I’m still writing the October essay—the month ran right over me. I’ve been living the material in a tumult: teaching, printing, marching, burning out, and starting again. Early in the month I built a collapsible poster-making cart for the No Kings Day protest and, instead of taking it to the larger protest, I wheeled it to the end of my driveway. What began as a quiet gesture turned into long, surprising conversations with neighbors as we made signs together—people who shared their worries and hopes in the cool October air.

I kept trying to finish my readings beyond the Book of Luke—Merton, Wiman—but the month itself became the main text. I’m pulling some key essays from both that I found helpful and moving with the swift current pulling me forward. So consider this a shorter dispatch from the field, written after the ink dried and the noise settled. The larger essay is coming, but for now, here’s where my head and heart have been.

What has stayed with me from October weren’t the things I posted, but the ones I couldn’t. The driveway, the laughter, the neighbors talking for the first time—those moments were the real work. They reminded me that vocation isn’t a job description or a brand. It’s what happens when my freedom meets God’s. Merton says that’s how we become fully ourselves, and I believe him.

I didn’t think my vocation into being; it’s been forged through years of showing up and doing the work placed in front of me with the gifts God gave me. What I’m wrestling with now isn’t how to find it, but how to live it in a world that demands everything be turned into content—consumable, forgettable, and flat. There were moments this month that would have made great posts, and I’m grateful I didn’t capture them. They were sacred precisely because they stayed off camera. The wrong turns, the plans that fell apart, the things that never made it to Instagram—those were the places where love showed up. The work that matters isn’t prominent; it’s hidden, and that hiddenness feels holy to me right now.

Wiman calls that kind of transformation grace that works backward. You don’t see it in real time; it reveals itself later, after the noise dies down. That’s how I see October now—the exhaustion, the conversation I didn’t want to have, even the moments that felt like failure. They were grace in progress.

Faith, as Wiman puts it, isn’t a mood; it’s action. And that’s what I saw at the end of my driveway, in the workshops I held, in the interactions with people who worked with the tools I built last month, in the faces of the people I met. It was love practiced in the ruins (as Wiman says) and you just had to be there.

I’ll be finishing up my full essay soon and sending the longer story of October in the coming days. Then I’ll weave my way into November, which has already been full. The creative pilgrimage is changing how I look at things—how I consume texts, face my daily tasks, and live my faith practice. Putting all of it together within a framework of faith is transforming how I move through my days. I’m so grateful.

God bless you and keep you. I’ll be in touch

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