Walk It Out
Hannah Brencher
7 min read ⭑
My earliest memories of my mother are of her sitting in the same spot at the kitchen table every morning. A cup of coffee would be beside her, and her leather Bible laid open. I can still picture her sitting there — the sun pouring through the kitchen window and flooding into the small dining area where she’d be scribbling into a plain one-subject notebook she bought for ninety-nine cents at Walgreens.
Years later, I would find out she was copying the Bible during all those mornings. Word for word, letting the text seep deeply into her mind as she wrote it all down. She’d fill a notebook and then throw it out. The part of me that has never thrown out a notebook cannot fathom this. But she would say the notebook served its purpose, and it was time to get another. If she’d bothered to keep the notebooks, she’d have well into the hundreds by now.
When I was a child, I watched her morning rhythm curiously. When I was a teenager, I eyed her rhythm skeptically. I didn’t understand God, but I was pretty positive I wasn’t interested in getting closer. I’d always felt like an outsider when it came to matters of faith. But I also grappled with a sense of longing within me — a great hoping — that my life wasn’t an accident. My mom’s mornings at the table always made me wonder, What kind of God is she meeting with? How good can he actually be? And what keeps her coming back there again and again?
A few months ago, I met up with a friend at his office, which resembles a nicely furnished fishbowl — with glass walls enclosing us on all sides. Anyone could look in and watch.
My friend works in the publishing industry, and we discussed the books I hoped to write in the future. He asked me what legacy I wanted to forge through my writing. What did I hope people would say about me over the next fifteen years? I was surprised at how quickly the answer came to me as if I had been waiting for someone to ask me that question for a long time.
“I just hope people say I was the real deal,” I answered. “More than anything, I want to be the real deal.”
Tears unexpectedly filled my eyes. I can’t tell you the number of things that had to shift around in my heart over the years to get me to this answer. I’ve spent years of my life being consumed by whether people liked me. Approval was my highest motivation for so long. Before starting the unplugged hours, I could see a direct correlation between how much time I spent online and how it affected other parts of my life. There was a disconnect between the life I wanted to be living and the life I was curating for others to see.
I’m convinced it’s never been easier than it is today to project a false life onto a screen for others to follow. Especially when it comes to matters of faith, you can convince everyone that you’re holding it together, that you’re rooted deep in something other than yourself, and that you’re doing just fine. If people don’t look too closely, you’ll pass without question.
Just last week, yet another pastor fell off the pedestal other humans had built for him. Building pedestals is nothing new. What’s new is how we’ve gotten into the habit of waiting for people to fall from the pedestals we’ve put them on and then turning against them the second they fail to meet our expectations. I get it. I’m disappointed too. But I’m also not surprised it keeps happening. It’s easy to get swept up into a performance.
The more we project our lives onto screens, the less we invest in what’s happening off-screen — the threads of our lives that matter. How we treat others. How we pray. If we pray. How we show up. How we speak to ourselves when no one is listening. How we wrestle with the challenges of this world. How we take this complicated, gritty faith thing and walk it out day by day.
People always say we are what we do when no one is watching, but who are we if we give others access to watch us at all times?
Our family walked through plenty of seasons in which I would have expected my mom to put the pen down and stop showing up at the table altogether. She didn’t, though. If anything, she doubled down.
I never asked her about her practice, but I knew I wanted what she had: something or someone good enough to revisit thousands of times, no matter the circumstances.
And so, when I was exhausted from trying to fill the crater-sized holes within me, the parts of me longing for more meaning and depth, I remembered her. The woman at the table. The woman who never forced her faith onto me, handing me something I wasn’t ready to hold. She never told me what I had to do or who I had to trust. She just walked out her faith — slowly, quietly, faithfully, consistently. Her daily life was, and is, evidence of decades spent at the table.
Today, my faith happens at the table, too, though it looks different than it used to. Sometimes the voice of Elmo introducing the letter of the day can be heard in the background. Sometimes a live performance of Encanto is happening off to the side of the table. But regardless of the chaos, I show up at the table as much as possible because I want my daughter to see me filling myself up. I want her to see me walking out the practice of faith because, at one point, I watched someone walk it out too — and it changed everything for me.
“We’re stumbling, sure, but we’re making it — one wobbly step at a time. Hold tight to the glimmers — they’re shining in plain sight. Hold tight to the glimmers and just keep walking.”
* * *
So what does it look like to really, truly walk out your faith?
I don’t have all the answers, but the more I power down, the more I find that walking it out is about investing far more energy into the practice than the preaching. It’s like that well-loved quote often attributed to St. Francis of Assisi: “Preach the gospel at all times, and if necessary use words.” Our faith — unspoken but lived out faithfully — may be the most powerful sermon we ever preach.
Walking it out means being willing to put ourselves rather than others under the microscope — to deeply examine how we think, pray, judge and love. It means having the courage to change and accepting new challenges of transformation all the time.
Walking it out looks like getting things wrong — a lot. That’s guaranteed. It means having people near enough to witness us getting it wrong and then love us back in the right direction rather than canceling us for being human.
Walking it out means continuing to show up and just keep walking. We take each day and do our best to move another step forward, and some days (read: a lot of days), we’ll wobble. We’ll fall short and still come back from it. No matter the number of falls, the goal stays the same: Just keep walking.
* * *
It’s the end of the day. Novalee and I are working through her bedtime routine. We brush her teeth and change her diaper. I switch on her night light. It’s a small ceramic lamp with little stars cut out of the base. Light pours through the little cut-out stars, projecting a faint, glowy night sky onto the walls of her bedroom.
I sit in the rocking chair, and she climbs into my arms and lays her head on my chest. We rock.
For a long time, I had gone through the motions of bedtime with her as quickly as I could. I was often impatient, tired after a long day. It wasn’t until I started leaving my phone downstairs that things shifted for us. We started taking more time together. We fought less. And my child, who never cuddled me before this new era, started asking to snuggle with me in the rocking chair.
Some nights we stay quiet together as I rock us back and forth. Other nights, we talk about everything she is planning for tomorrow. The things she will do. The dresses she will wear. I marvel at her — for me, tomorrow is a placeholder for my worries, but to her, tomorrow is only and always possibilities. Infinite possibilities.
Tonight, we sit in silence. I trace my fingers along the frilly edges of her princess nightgown. And I hear her little voice whisper into the darkness, “Wanna pray?”
I’ve talked to her about prayer in carpool lines and before meals. About how we can talk to God about our friends and family, and he’s listening. In a world where we often fight to be seen, he stands waiting like a gentleman with infinite patience—ready to offer us his full attention. Tonight, talking to God is her idea. So much of motherhood feels like wandering around in the dark, hoping you are doing something right. Moments like this one feel like faint flickers of “Yes, you are” in the midst of the wandering.
She doesn’t wait for me to answer her question. She starts rattling off a list of names as if she’d been holding them in her mind all day, waiting to release them: Pop-Pop. Abuela. Skipper.
“Who else? Who else?” she asks every couple of names. A phrase she’s mimicking from me.
Nana. Daddy. Uncle John-John.
She keeps whispering names into the darkness. I draw her in closer to my chest and tell myself the truth as we rock back and forth: Yes, we’re walking in the right direction. We’re stumbling, sure, but we’re making it — one wobbly step at a time. Hold tight to the glimmers — they’re shining in plain sight. Hold tight to the glimmers and just keep walking.
Hannah Brencher is a writer, TED speaker and entrepreneur. She founded The World Needs More Love Letters, a global community dedicated to sending letter bundles to those who need encouragement. Named as one of the White House’s “Women Working to Do Good,” Hannah has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Oprah, Glamour, USATODAY.com, the Chicago Tribune and more. She lives in Atlanta with her husband, Lane, and daughter Novalee.
Taken from “The Unplugged Hours” by Hannah Brencher. Copyright © 2024. Used by permission of Zondervan.
