The Only Thing
discernment and befriending in uncertain times • a bonus essay
Greetings, fellow wayfarers!
Lately, there’s a couple of words that keep tumbling around in my mind, refining how I think about purpose, living well, and becoming ourselves. They’ve become especially insistent the last few months, as I keep sensing this low-grade anxiety humming beneath contemporary life right now. Not panic exactly, but something more pervasive and persistent. We sense the ground shifting beneath our feet, and nobody quite knows where to step. Yet rather than sitting with that uncertainty, we are bombarded with takes. Sometimes, we’re the ones bombarding everyone else with takes. Every platform, every pundit, every algorithm has a confident explanation for what’s happening and what comes next, each one more bold, more loud, and more certain than the last.
Most of us are just wondering: WHAT is going on?1
The In-Between
This uncertainty isn’t accidental. In almost every area of life, the structures and stories that got us here are revealing their limits, their brittleness and insufficiency to handle the very change they made possible. The promise of connection without the substance of it. Institutions that look solid until they don’t. Leaders who appear strong but foment chaos. A realization that the old maps no longer match the territory. The pace of change outruns our ability to process it, to make sense of what we see and experience.
There’s a word for this kind of transitional moment: liminal. From the Latin limen — threshold. It describes the disorienting in-between space when what was is clearly ending, and what comes next hasn’t taken shape yet. It’s not crisis exactly, though it can feel like one. It’s more like standing in a doorway, unable to go back, unable to see clearly forward.
Transitional experiences all follow the same three stages: a separation and an ending; disorientation and the liminal; and, re-formation into new identities and structures. We’ve been experiencing the ending of a lot of things, and we’re trying to find an answer to the question that last stage raises: who or what are we becoming? With all the voices shouting ideas into the mic, so to speak, no one’s ideas are truly leading (or rather, the worst ones are).
Because there’s no clear, coherent, compelling vision, we’re traveling this liminal ground in desperation, following some back toward the known past, and others toward the unknown future. But in both cases, we’re in a posture of resistance: we do not like it here, we do not want it, and we cannot be done with it soon enough. We miss both what we’ve lost and what isn’t yet real or true. We miss what felt like control over our lives, a control we owe to the familiar, the routine, the predictable. When that routine becomes irreparably disrupted, we experience confusion, frustration, impatience. Especially, we experience grief.
The bigger the change, the greater the loss.
Normally, something absorbs some of the shock: a community, a tradition, a trusted voice that helps pace what we’re experiencing. But right now, those buffers are either gone or disintegrating. We’re absorbing the loss in real time, making sense of it alone, and trying to envision a way forward without much guidance. That’s an enormous amount to carry.
Living without closure or resolution starts to feel without purpose. We want out.
This is where we are right now, personally and collectively. And it raises the question: what does it take to navigate a moment like this well?
Most of the answers are just more of what got us here: faster tools, louder voices, more boldly asserted takes. But I think this moment is inviting us to something quieter and more demanding.
We’re being invited to discernment.
About the First Word
We use the word “discernment” a lot, but rarely in its fullest sense. It’s come to be a sophisticated synonym for choosing well, a kind of careful, unbiased decision-making available to anyone willing and able to think clearly enough. We use it to describe the ability to see people, situations, or problems without distortion, to cut through the noise and arrive at the right answer through careful reasoning.
But that’s not quite it.
Discernment isn’t primarily about decision-making. It isn’t grounded first in logical analysis or rational discussion, and it doesn’t assume that we have the capacity to understand and solve every problem if we just think carefully enough. That version of discernment is really just optimized thinking. And optimized thinking falls prey to the same limits, blindspots, and noise that got us confused in the first place.
When we feel uncertain, we instinctively want to meet ambiguity with a decision, A Plan. We rush to convert the discomfort of not knowing into the relief of clear outcomes and concrete actions. The desire for control isn’t wrong. But here’s the thing: a plan for outcomes assumes we already know what we’re dealing with. In a liminal moment, that’s precisely what we don’t know. Much of the noise we’re hearing is really the sound of that frantic attempt to resolve uncertainty through confidence, control, and motion.
The last few months of my life have been a slow reckoning with such frantic attempts. I recently wrote about how my own productivity systems broke open just how tightly I clung to the illusion of control: control over process, control over outcome. The more I wanted a specific result, the more I tried to engineer every aspect of my day and effort to gain it. The same pattern kept showing up in every area of my life: lock it up, lock it down. If that doesn’t work, try harder.
Over time, without realizing it, I’d become someone I didn’t recognize. Someone whose every action arose out of anxiety and fear, for whom the idea of genuine rest sent me into a spiral of panic. I could not trust that I was trustworthy if I wasn’t proving it to myself every minute of every day. Eventually my body began to break down in ways I couldn’t ignore or engineer my way out of. There was no try left.
Noise and Signal
I heard artist Scott Erickson say on a podcast that whenever he’s in a dark period, he asks of himself and of God: “What’s the only thing I can learn by being here?”
I’ve come to think that this is the question we’ve all been avoiding, that we must begin to grapple with if we’re going to make any real changes in life, in society, in the world.
Because this question invites me to listen to what my life is telling me, to notice what God is calling me to pay attention to. Old things have passed away; new things are coming. But the dying and the arriving are incomplete and not yet, and here feels like a boggy swamp. The question doesn’t get me out of the swamp any faster. But it reorients me toward something other than my frantic efforts at control.
The word “discernment” itself points somewhere different. Discernment comes from the Latin discernere — to separate, to distinguish. In the Christian tradition, it has a long history in the spiritual life of both communities and individuals. The goal of discernment is, first and foremost, to learn to see the work of the divine in the world, to separate the signal of God’s movement from the noise of human activity.
Discernment implies hiddenness, something undisclosed or yet to be revealed. It hints at insights we can uncover, names we can bestow or receive. These days, we experience what can only be called an “information surplus,” and bemoan what feels like an insufficient quantity of attention to adequately filter and select what we need. But attention is not a quantity; it’s not a resource we can spend or save. Attention is meeting, it is revelation, it is an encounter with the reality before us. Attention is the prelude to discernment.
What discernment requires, before anything else, is not better thinking. It’s deeper listening. Attending. Noticing.
Noticing requires a name, because to name something is to enter into relationship with it. Naming, like noticing, is not a one-time act but a sustained one, a repeated return, because to use a name requires memory, connection, attention over time. We find it hard to love what we cannot name. And what we do not love, we will not tend.
About the Second Word
Befriending enacts what naming requires: curiosity and care unfolding over time. But it also suggests something about posture: a turning away from aggression and toward relationship. For a long time, I have treated my body as a problem to be solved, an enemy to be vanquished. As it started breaking down faster, all I knew to do was try harder, which just made everything worse. Befriending became the only alternative left to me. Not fixing, not forcing, but learning to listen to, to notice what my body was actually telling me. Befriending invites me to actually inhabit my body.
To inhabit is to be where you are, to be nowhere, nowhen else but here. Inhabiting my body means recognizing that I can only meet the world through my limits, my finitude. Finitude isn’t a problem to overcome; it’s the shape of a human life. Befriending finitude means learning to work with those limits rather than against them, to let them tell you something true about who you are and what you’re for. Befriending is the recognition that many things in life don’t need try. They need rest.
Rest is not a cessation of activity, but a relinquishing of the attempt to control. Discernment helps us notice the difference.
Tending the Signal
God knows the world feels more chaotic and uncertain all the time. Every day comes with a demand to notice, to care, to act on what’s happening out there. And of course, to observe is to feel a reflexive compassion for another human being’s plight, a desire to do something that helps.
But we inhabit here.
To befriend, to tend, to care within our limits means to take responsibility for our part in the relationship of what we have noticed and named. As Sarah Hinlicky Wilson so beautifully states: “everything real and everything that heals is personal and local.”
If we cannot or will not be in relationship with what we have noticed, we are free to turn our attention to what we can name and befriend. We gain this freedom through discernment. Discernment is more than a practice of self-knowledge or choosing well. To discern is to notice where God is already at work — in the world, in others, in the texture of our own lives. It’s coming awake to the persons we are, and to who we’re designed to become. Befriending our limits, our finitude isn’t resignation, but rather, preparation. We tend what we love. We participate in what we name. And we can only name when we’ve learned to be still enough, present enough, to notice.
And only then, we act.
Let’s be hopeful, creative, and wise—together.
Shalom,
This essay is in conversation with the following:
Our Unforming: De-Westernizing Spiritual Formation by Cindy S. Lee
How to Lead When You Don’t Know Where You’re Going: Leading in a Liminal Season by Susan Beaumont
Note to Self: Creating Your Guide to a More Spiritual Life by Charles LaFond
The Enneagram of Discernment: The Way of Wisdom, Vocation, and Practice by Drew Moser
Becoming by Beholding: The Power of the Imagination in Spiritual Formation by Lanta Davis
Worth Doing: Fallenness, Finitude, and Work in the Real World by W. Davis Buschart and Ryan Tafilowski
“If Your Attention Isn’t a Resource, What is It?“ by P.J. Anderson
“When Attention is the Coin of the Realm,” by Sarah Hinlicky Wilson.
→ This song kept me company: Sound and Color by Alabama Shakes.
