I picked the word “Desire” as my 2024 word of the year.

It proved to be tough word, but a one that stuck with me more often than it floated off like past years.

I didn’t indulge every desire. In fact, more of my effort was spent trying to identify my desires than making them come to pass. It’s hard work for an enneagram 9.

Paying attention to my desires is a gift I haven’t given myself for decades. I used to think this was very pious of myself. I wore it like a badge of honor.

“Oh don’t worry about me!” “I’m good with whatever!” “I’m flexible!”

All of these things are true about me. But I have also spent a lot of my life robbing myself of the very human and fulfilling experience of wanting anything out of my life.

When I hit publish on my last article about outrage, I knew there would be more to say here. Mostly because the deep truth is that anger isn’t inherently evil or even altogether bad for you.

Anger is simply an emotion on the emotions chart. It’s one that we feel deep in our bellies, running hot across our foreheads, sending tremors through our fingers.

Anger is not the problem at all. In fact, anger - when properly synthesized - can become a great motivator for change in life, and history has proven this to be true more than once.

Is it just me or are we all yelling on the internet these days?

I’m in the business of wholeness. This means unearthing and calling out what it is that fractures us and suggesting ways we might move forward in healing.

My friend, outrage is fracturing you and it’s fracturing us.

Let's talk about how to move away from outrage addiction.

Fear, anger, and anxiety are powerful motivators for behavioral change and tend to see some of the highest returns on investment. Advertisers and marketers have known this for years. And since political campaigns are essentially one ginormous marketing effort, exploiting the fears of the American people can become quite lucrative both in cash money and votes.

Here’s a question - do you really want your exploited fear to be what decides your vote? Because the chances are, it will be.

I visited the National Museum of African American History & Culture in DC last Sunday morning. We skipped our regular church service and caught a train to DC with my family and brother to meet my sister-in-law who was leading a band trip there. So I can’t claim that it was my idea.

We had missed church service the weekend before as well and my inner church girl who owned several Sunday school perfect attendance airbrushed tee shirts was fighting me about missing church again.

Little did I know how much that visit would be a Divine encounter in and of itself.

There’s an inner process at work when you head down the road of faith deconstruction.

Something triggered dissonance in your very self and the brave will wander inward to see where the disturbance lies.

That journey inward reveals your mis-formation. Over the years you have shut down parts of yourself for love, acceptance, and belonging. You now open the doors to spaces within your being you had locked up tight only to discover that they seem not only ok, but good. You wonder why you set these parts of yourself off limits? You grieve the time you’ve lost embodying these qualities. And then you begin the work of healing and rehabilitation toward wholeness once again.

I love when things are obvious.

That means there’s an obvious solution - even if it’s a painful one like the tonsillectomy in my son’s future.

An obvious problem is a fixable problem.

But - the big *but* - not all problems are obvious.

Now that I’ve shared my passion for people who find themselves in a faith transition (aka deconstructing), I’m having a lot more conversations with people who are asking hard questions about what they believe. It’s most often in one of these processing conversations that I hear “So this must be what your coaching is like, right?”

And my answer is always “Well, not exactly.”

There are many deconstruction/faith coaches and groups out there focused on helping people process the specifics of their beliefs and theologies, but that’s not what I’m interested in doing.

I’m interested in empowering you on your spiritual journey.

We’re in part three of common experiences of deconstructing faith. Today we’re digging into the ins and outs of how your day-to-day life begins to change as well as getting intentional with personal practices and community after a faith shift.

Let’s dive into part 2 of this series and talk about some of the secondary stages of deconstructing your faith. Once you walk through the initial crisis and rediscover some of your identity, questions of what you believe and how to discern begin to surface.

Deconstruction is a buzzy word right now. Very hashtagable. But truthfully the idea of deconstruction has been around way longer than the phrase itself.

Faith deconstruction is the process of examining what you believe instead of taking it all at face value. Which quite honestly, is a good practice. Not practicing a posture of examining what you're told to believe is a straight shot to cult life, and we can all agree, cults = no good. So why is deconstruction both such a buzzword and so demonized right now? And what does deconstructing even look like?

Let’s look at 3 reasons for all the buzz and the first 4 common experiences of deconstruction…

I used to think faith was something to be grasped.

In fact, I've been in a lot of conversations committed to "putting handles" on a faith concept - bless it. It's from a good place that we want to make the concepts of a faith from an ancient origin easily applicable to our 21st-century lives. But I'm not sure grasping it should be the goal anymore.

At this point many of us have faced advocacy burnout as bad news keeps coming one wave after another after another. Before I go on, know I believe deeply in fighting for change where we want to see it, and my purpose here is to make sure that you're up to the task as the most whole version of yourself.

I freaking love watching my kids, they teach me so much. My favorite thing to watch is when they are discovering something new and amazing. This happens at lot at the Science Center or the Aquarium. They are face to face with something so new and wild that their brains have never imagined before. Their eyes move over their new discovery a million times as they compute what it is they are seeing. Their faces are a combination of peace and amazement. They are unthreatened by the fact that their smallness has never anticipated such a thing, they are grateful to be there discovering this new thing in that moment. Their wonder is often followed up with "Mommy, look at this!" an invitation into the wonder they are experiencing. And I always join. I LOVE IT. This year, I'm joining my kids in the hunt for awe-filled wonder and I hope to invite them into my own discoveries, too.

2022 was a good year for me. It also held a new kind of difficult. The "ands" of 2022 feel very strong, really.

In 2022, I got to spend a whole year living into my values in a new way. I got to step into a full year of doing this new thing and establishing the rhythm of life for my family I spent so long craving.

This new working pace destroyed my expectations of what good productivity should look like. In fact, this year I got the wild wake up call that productivity has been quite the idol in my life and so I spent a lot of time dethroning it. And the work of dethroning productivity, and de-commodifying my very self has resulted in a wildly different list of things I'm proud of this year than I would have anticipated or imagined in January 2022…

We all access our stress-coping behaviors when we feel pressure. If you know yourself, you're probably aware of what parts of your stress response you like and don't like. If you know enneagram, you're probably aware of what stress means when it comes to your type. The reality for all of us is that when we are under pressure, our brains and our bodies will adapt to help us get through it. So what can naming the pressures of the holiday do for you?

I start out every new year with a birthday. Just 5 days into a new year, the number that defines my time here on earth goes up. Honestly, it doesn't really feel like the new year begins until after my birthday. I don't like to go back to work before then. I don't tend to try to start resolutions before then. I just give myself the birthday gift of an extra 5 days of rest and celebration.

I also tend to do a lot of reflecting on those days. Reflection - in a more honest sense, often ruminating, comes pretty naturally to me. I love the movie Inside Out because I can remember, in my own maturing, when my islands of personality fell and were rebuilt. And I take notice of my islands of personality crashing within me even today.

My 33rd year held a lot of crashing and rebuilding.