Resilience

Review: What Grows in Weary Lands

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Cover image of "What Grows in Weary Lands" by Tish Harrison Warren

What Grows in Weary Lands

What Grows in Weary Lands, Tish Harrison Warren. Convergent Books (ISBN: 9780593728840) 2026.

Summary: Lessons for the weary from the desert fathers and mothers on practices that cultivate resilience and renewal.

One of the hard things I’ve seen in my Christian journey are others with whom I travelled give up, often in mid-life. While some have been because of “church hurt,” others are just tired. The demands of life combined with their own waning energies are part of it. Another part is that the faith of their twenties isn’t working anymore. The God who once seemed so real is distant. Some, out of habit, keep showing up, perhaps with a faint glimmer of hope that something will break through. Others just walk away. Sunday brunch is so much more inviting.

To look at her from the outside, Tish Harrison Warren was the model of the vibrant Christian. A gifted writer, she had reached the rarefied air of writing a weekly op-ed for The New York Times after a string of well-received books and articles. She was also an Anglican priest, who had returned to her home town of Austin, and the mom of three children. But her life mirrored that of many in mid-life: in the “sandwich,” harried, distracted. In reality, she felt like she was in a desert–weary and parched.

In this book, she describes turning to a weird bunch of saints from 1700 years ago, the desert fathers and mothers, the progenitors of monasticism. Yes, they did some strange things lie sit on pillars. But they also understood that the desert is part of the spiritual journey. They named the condition and the tendencies to “flame out” or “numb out.” Instead, they wrestled what it meant to go on with God through the desert times.

After this introduction, Warren, in a series of pithily titled chapters reflects upon and passes along their wisdom. “Stay in Your Cell” focuses on the temptation of acedia, to flee to ease or new distractions, and the wisdom of stability, of staying true to one’s people and one’s spiritual practices. We meet John of the Cross, who learns to set aside the longing for feeling or insight to simply be with God in his cell, even when there is no sense of his presence. “Pledge Your Body to the Walls” draws on Benedicts insights about gyrovagues who moved from one monastery to another. Warren explores all the ways we are gyrovagues from relentless moves to church switches and the challenge of letting our roots sink deep in a place.

“Wait in the Womb” explores how stability that waits and perseveres becomes a place where God develops and transforms us. She quotes C.S. Lewis’s counsel to ” ‘continue seeking with cheerful seriousness,’ knowing that unless God ‘wanted you, you would not be wanting Him.’ ” Then, “Relax the Bow” draws on a story of Antony with a hunter, asking him to draw a bow more and more until the hunter protests that it will snap. So it is, Antony says with God’s work. Warren writes about learning the gift of days of delight and sabbath and the grace of confession as ways to relax the bow. Likewise, “Let the Silt Settle” invites us to silence and solitude.

Throughout the book, Warren is both hopeful and yet honest. There are no quick fixes or shortcuts out of the desert. This is a book about going through desert lands, about how to keep going, cultivating resilience. “Brace the Wall” addresses the realities of doubt and disorientation in our desert journeys. We have questions and don’t see clearly the way forward. And sometimes we doubt that God can be trusted. She writes of working through the Psalms and how “yelling at God about our anger, our doubt, and our complaints is perhaps one of the most faithful moves we can make.”

Finally, “All Smoke, All Flame” speaks to “the culmination of Christian resilience.” The title comes from the counsel of Abba Joseph to Abba Lot, who recites his practices and asks “what else can I do?” Abba Joseph “stretched his hands toward heaven. His fingers became like ten lamps of fire and he said to him, ‘If you will, you can become all flame.” We cannot force fire by our efforts, which are just smoke. But by grace through our stumbling practices of faithfulness, we slowly progress. And one day God will set us ablaze in glory.

There is a lot of wisdom as well as earthy humor in Warren’s rich prose. The gist of it all is to not give up, flaming out or numbing out. It is not to chase after spiritual quick fixes. It is to stay put and keep going deeper in the inexhaustible world of prayer and scripture, of sacrament and community. I’m past those perilous middle years. But Warren speaks to my senior years as well. It’s so easy to settle in. I need her call to persevere all the more. And, I’m compelled by the vision to become all flame. By grace, may it be so!

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Review: When Work Hurts

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Cover image of "When Work Hurts" by Meryl Herr

When Work Hurts, Meryl Herr. InterVarsity Press (ISBN: 9781514010242) 2025.

Summary: Moving through workplace disappointments and finding healing and hope through Israel’s journey of exile and return.

I’ve reviewed a number of books on vocation and finding work you love. But this is the first book I’ve read to address the uncomfortable reality of when work hurts. Yet for many, their glowing hopes of fulfilling work have ended in disillusionment. You are part of a “reduction in force.” It could be the boss who unpredictably flies off the handle in temper tantrums. Or it can be toxic relations in a work team. Then there are the terrible instances of verbal, physical, or even sexual abuse in the workplace. Finally, in situations stressing productivity over the value of people, relentless hours and stress can result in burnout.

Meryl Herr has experienced many of these in her own work career. In her research as a former director at the Max De Pree Center for Leadership, she has heard many other stories of workplace hurt. In When Work Hurts she names the different wounds people bear from workplace experiences, including the guilt one may feel as a consequence. But she also explores how we might hope again and reclaim a sense of God’s purpose within one’s work. She does this not only through honest discussions of devastating work experiences. She also parallels that devastation with the experience of Israel as Jerusalem is devastated, they are deported to Babylon, make a new life there, and in a later generation return and rebuild. And she follows this story stage by stage throughout the book. and through that, she explores how we can cultivate resilience and hope as we heal.

Herr begins with the devastation of layoffs and firings, when the walls come crumbling down. She explores the experience of displacement, a kind of exile, when one loses a job or is estranged in relationships. Then there is the darkness of disillusionment, the dark nights of the soul when it is unclear what’s next. Herr discusses the everyday faithfulness that seeks peace and the prospering of those around one during such times.

Disillusioned workers often wonder about God’s calling in this “in between” place of displacement. She explores the opportunity this affords to pay attention to God, community, ourselves, and the world around us. Thus, Israel heard God’s call to return when God raised up Cyrus. Then she gets real practical in terms of staying on task in our job search, not unlike the exiles who needed exhorting by Haggai to redouble their efforts in rebuilding God’s house. Part of moving through work hurt is making sense of it all through seeing a bigger picture. This includes job crafting, seeing one’s calling within work, and seeing one’s work within God’s redemptive story.

Yet sometimes, workplaces may still be toxic or exploitative. Herr likens this to the ways Israel was opposed as they rebuilt Jerusalem and how they both prayed and armed themselves. In the workplace, this doesn’t mean physical battle but spiritual armor to stand, act with courage and care, pursuing peace where possible and discerning when one must leave. And sometimes, we cause workplace hurt and must own it.

Through it all, Herr challenges us to remember hope through remembering God’s faithfulness to us and God’s promises in scripture. She also bids us to remember the new Jerusalem, where we will work with unending joy.

Each chapter includes real life stories of both disappointment and how people pressed through to hope. Each chapter also concludes with a “Work Hurt Clinic” helping the reader or groups reflect on their own experiences in light of the chapter. They identify symptoms, causes, pain, and ways to experience care.

This book is a welcome addition to the collection of marketplace books. Where others touch on workplace hurt, Herr looks it in the eye, naming all the forms it can take. Furthermore, Herr shows the way of cultivating resilience, not by pulling oneself up by one’s own bootstraps. Rather, she treats workplace hurt as a call to ground ourselves more deeply in “exile faith” and in the God who “makes a way out of no way.”

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Growing Up in Working Class Youngstown — New Year’s Grit

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One of the more interesting books I’ve read in recent years is Angela Duckworth’s Grit. The book explores how grit is a combination of purposeful passion and perseverance. As I read the book, I thought about how much I learned about grit by growing up in Youngstown. I think about how many of those winter snowstorms we dug out of–and then went to school. We hardly ever had snow days. We watched our parents go to work, often to hard, physical, and sometimes dangerous jobs. We had parents who struggled through the Depression. And many of us had to reinvent ourselves when the big employers pulled out of the city. Some of the city’s sports heroes are football players like Frank Sinkwich or boxers like Ray “Boom-Boom” Mancini. If you were knocked down, you got up. Or you knocked the other guy down first. Grit.

We’ve faced a hard couple of years. Youngstowners don’t sugarcoat things. We buried people we love. We got sick and recovered. We saw businesses struggle. But if we are reading this, we survived (and hopefully will, to the end of this thing). That’s no small thing. As I think of the year ahead, this seems to be a time for Youngstown-strong grit–even as we have lived with grit through the pandemic.

I saw a story yesterday on WKBN’s website about the Westside Bowl and the couple who have turned it into a popular entertainment venue. It exemplifies Youngstown grit. The old Gran Lanes was our favorite spot on the West side for bowling. Then it sat vacant for years. A West side couple, Nathan and Jami Offerdahl had a dream, then spent three years between 2015 and 2018 working out a business plan. They opened with a small downstairs venue for 200, then took out half the lanes, created a larger upstairs venue, kept half the alleys, and served good pizza and booze. When COVID hit, they came up with a “pay it forward” pizza promotion that allowed them to pay the bills.

Grit is disciplined passion. It is just plain hard work from planning a business to renovating a venue. It perseveres during down times. It keeps finding a new way to do things. And grit sticks to its values. The Offerdahls created an intimate, artsy venue that bands love and refuse to tear out additional lanes to make the upstairs venue larger. (From the Gallery pictures, it really looks like a great concert venue.)

Rather than resolutions, which I don’t think Youngstowners are big on, I wonder if this is a good year to get on our Youngstown grit. That doesn’t mean being mean and nasty or hard-hearted. I think the ICU personnel caring for our sickest are among the grittiest people we will encounter. They are tired but they keep showing up, shift after shift. Grit can mean caring for an aging loved one–Youngstowners take care of family.

Maybe this is the year you decide to pursue a passion you’ve long thought about, like the Offerdahls. Surviving a pandemic can have a wonderfully focusing effect. It could be giving yourself to volunteer work that makes some part of the world a little better place. Maybe it is pursuing a business or creative venture. And think how good it will be to persevere in developing a skill or launching a new venture when you’ve had all that practice in persevering with social distancing, quarantines, masks, and the like!

Gritty people know how to celebrate. Their celebrations aren’t empty celebrations just to have fun. From weddings to wakes, we knew how to celebrate, enjoying the fruits of work, the efforts of raising kids, and the preciousness of life and family. No wonder we insist on good food and plenty of it at our gatherings!

I’ve written so much in this series about the gritty people who built Youngstown from the early settlers to the laborers, the civic and cultural leaders, and the builders of industries, and even some of the great buildings of the city. Whether we still live in the Valley or make our homes elsewhere, this is a time for grit and resilience.

I look forward to sharing more stories of Youngstown and the character and grit that shaped our city. I wish you a Happy and “Gritty” New Year!

To read other posts in the Growing Up in Working Class Youngstown series, just click “On Youngstown.” Enjoy!

Review: Daring Greatly

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Daring GreatlyI can’t seem to get away from Teddy Roosevelt! Brene’ Brown begins this book with a quote from a speech of his at the Sorbonne in 1910 in which he talks about the man in the arena being the one who counts and not his critics, the man who strives for great things at great cost. Her title is drawn from these words:

“…who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly….”

Brown describes her research into vulnerability as one that led her to a personal breakdown, which her therapist described as a spiritual renewal. She traces her research course, which began by exploring human connection and discovered in her interviews that the fear and shame of disconnection is what came up over and over again. She says she was hijacked by her data into researching shame, and the flip side of this, a shame resilience that enables people to overcome shame and live “wholeheartedly.” Wholeheartedness comes from a sense of one’s basic worthiness, cultivated through a variety of practices such as letting go of perfectionism, of numbing and powerlessness, of scarcity fears, of the need for certainty and more.

A key to wholehearted living that “dares greatly” that is at the core of this book is the embrace of vulnerability. Vulnerability requires courage and a willingness to press against all the “vulnerability myths” shared by both women and men. But it leads to compassion and connection, nowhere illustrated more than in Brown’s concluding chapter having to do with vulnerability and parenting. I found myself saying “Amen” and “Amen” and wishing that my peers in parenting could have heard this sooner and not inflicted so much pain on each other around being the perfect parent. Her stories of being imperfectly vulnerable with her children and allowing them to dare greatly, even if this just meant showing up, were worth the price of admission.

I found her insightful in the ways we shield ourselves from vulnerability through foreboding joy, where we do not allow ourselves joy because we are waiting for the other shoe to drop, through perfectionism, where we think that by doing things right we will never know shame, and through numbing, by which we deaden ourselves from the painful things in life. Instead, she advocates practicing gratitude in the moments of joy, appreciating the “cracks” in our life that shed light on our humanness, and learning how to feel and lean into our hard feelings while setting proper boundaries.

She also challenges organizations to “mind the gap” and practice “disruptive engagement”–developing awareness of the gaps between strategy and culture and the ways we discourage engagement through corporate shaming practices. Bringing the best that we have often involves vulnerability and risk in disruptively engaging broken corporate culture.

I found this a helpful book that was immediately applicable for me in several situations in which I was mentoring young leaders facing the choices of “safe” disengagement or vulnerably stepping into their work as leaders. Vulnerability is scary for all of us and yet ultimately the only path to real connection and real greatness. Brene’ Brown helps us on that path through her stories and research, even while helping us to see that each of us makes that path our own by walking into vulnerability.