered a theology of marriage and children and what the Christian tradition has always said about the meaning of the two together that shocked us.

Neither my husband nor I had ever seriously thought about the theology of marriage and children. We were simply swimming in the cultural waters - that children were a choice, that timing was a matter of personal preference and financial readiness, that waiting until we felt ready was not only reasonable but wise. We had never examined those assumptions. We had never asked whether they were consistent with what we actually believed about God, about marriage, about the shape of a faithful life.

The more we thought about what we had read, the more uneasy we became. Not because anyone was accusing us of anything. But because we were beginning to see something we had not seen before - that the life we had been living so contentedly, the life that felt so free and so easy and so entirely sensible, was organized primarily around our own comfort. And that comfort, left unexamined and unchallenged, has a way of becoming its own kind of captivity.

We were not avoiding children for any compelling theological reason. We were avoiding them because everything was going well, and we did not want to disrupt that. Sacrifice felt optional when so little was being asked of us. And the longer we waited, the more settled we became in the life we had, and the harder it was to imagine choosing anything else.

We knew we were at a crossroads, and we knew we needed to choose, not just about children, but about something larger than that - about which direction we were walking. We had to decide whether we were walking toward the life God was calling us into, or whether we were going to keep protecting the comfortable life we had already built.

We chose to walk toward holiness - to stop arranging our lives around ease and open ourselves to the costly gift God was placing before us. It was one of the best and hardest decisions we have ever made.

I tell that story not because the specific question we were wrestling with -children, timing, what faithfulness looks like in a marriage - is the subject of this series. It is one example among many of a pattern I have come to believe is one of the defining spiritual challenges of our moment.

Because my husband and I were not alone in our complacency. We were surrounded by people in the same place - good people, faithful people, people who loved God and went to church and read their Bibles - who were nevertheless making the same quiet, reasonable, sensible choices in the direction of comfort and away from the harder, more costly, and more formative things that faithfulness requires.

As I have grown older, I have watched that pattern only deepen. The comfort is more readily available, the expectations are even lower, the cultural pressure to choose ease over sacrifice has become more relentless, and the voice within the Church calling people toward holiness - toward the hard, beautiful life the New Testament actually describes - has grown quieter and quieter.

I think about that crossroads moment all the time. Not just what we decided but what it took to get us there - the fact that it required a book, a lot of uncomfortable conversations, and a moment of honest reckoning with ourselves. Without any of that, we would have simply kept walking in the direction we were already going, never questioning it, never quite realizing that comfort and contentment are not the same thing as faithfulness, and that the life we were living, however pleasant, was not the life we were made for.

That is what frightens me about the moment we are living in now.

It is not only that we may be making wrong choices, but that we have lost the inclination to ask what our choices are forming us to become. So many of us are making choices - about marriage, about children, about church, about prayer, about how we spend our time and order our days and give ourselves to things larger than our own preferences - with no one asking us to examine them, no voice in our lives naming what is actually at stake, no moment of honest reckoning with the question put into words on that ordinary evening so many years ago.

Which direction are we walking?

Here is what I have come to believe after years of thinking about that question and watching the people around me navigate it in their own ways. Comfort is not the enemy of the Christian life, but comfort unchallenged, comfort unexamined, comfort that has quietly become the organizing principle of our days and our decisions - that is something entirely different. That is something the New Testament has a great deal to say about, and what it says is not what our culture wants to hear.

I often wonder if our deepest problem is not that we sometimes choose comfort over holiness, but that we have forgotten to want holiness at all. It’s innate in us to want happiness, security, success, and ease. But how many of us find ourselves wanting, above everything else, to become holy? How many of us examine our choices not by asking, “Will this make my life better?” but “Will this make me more like Christ?” I certainly don’t!

Christianity has never promised that the good life is the easy life. It teaches us to take up our cross, to die to ourselves, to practice steadfastness and faithfulness and sacrifice and self-denial - not because suffering is good in itself, but because holiness is worth pursuing, and becoming holy will sometimes be hard. I think this is the strong conviction we have most failed to pass on to the next generation - that hard things are not obstacles to a joyful life - sometimes they are the very means God uses to lead us into one.

There is a joy on the other side of faithfulness that comfort alone can never give us. My husband and I found that joy when we chose the harder thing on that ordinary evening in our apartment. And in the years since, through the children who arrived and the sacrifices they required and the people they have made us into - we have found more of that joy than we could ever have imagined from where we were standing then.

I want to spend the next several weeks exploring what that conviction looks like lived out - in marriage, in celibacy, in the decision to have children, in the faithful weekly practice of showing up to church, in eating together, in daily prayer, in the rhythms of the liturgical year, in care for the poor, and in the ancient practice of self-denial that our own age finds so baffling and so unnecessary.

Not because I have mastered any of these things - I most certainly have not! But because I think we need to hear again - clearly, honestly, and without apology - that a life spent becoming holy is worth the cost.