10 minute read
Shauna Niequist: We’re Never Finished Learning New Things
Shauna
NIEQUIST
Living Lightly in the Middle of Chaos, Loss, and Grief
by Laura Neutzling
When you’re in the throes of a crisis, it can be life changing, mind altering, and all together transforming. When something shatters life as you know it, it can challenge everything you think you know about yourself. It can bring you to your knees when you realize how little you know at all. Shauna Niequist knows what that feels like.
And as traumatic events invariably do when they barrel into the worlds we’ve carefully curated, Shauna found hers coming down around her in pieces. Surrounded by rubble, she struggled to understand who she was and who she would be when she emerged—if she ever did.
A lifelong Midwesterner, Shauna was born and raised in a little town outside Chicago where her children would eventually be born, attending the same schools she did as a little girl. She was part of a vibrant church her parents founded, where her husband Aaron was also a music minister.
Starting her writing career as a popular Christian blogger, Shauna wrote books that turned into New York Times bestsellers, which turned into to highly attended speaking gigs, an appearance with Oprah, and a top-charting podcast. Little by little, Shauna created a place for herself among a growing community of women who looked to her as a warm friend who always had an extra chair at the table, who always knew what to say, who had also experienced the everyday realities of being a Christian, a mom and wife, a daughter and friend.
Shauna never thought one day she’d leave what she’d always known. It took her years to realize the life she and Aaron had built together, enmeshed with their family and lifelong friends in the place they grew up, wasn’t exactly what he wanted too.
“My husband would ask, ’Is this the year for an adventure?’ And I thought he meant a trip, but what he meant was, ’I don’t want to live in our hometown forever. I don’t want to work at the church where we’ve been our whole lives. I want to live a different way. I want our life to feel like an adventure.’ I didn’t listen very well, and I think what it came down to is I couldn’t imagine that we wanted such different things. I thought everybody wanted what I wanted.”
Together they began to dream what their next chapter might look like. Aaron left his job at their church. They flew to other cities, visited other churches. They slowly dipped their toes into the waters of change, when all of a sudden, they found themselves submerged in it.
“Just when Aaron and I had made a tentative, fledgling step into a new way of living, in our
Shauna’s Little Ways to Live Lightly
WALKING
WRITING
CONNECTION
marriage and in our town, something truly terrible exploded into our lives, and at the center of it was my dad and our church. While it’s not my story to tell, it completely shattered me,” she writes in her new book I Guess I Haven’t Learned That Yet. “I didn’t know how to talk about it, and mostly I still don’t.”
As Shauna started to peek out from under the rubble, opening her eyes to the reality that now lay in front of her, she began to see things shifting—the
ties to their church diminishing, their community and relationships changing—and the idyllic hometown experience she had clung to didn’t hold the same charm. “So we began the process,” Shauna recalls, “and it felt very like Goldilocks, like, This is too big. This is too little. This isn’t us. We never expected the place that would ultimately become our home would be New York City, but when we tapped on every little door in the course of moving here, they opened. We felt like there was a lot of energy and direction—like God’s graciousness was very apparent—and it felt like the path was emerging before every step.”
This isn’t about failing. This is about being new. This is about being a learner. This is about being a beginner in a new place. And it’s a wonderful thing.
Though Shauna could see the location change was exactly what she and her family were supposed to take on, it's had its diffi cult moments. Adjusting to a larger city with new ways of doing things made the Niequists feel like they were falling behind, and Shauna noticed her kids began to chastise themselves because everything felt so hard. “This isn’t about failing. This is about being new,” she told her children. “This is about being a learner. This is about being a beginner in a new place. And it’s a wonderful thing.” Instead of saying, “I made a mistake” or, “I got it wrong,” or, “I can’t fi gure it out,” she reframed these experiences for herself and her family as “things we haven’t learned yet” to help them give grace to themselves in those moments. “I put the phrase on our wall and I said, ’At the end of each day, all four of us are going to report one time we had to say that to ourselves.’’ I wanted our kids to know it wasn’t just them. Aaron and I were as confused and exhausted as they were. There were so many new things to learn, so we tried to build this idea that being new is good and starting again is good. It’s okay to be a rookie, and it’s okay to need help.” Shauna’s found this way of thinking is bringing health and healing to their days. She now advocates a premise of “living lightly,” which enables her to free herself from the weight of how things used to be and sets her up to be more present where she i s now. “Living lightly is letting go of a lot of things from the past that you’ve been hanging onto that don’t serve you well anymore: anger, unforgiveness, guilt about something that you can’t fi x. There’s a way of living lightly that I think applies to our stuff , to our assumptions, but also to our relationships. And that’s been a very life-giving idea for me.”
Adapted for print from an upcoming interview on the Jesus Calling Podcast. Put your phone in Camera mode and hover over this code to hear more of Shauna’s story on April 14!
Shauna’s new book, I Guess I Haven’t Learned That Yet, is available at your favorite book retailer April 12. You can fi nd her Present Over Perfect Guided Journal in stores now.
Try Your Hand at Journaling!
LEARN TO BE A BEGINNER AGAIN
1. Have you ever had a season when your tools and tricks to get through life—or even some of the hats you wore—didn’t work or fi t anymore? What did you have to let go of?
2. How do you feel about being a beginner? Does it fi ll you with excitement, or a little bit of dread? Why do you think that is?
3. Does the motto “I guess I haven’t learned that yet” take some pressure off and help you try new things? Why or why not?
Wayne Francis
Opening Our Hearts to All of God’s Children
by Wayne Francis and John Siebeling
Wayne Francis and John Seibling pastor two campuses of the raciallydiverse Life Church–Wayne in New York and John in Memphis. When they each launched a sermon series in February 2020 on open-hearted conversations about race, they didn’t foresee how needed their topic would be. When national conversations began to mirror their own months later, Wayne and John felt called to write a book to help other Christians navigate similar conversations with their own family and friends. The pastors sat down with The Jesus Calling Magazine to talk more about the ideas in their new book, God and Race.
John Siebeling
What was your biblical grounding and inspiration for tackling conversations on race?
John: Earth is a place to practice what heaven’s going to be like. On the day of Pentecost when the church was born, there were people from every nation in Jerusalem. Diversity is in our DNA as believers. There’s a longing for it.
Wayne: The true heart of our churches here in America is a place where everybody can be represented, and where everybody who comes from diff erent backgrounds and ethnicities can fi nd the gospel that sets us free. We like to say that diversity isn’t reserved for heaven. It’s a requirement on Earth. We’re trying to motivate leaders and laypeople to create contexts for that to happen within the church.
How do you guide people from different backgrounds and views to engage in productive conversations with each other?
John: Listen to each other. We have to deeply listen to what the other person is saying. We need to learn from them, and then we need to fi nd ways to laugh together.
What can people do to learn more about their fellow brothers and sisters in Christ who might be from a different culture?
Wayne: Now’s a great time for us to press into diversity. If you’re white, this is a great time for you to maybe watch a new documentary on Netfl ix with your family, or plan a trip to a museum to learn a little bit more about African-American history. And if you’re Black, try inviting a person who’s white into your context and give them an opportunity to ask some questions in a personal way—like trying great cultural foods together, for instance. All of us need to open up our worlds to each other.
Adapted for print from the Jesus Calling Podcast. Put your phone in Camera mode and hover over this code to hear more of Wayne & John’s story!
You can fi nd Wayne and John’s book God and Race at your favorite book retailer today.
