Guidance for Confusing Times

When a relationship feels off, our first instinct is to study the other person. What did they mean by that? Why won`t they meet me halfway? What do they need to change?

But Dr. Alison Cook pointed us somewhere less obvious: the health of our relationships often traces back to how present we are to ourselves. When you actually know how you`re showing up, what you need, and what drains you: you stop handing people an impossible job. You stop asking a spouse or a friend to fill a hole only you can tend to.

Being with yourself isn`t self-absorption. It`s what makes you safe to be with.

We treat knowing God and knowing ourselves like two separate projects: one spiritual, one self-help. One holy, one a little indulgent.

But Dr. Alison Cook reminded us this isn`t a new idea, or a soft one. It runs straight through Augustine and Calvin: you cannot fully know God while staying a stranger to your own soul. The two are stitched together. When we sit with God honestly, we end up seeing ourselves more clearly. And the more honestly we know ourselves, the more room there is to actually meet him. Turning inward isn`t turning away from God, sometimes it`s the doorway to him.

What might you notice about yourself if you sat with God in the quiet this week?

There`s a kind of loneliness that geography can`t fix. You can be in a full room, a good marriage, a real community—and still feel unreachably alone.

In our conversation with Dr. Alison Cook, she kept returning to one quiet truth: even in the places inside us that feel most unseen, we are not actually alone there. This is the promise of Psalm 139. Not that God waits for us to climb out of the dark and come find him, but that he`s already there—in the uttermost parts, on the days we can`t feel a thing. His hand is holding, even when we don`t notice the grip.

We spend so much energy trying to escape being alone. Fill the quiet. Text someone back. Turn on something in the background.

But Dr. Alison Cook told us the people who are most at home in their own company are usually the least lonely ones in the room. Not because they need people less—because they`ve done the inner work of being with themselves. They know how they show up. They know what they need. So they can be with others without asking anyone to be everything.

Solitude, it turns out, isn`t the opposite of connection. It might be the ground it grows from.

When you`re alone with yourself, no screen filling the silence: is it a place you can rest, or one you rush to leave?

We`ve made silence into a problem to solve. An awkward pause, dead air, a lull we rush to fill with a podcast, a text, a scroll. So we`ve nearly lost the thing Andy Crouch is describing: a space where nothing is being asked of us and nothing has to be said.

That`s exactly what a screen can`t give you. A device always offers communication and always demands a response. Real presence with another person, or with God doesn`t. It can just sit there with you, and be enough.

Try it this week. Fifteen minutes, no inputs, nothing to answer. See what shows up when you stop filling the quiet.

We can be tempted to measure your worth by what your mind produces: answers, output, tasks cleared. Andy Crouch points to something older and stranger: before your mind was ever useful, it was made to marvel. To behold the world you didn`t make and simply be amazed by it.

That`s the capacity most at risk right now in our technological age. Not our productivity, but our wonder: the ability to stand before something astonishing, or beautiful, or terrifying, with nothing to do about it but look.

Your wonder is worth protecting. Put down the thing that turns everything into a task, and let yourself be amazed.