Tag: walking

You can’t think your way out

You can’t think your way out

All summer, I’ve been chipping away at my next book, which is a practical exploration of a single pregnant verse of Scripture: Micah 6:8.

He has told you, O mortal, what is good;
and what does the LORD require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?

After mulling various possible projects, I landed on this one, in part, because it seems like the one that can best serve both spiritual seekers and the church in our current cultural moment.

I’m now drafting the last full chapter, which is on humility.

Or rather, that’s what I thought it would be on.

It still is, but it strikes me as important that the lone action verb at the end of Micah 6:8 is not “Humble thyself” or “Be humble”—but rather: “walk.”

“Walk humbly with your God.”

The Hebrew word is halak, which has a long history in the Scriptures.

God’s Law is described as halakha: “the way of walking.”

The imagery goes back to Genesis. We read there that Enoch walked with God (Genesis 5:24). Noah walked with God (Genesis 6:9). And even earlier, the LORD’s first mention after Adam and Eve eat the fruit is of God “walking in the garden in the cool of the day” (Genesis 3:8)—searching for his walking partners.

WALKING > THINKING

The call to “walk” is helpful to me personally because I have a tendency to get stuck in my own head. Analyzing. Ruminating. Evaluating. Replaying. Comparing. Worrying. Constructing the perfect response to the imagined slight that happened yesterday.

And while thinking is fine and good (says the college professor), it is precisely this “stuck-ness” in our own heads that is the deadly enemy of both humility and joy.

In fact, I’ve come to question the common assumption that we should speak of humility merely in opposition to the sin of pride. Yes, pride is real and deadly, but in my experience I see problem more like this:

Thus, the beauty of the call to “walk”—and walk humbly.

A wise colleague suggested to me that the use of “humbly” in the verse connects not just to our need to “walk” (in general, or alone), but to walking “with” a certain kind of Partner. That is: it takes humility to walk with a greater Other, to let him set the pace, neither running ahead (in pride) nor ghosting him to hide behind fig leaves (in shame and self-loathing).

While restless, self-conscious comparison is a loop that takes place in our heads, walking is a slow, embodied practice. One foot, then the other.

As such, it moves the focus out of our heads, where, in the famous line from David Foster Wallace,

“Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence.”

This reminds me of a story.

“WE’LL THINK OUR WAY OUT”

When I was new to ministry, and serving as an intern at a local church, I was blessed to attend a teaching conference at a massive megachurch in the Chicago area.

For a kid from rural Kansas, I had seen nothing like it. The sanctuary could have housed a minor league hockey club, the music was pitch-perfect (U2-inspired, obviously); and while every speaker could have hosted a TED Talk followed by a comedy special, my favorite preacher brought a live goat on stage to illustrate a point about the high priesthood of Jesus.

To be honest, I loved the conference. And I still believe God uses different types of churches to reach different types of people. Looking back, however, it isn’t hard to see the interplay of hubris, inferiority, and comparison that thrives in such settings—not just in the organizers, but in attendees like me.

One line stuck with me so much that I remember it verbatim.

In a breakout session, one of the church’s executive pastors explained one of their internal mottos: “We will think our way out of any problem.” It was meant as a calming encouragement in the face of future challenges. As in: Yes, we will invariably encounter setbacks and surprises, but if we think clearly, creatively, and objectively, we can always engineer a way out. I remember scribbling down the quote within my conference notebook.

Alas, I no longer agree.

Years later, when this same megachurch imploded in scandal and the inevitable coverup, it became clear just how wrong the maxim was. Some the most destructive fallout—overlooking impropriety, silencing victims, subbing NDAs for repentance—came from leaders trying desperately to “think their way out” of sin rather than coming clean, holding accountable, and taking the next difficult but faithful step.

The logic of PR firm won out over the ethos of the Kingdom. Gnosis (“knowledge”) over halakha. Cunning over wisdom.

Here then is the way I see it now: You can think your way into sin, but you can’t think your way out of it.

As the saying from AA goes, “Remember, your best thinking landed you here.”

Israel doesn’t think her way out of slavery. Lazarus doesn’t think his way from the tomb. And Paul most certainly doesn’t think his way out of persecuting Christians and into apostleship. In all cases, God intervened; then his people had the choice of whether they’d start walking or stay put.

None of that diminishes the importance of clear, well-ordered, rigorous thought, which can be the midwife and the handmaid to obedience.

But it does mean this: You can reason well or poorly, but neither is sufficient for the “good” that God requires: To do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God.

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What is walking?

What is walking?

“The world reveals itself to those who walk.” So said Werner Herzog.

I’m flying back now from Budapest, where I had the privilege to speak to a group of European church leaders. I was lucky enough to bring my eldest daughter with me. And we had two days prior to the conference to explore one of Europe’s great cities. (It’s been special and I’m grateful for the invitation.)

In Budapest, we walked a lot.

As always, I conceived of things while moving slowly on foot that would not have pressed themselves upon me otherwise. Like: Hmm…, Hungarians are thinner. I bet it’s partly the walking.

Then this gem from L. M. Sacasas hit my inbox (here).

Sacasas writes thoughtfully on the crossroads of technology and culture on his Substack, The Convivial Society. (You should subscribe to it.) In his words,

“To walk, then, is to inhabit a fitting scale and speed. It is the scale and speed at which our bodies are able to find their fit in the world, and the world rewards us by spurring our thinking and disclosing itself to us.”

I’m pondering that wisdom as I lament the fact that my next book (or rather, books) don’t seem to be revealing themselves as readily as prior ones. Reasons are numerous. I have more jobs and “hats” than five or ten years ago. More kids. More soccer games. More emails and calendar invites. But I wonder if it isn’t also that I’m just not walking and thinking enough to have worthwhile things to say. (I suspect most preachers and teachers can relate to that.)

Sacasas wonders if the reason walking and writing pair so well is that both require a kind of deliberate slowness. Because, “Past a certain speed, we simply cannot perceive the world in depth.”

Both writing and walking . . . seem to calibrate the tempo of our minds to the rhythm of thought.

Yes, cars and jets and computers and smartphones are useful—I’m boarding a transatlantic flight in a few minutes and typing on my MacBook. But as always with technology, there is a cost to our sedentary connectivity.

Namely, “the tool we think enhances our capacity may also diminish it” (…a note to all incautious evangelists for the gospel of AI).

To this end, Sacasas then quotes Rebecca Solnit, who observes,

The mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour. If this is so, then modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought.

Of course, not all sidewalks are created equal—the trash-strewn footpath by the Casey’s is not the Danube promenade by the Hungarian Parliament. Nor are all motives for our ambulation equally transformative. The tourist and the pilgrim differ in subtle and important ways. As Sacasas puts it,

The tourist bends the place to the shape of the self while the pilgrim is bent to the shape of the journey.

Those differences aside, mt overarching takeaway—and one I hope to embody more this summer—is as follows:

There is a scale of activity and experience appropriate to the human animal and things tend to go well for us when we mind it.

I’d say more, of course, but it’s time to strap myself to a metal tube that moves around 500 mph. No time for irony (or editing).

But here’s to more walking when the jet-lag wears off.

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