Welcome to the 35 new subscribers who have joined this community of almost 750 readers in the past month and invited me into your inbox. Every month, in addition to at least one hyper-practical email, I share a list of ten things that were on my brain over the past thirty days that will now be on your brain too.

1. I walked over 100km with my dad on the Camino Portuguese to from Vigo to Santiago de Compostela, Spain. Walking is one of my favorite things to do (and probably the most common way I talk with God). For more on walking, check out “A Theology of Walking” from Substack writer Griffin Gooch.

2. Speaking of walking the camino, W. David O. Taylor’s new book To Set the World Aflame: How Artists Bear Witness to the Fullness of God’s Creation was one the books I read on the Camino and it paired well with my walk. I want to be a pastor who encourages the artists and creatives in my life. Give him a follow on Substack.

3. While we’re on the topic of art, I took my pen + watercolor stuff with me on the Camino after struggling to find time for it the past few months. I’m still new to this, but I’ve found a few YouTube channels helpful—in particular Stephen Travers Art and Sketching Scottie. My six-year-old daughter and I like to share drawings from our notebooks with each other.

4. I’ve been posting a bit more on my Instagram lately (@austingohn)—usually just one good thought each week (like a word to creatives and artists in my life after reading Taylor’s book and some comments from Jeremiah on why the way to the good life is ancient). Follow me there if you don’t already because I share things there that I don’t always share here.

5. My wife and I got to see Switchfoot for free, and they still rock. The Beautiful Letdown is still one of my favorite albums of all time, and it was the soundtrack of my youth group days in the early 2000s. To my Gen Z readers, do yourself a favor and go listen to it. (Also, if you’re one of my Gen Z readers, say hi in the comments - or whatever the kids say these days!)

6. I’m thinking about starting an annual teaching series at our church that addresses some specific issues in our cultural moment that keep coming up in pastoral conversations. To prepare for the first one of those series, I’ve started a deep dive into the topics of AI and sports gambling. On AI, I started with The Infinity Machine, and on sports gambling, I started with Everybody Loses. Both of those books told the story of how we got to where we are, which is so helpful for how I understand things.

7. While we’re on the topic of AI, a few pastor friends and I got to sit down with Brandon Rickabaugh when he was here in Pittsburgh a few weeks ago. He’s on Substack, and he’s one of the leading thinkers at the intersection of AI and spiritual formation. We asked questions for almost three hours until I said it’s my bedtime, but I’m still thinking about the pages of notes I took—especially what it means “to be the kind of person for whom AI is not a problem.”

8. As I’m trying to eat healthier, I’ve discovered the joy of pistachios (or as my youngest calls them “pa-tash-ee-ohs”) even if I don’t enjoy the price of pistachios. (Related: When my wife and I first got married, we had a bunch of gift cards to Bed, Bath, and Beyond. She told me that I could pick out anything I wanted, and all I left with was a bag of pistachios.)

9. After doing a “boy movie” list with my son this summer, I’m always on the lookout for other good films we can watch as my kids get older. On a recent flight, I watched Project Hail Mary and immediately added it to the list. I appreciate Brett McCracken’s review of it over at The Gospel Coalition, and he’s now on Substack. Give him a follow.

10. I’ve been getting to know Josh Caliguire one text and voice memo at a time. We first connected through Soul Care, then I found him on Substack—where he writes about friendship. Now, we’re “voice memo pals,”™ which is the millennial version of pen pals. (I told him to trademark it first, then I beat him to the punch as friends do.)

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- Austin Gohn

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If we’ve never met, I’m Austin Gohn—the author of A Restless Age about Saint Augustine and the five searches of young adulthood, the founder of Everyday Institute that makes it simple to accelerate discipleship every single day, and the lead pastor of Bellevue Christian Church that’s been making disciples since 1896.

My wife Julie, three kids, and I live in Pittsburgh, PA in a home we’re renovating one room at a time.

I write two emails a month on Substack—one piece of hyper-practical writing and one list. If you like my writing, share it with a friend and like or restack it on Substack.

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I’m surprised I’ve never done this before, but I went back through all my teaching notes and wrote down some lessons from teaching through Acts that I don’t want to forget. It brought some closure to the whole experience that I didn’t know I needed.

There are 28 chapters in Acts, so here’s 28 lessons for you:

1. Acts is meant to be experienced, not just exposited. Don’t make the mistake of preaching through the whole book without making room in your church or your life for the Holy Spirit to make the book come alive. Expository preaching of Acts, at its best, should lead to an experience of the book of Acts in the lives of listeners.

2. Speaking of experiencing Acts, ask yourself: What would a new believer expect after reading Acts for the first-time? If you’re not sure, I’ve always loved John Wimber’s story: “When are we going to do the stuff?”2

3. “Don’t be jealous, be inspired.” That’s something our AirBnB host told us once after we said that we were jealous of his house, and I think it applies to reading Acts as well.

4. I once spent a day following a missionary around, and it felt like I was walking through the book of Acts. If you feel like Acts is just church history that’s not for today, you probably haven’t spent much time with the global church at the missional frontier.

5. Mark Sayers once said in his podcast that, when it comes to the renewal of the church: “Your destiny is in your history.” If you’re looking for clues that have the potential to renew the modern church, make Acts a regular part of your personal reading plan and church teaching calendar.

6. If you’re open and humble, you will likely not finish reading Acts with the same pneumatology (theology of the Holy Spirit) as you started with. That’s true for both the cessationist and the charismatic.

7. “If the Holy Spirit were withdrawn from the church today, 95% of what we do would go and no one would know the difference. If the Holy Spirit had been withdrawn from the New Testament church, 95% of what they did would stop, and everybody would know the difference.” — A.W. Tozer

8. Acts isn’t about the church, it’s about Jesus. If the Gospel of Luke was about “all that Jesus began to do and teach until he was taken up” (Acts 1:1-2), Acts is about all that Jesus continued to do and teach when the Holy Spirit came down.

9. Never get tired of Acts 2:37-47. I believe it’s so central to teaching new believers how to follow Jesus into the lives they’re made for that I made two courses around it that we offer at our church and give away for free to other churches: DAY ONE + EVERYDAY HABITS.

10. If you think the early church is perfect, you clearly haven’t read past Acts 2. You’ll think otherwise once you get to Acts 5:1-11 or Acts 6:1-7. The Bible doesn’t ignore the mess of the early church, it includes it. Why? See what Bonhoeffer had to say next.

11. “Every human wish dream that is injected into the Christian community is a hindrance to genuine community and must be banished if genuine community is to survive. He who loves his dream of a community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial.” — Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together

12. Praying churches always become sending churches. If you start praying for the nations, don’t be surprised if you’re sending people to the nations. We sent a family out from our church in the middle of this series.

13. Church history is full of stories of legendary generosity—gospel patrons like Barnabas who made a gift that moved the mission of the church forward. I could tell so many stories from the past few years of people in our church who did that and every church has stories of legendary generosity.

14. Despite the critics, the church has always cared about church growth, but the early church grew without any of our modern, western church growth models. The early church grew by raising, not lowering, expectations. It grew by practicing, not distancing itself, from the weird stuff like “signs and wonders.” It grew by inviting, not ignoring, the marginalized. It grew by enduring, not avoiding resistance. It grew by proclaiming, not watering down, the gospel. And it did it all without a social media strategy. Just read Acts 5.

15. If you want to experience more of the Holy Spirit in your life, stop playing it safe.

16. “This living in the stream of the Spirit is not a special occupation for very holy people. It must be the constant aim and increasingly the experience of every ordinary Christian. There are men and women in professions and business, in hospitals and mills, that come about as near to living in the stream of the Spirit as any people I know.” — Sam Shoemaker, With the Holy Spirit and With Fire

17. The Bible doesn’t give you formulas. It tells stories. Only sorcerers want formulas. Be careful of anyone who reduces the Holy Spirit to a formula.

18. I’ve always heard that if you need a good model for Bible study, pay attention to Philip and the Ethiopian Eunuch (Acts 8:26-40). Following their example, read the Bible with a “guide on the side,” read with a less is more mindset, read with more questions than answers, read with an eye for Jesus, and read with a “bias toward action.”

19. Speaking of the Ethiopian eunuch: “If you care about diversity, don’t dismiss Christianity: it is the most diverse, multiethnic, and multicultural movement in all of history.” — Rebecca McLaughlin, Confronting Christianity

20. If discernment is the art of discovering God’s next step for you at a crossroads in your life, the Apostle Paul and his team were a masterclass in discernment as they followed the Holy Spirit across the Roman Empire. If you want to hear God in the decisions that matter most, I wrote a 40-part series on it last year. Start with the last one in the series or subscribe for a free PDF that I use to help people discern God’s voice.

22. “Once you lay hands on people and pray for them, whether formally or informally, you have literally no idea what the Spirit is going to do next.” — N.T. Wright, The Challenge of Acts

23. I’m not a church-planter, but I’m thankful for church-planters—especially all the incredible church planters in my life. As Timothy Keller wrote, “Since we are living in an Acts-like world again rather than the earlier context of Christendom, church planting will necessarily be as central a strategy for reaching our world as it was for reaching previous generations.” If you’re not financially supporting a church plant yet, try Mustard Seed Network in Japan. They are doing unbelievable work.

24. The rising Apollos Generation needs more coaches like Priscilla and Aquila and less critics. (See Acts 18:24-28.) If you’re wondering what that looks like, it starts with asking three questions: What wisdom can I offer? What permission can I give? What support can I provide? I am where I am today because of people in my life who asked those three questions as I was starting out in ministry.

22. When the gospel changes how you spend your money, time, and attention, prepare for all hell to break loose. That’s what happened in Ephesus in Acts 19, and that’s what has happened in every city that’s ever experienced a great move of God. Just read about the Welsh Revival of 1904-1905.

25. The best defense for the faith is a good story. The end of the book of Acts is most just Paul telling and retelling his story of encountering Jesus. Yes, teach people how to defend the faith through apologetics, but teach everyone how to tell their story. All it takes is three parts: What were you like before you encountered Jesus? How did you encounter Jesus? What has your life been like since? Answer those and you have the beginning of your story.

26. I didn’t realize this until I started teaching through it, but multiple decades pass from the beginning of Acts until the end—thirty years by some estimates. It’s a reminder that you’re reading the highlights of what happened in those first few decades. Pay attention to what God does over thirty years in your church, not just thirty days.

27. I read Franics Chan’s Forgotten God when I was a college student, and teaching through Acts made me remember something I’ve forgotten: “I don’t want my life to be explainable without the Holy Spirit. I want people to look at my life and know that I couldn’t be doing this by my own power.” I still want that to be true, and I hope you do, too.

28. Acts ends where it begins: a house. It says, “Paul stayed two whole years in his own rented house. And he welcomed all who visited him, proclaiming the kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness and without hindrance” (Acts 28:30-31). And, if you invite the Holy Spirit, Acts will continue in your house or apartment through the ordinary work of hospitality, evangelism, and discipleship.

I’d love to hear from you: Which one of these 28 lessons do you want to remember? Leave a comment below.

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And, if you’re thinking about studying Acts for yourself, here are a few (not 28) resources I recommend:3

• Paul (N.T. Wright)

• The Challenge of Acts (N.T. Wright)

• Acts resources from The Bible Project

• A good Scripture Journal—like this one for the CSB

• The Message of Acts (John Stott)

You can listen to the whole series on the Bellevue Christian Church (Pittsburgh, PA) podcast starting with this episode.

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If we’ve never met, I’m Austin Gohn—the author of A Restless Age about Saint Augustine and the five searches of young adulthood, the founder of Everyday Institute that makes it simple to accelerate discipleship every single day, and the lead pastor of Bellevue Christian Church that’s been making disciples since 1896.

My wife Julie, three kids, and I live in Pittsburgh, PA in a home we’re renovating one room at a time.

I write two emails a month on Substack—one piece of hyper-practical writing and one list. If you like my writing, share it with a friend and like or restack it on Substack.

Welcome to the forty-nine new subscribers who have joined this community of over 700 people. Every month, in addition to at least one hyper-practical email, I share a list of ten things that were on my brain over the past thirty days that will now be on your brain too.

1. Bear Grylls is on Substack. Yes, the Man vs. Wild guy. You might not realize this, but he’s a follower of Jesus—and it shows up in everything he does. (He’s even in one of the Alpha videos.) I’m about three weeks into his Modern Savage Handbook, and it’s the most I’ve enjoyed an exercise and nutrition plan in my life. Ask me again when I finish week twelve.

2. I started a new teaching series on The Ten Commandments on Sunday called Broken: The Ten Commandments for People Who Have Broken Every Single One. You can listen to the first one here or watch it here, and I’d love for you to follow along. (I just finished a multi-season, 40-sermon series on Acts and, in my next post, I’m going to share some insights from that experience.)

3. Wendell Berry died. I appreciated Karen Swallow Prior’s article about him, and the article in Mockingbird from last year that Grace Leuenberger wrote. If you’re not sure what novel to start with, I suggest Hannah Coulter. And, Annie Dillard died, too. She’s Pittsburgh-born and one of my favorite essayists of all time. If you’ve never read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, start there.

4. Most of the time, the first step in my preaching process is 60-90 minutes with nothing but a print-out of the text, a pen, and the Holy Spirit before I open commentaries. After a viral Substack note about it, I was asked to write an article about it for the Autumn 2026 edition of Preach magazine—a publication from The Leaders of Worship and Preachers Trust in the UK. The editors kindly made a public link so my Substack subscribers could read it, too: Read “Don’t Start With Commentaries” here. (You can also find membership options here.)

5. I’m loving the new SEU Worship album: Found in the Field. I love the line “holy wild rushing wind” to describe the Holy Spirit.

6. Right before sabbatical, I quietly released the fourth course from Everyday Institute—and, I forgot to tell anyone about it. It’s called Everyday Life, and it’s all about following Jesus in the six areas of the life you’re made for one step at a time. It’s part of a series of four courses, developed with help from my friends at Missional Labs, designed to accelerate discipleship every single day. Think of it as the first-year of discipleship most people never get. We run all four courses every year at our church, and we give them away for free to any people, ministries, or churches that want them. (You can try it for free if you want.) If you’re a church or ministry leader who wants to find out more, reach out to hello@everydayinstitute.com or check out the page we designed with all the resources you could ever want.

7. I enjoyed this interview with Charlie Dates on The Carey Nieuwhof Leadership Podcast. He gave some really practical advice on how to shepherd people into talking back to you while you’re preaching, and I immediately applied it the following Sunday.

8. At the end of August, I took an annual camping trip with another pastor in the city and our boys that we’ve been doing for four years now. Following the advice of Jon Tyson (now on Substack), it’s an annual deposit in their journey toward manhood. If you’re raising boys, I highly recommend his book The Intentional Father and his work on The Primal Path.

9. On that camping trip, my friend Rob Maine introduced us to the art of smash burgers. For the past few weeks, we’ve been grilling smash burgers using a baking steel on the grill and they’ve become a regular part of our summer meal plan. We love this recipe.

10. In January 2024, I encouraged our church on Vision Sunday to write down one prayer on a notecard and share it with 2-3 people around them. At the time, my dad was walking through “the valley of the shadow of death” in his fight against cancer, but I knew that before his cancer began, he had desired to do a pilgrimage on one of the camino trails with me. So, on my notecard, I wrote, “That God would heal my dad enough to hike a week on the camino together in 2025.” Well, it’s not 2025, but in about two weeks in October 2026, I’m joining my dad and step-brother to walk about 100k on the Camino Portugues to Santiago de Compostela, Spain. Will you pray for us as we prepare for and complete that walk?

Thanks for subscribing. What’s one thing on your brain this month? Share it below.

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- Austin Gohn

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If we’ve never met, I’m Austin Gohn—the author of A Restless Age about Saint Augustine and the five searches of young adulthood, the founder of Everyday Institute that makes it simple to accelerate discipleship every single day, and the lead pastor of Bellevue Christian Church that’s been making disciples since 1896.

My wife Julie, three kids, and I live in Pittsburgh, PA in a home we’re renovating one room at a time.

I write two emails a month on Substack—one piece of hyper-practical writing and one list. If you like my writing, share it with a friend and like or restack it on Substack.

Subscribe now

A roll of drawing paper doesn’t have batteries that need to be replaced. It can be used by more than one of our kids at a time—even if they still fight over who sits where. It can be enjoyed at just about any age (including adults) in different ways. It requires minimal setup. It stirs creativity. It’s better than doomscrolling.

It’s cheap fun.

Once one sheet fills up, you just tear the whole thing off, cut out any drawings for the wall in our kitchen (if any are worthy), or just crumble it up and throw it away. Then, pull out a new sheet and start over.

One of the times we use our paper roll most is on our sabbath.

This summer, while I was on a 12-week sabbatical, I tried something new. Most Saturdays before our kids woke up (except when we were on our analog road trip), I stretched out a new piece of drawing paper on their craft table and filled it with some kind of challenge or activity.

Sometimes, I was creating it just minutes before our kids woke up because I totally forgot about it. Some activities were simple. Some were surprisingly complicated. I knew I nailed it, though, when whatever was on the paper roll kept them occupied while I made our bigger Saturday breakfast of biscuits and gravy, pancakes, or waffles.

As it starts to get colder outside, which means the kids will be inside more, I’m sharing 9 different ways you can help your kids enjoy a simple roll of drawing paper that I field tested with our three kids this summer. They are ranked according to my very subjective judgment system of “effort to make” (1 = minimum effort → 5 = maximum effort) vs. time to enjoy (1 = minimal time → 5 = maximum time). I’ll start with the one that I’ll probably never do again and end with one that would make J.R.R. Tolkien proud.

At the end, in the comments, I want to hear your best tenth idea of how to use a roll of drawing paper. Comment with your tenth idea and like your favorite ideas from others.

Ranking Nine Paper Roll Ideas

9. Maze

Effort to Make: 5 / Time to Enjoy: 1

My kids love maze and puzzle books, and I thought, “I’ll design a maze for them myself.” In my head, it sounded simple enough. How hard could designing a maze actually be?

Harder than you think.

While I enjoyed learning the best practices of maze design, it took me almost an hour to make the maze and I was still trying to finish it up when they came downstairs. Part of the problem was that I designed it with three entrances that led into three fully-enclosed mazes at varying degrees of difficulty for each of my three kids.

In the end, it took each of them less than two minutes to complete and my two-year-old didn’t get it.

Never again.

8. Decoder Puzzle

Effort to Make: 4 / Time to Enjoy: 3

A decoder puzzle is basically nothing more than using a key to decode a secret message.

It felt simple to make, but it took more effort than I expected to not mix up the letters as I was preparing it. I kept forgetting which side of my key was the code. And, as my kids let me know, I got a few of the letters wrong. (Additionally, only my older two could enjoy it because they know letters.)

It’s fun, though, because it let me write a fun message that had something to do with what we were planning to do for that particular Sabbath day. (Hint: It was an amusement park.) If you have something fun you’re planning, a decoder message is a great way to communicate that.

7. Word Search

Effort to Make: 3 / Time to Enjoy: 3

The word search was fun because it was near the Fourth-of-July, so I could use that as a theme for the words I chose. If you’re near a holiday or it’s the beginning of a new season, a word search is a good way to build some excitement for it.

It was a puzzle for me, though, to figure out how to get all of the words in there. In classic Austin fashion, I planned a little bit and figured the rest out on the fly. I also had no system for deciding what letters to use for all of the remaining spaces.

Similar to the decoder puzzle, the word search did take them a long time to complete, and they enjoyed it.

6. Make Your Own Pokemon Cards

Effort to Make: 2 / Time to Enjoy: 3

My kids are in their Pokemon era (or, as my parents used to call them, “Pok-e-man”).

When I was a kid, for reasons that are still a mystery to me, I wasn’t allowed to have Pokemon cards. But, after watching my own kids obsess over them, I think I get it.

I thought it would be fun, though, to let them design their own cards. They loved it, and thought the hand-drawn Pokemon logo was so cool. (Admittedly, I was very proud of that.)

With the exception of drawing the logo, it was minimal effort to design card outlines. Within the card outline, just leave spots for a drawing of the Pokemon, HP, a description, Attack 1, and Attack 2. And, draw a sample card if you want.

5. Stained Glass Game

Effort to Make: 1 / Time to Enjoy: 3

I picked up this one from The Tabletop Family on YouTube, and I like it because it’s a game they could make themselves if they want to.

Basically, you draw the shape of stained glass. Then, a bunch of intersecting lines. The game rules are: 1) Take turns coloring in a section, 2) It can’t touch the other person’s section, 3) First person to run out of spaces loses.

The problem is that it’s for only two players, and I have three kids. One of them was upset about that, and I’m certain you can guess it was the youngest one.

4. Dot and Line Game

Effort to Make: 1 / Time to Enjoy: 3

This is a classic game, and my kids love it. Similar to the stained glass game, it’s an easy one for them to recreate on their own wherever they are. It takes almost no effort to create, but if you make it big enough, it can keep them occupied for a long time.

3. Color-In-Your-Names

Effort to Make: 2 / Time to Enjoy: 4 (No picture for this one.)

The last three are my favorite because, when they were finished, we had some art that we actually wanted to keep—starting with coloring in their names.

All it takes is drawing their names in big bubble letters and letting them get after it with whatever colors, patterns, or designs come into their minds. When they’re done, you have a cute timestamp of their creativity.

I’m pretty sure they grabbed some tape and hung them by their beds.

2. Paper Quilt

Effort to Make: 1 / Time to Enjoy: 4

One of the things I loved about this paper roll idea is that it got them working together. They weren’t competing like in the dot-and-line game or doing their own solo project, which led to less arguments overall. As they each designed a part of the quilt, it turned into a beautiful final design that they all contributed to and they cut it out as soon as they were done to share it proudly with us.

To make a paper quilt, just draw a big rectangle. Then sub-divide it into lots of squares. Encourage the kids to try out lots of different designs. Watch what happens.

1. Draw Your Own Island

Effort to Make: 3 / Time to Enjoy: 5

I’ve always been inspired by the hand-drawn maps from J.R.R. Tolkien in The Lord of the Rings. I love the simplicity of his world-building design features.

Basically, for this one, I drew each of them an island outline—making an archipelago, of sorts. Then, I also gave them some ideas for features: trees, cities, mountains, rivers, lakes, etc. Finally, I showed them the maps in The Lord of the Rings because it’s time for them to know his genius.

I loved watching my little world-builders work, and it felt like a glimpse of what it was like in Genesis 1 when God created the heavens and the earth. And, just like the Lord, when they were finished, they spent the remainder of our Sabbath resting from the “work” they had done.

A Few Practical Notes on Getting Started

If you’re wondering where to start, start with the next four Saturdays—not 52, not the rest of their childhoods, or even the rest of the year. Just four. Pick four ideas from this list that you want to try, buy a roll of drawing paper, and start this Saturday.

Here are a few practical notes to keep in mind as you get started:

1. Find a home for your roll of drawing paper. If you have to get the roll of drawing paper out every time, you’re less likely to use it than if it has a permanent home somewhere you and your kids can see it and use it. As Andy Crouch advises in The Tech-Wise Family, design your physical spaces so that your family gravitates toward the right kinds of things. For us, our roll of drawing paper lives in a craft area with a short table and short chairs in a sunlit nook in our dining room—with easy access to baskets of crayons, markers, and colored pencils. It’s always a disaster, but it’s worth it.

2. List out ideas ahead of time. That’s what this post is designed to help you do. When you’re trying to come up with an idea early in the morning, while still waiting for the caffeine to hit, you’re going to end up with tic-tac-toe every time. I never know when I’m going to think of an idea or come across a good one for someone else, so I made a Google doc to keep track of ideas that I come across.

3. Don’t work too hard on it. Nothing is worse than finding yourself yelling at your kids at 7 in the morning, saying, “Daddy is trying to finish your drawing paper activity! Can you guys just keep it down and stay out of here for a second?” That’s not an exact quote, but it’s the vibe of something I said multiple times. If you enjoy making a Saturday morning challenge or activity for your kids, lean into it. If it’s starting to feel burdensome, forget it and watch another classic episode of The Magic School Bus.

In the end, the win is when your kids don’t need your help to figure out how to enjoy a roll of drawing paper on their own. Your goal is simply to give them some ideas as they’re getting started or add a little sparkle into their Saturday mornings. Kids are creative if you give them space to be, and they’ll come up with ideas you would have never imagined.

As I was finishing up this post, I glanced over at our kids activity table and I noticed something ironic: There’s no paper roll. It must have run out at some point in the past month, and we haven’t had a chance to get a new one. They used up the rest of the roll—even after I quit making them Saturday morning activities and challenges.

That’s a win.

I’d love to hear from you in the comments: This list feels incomplete at nine. What’s your best “tenth idea” for how to use a paper roll? Be sure to like your favorite ideas from other people in the comments.

Leave a comment

For more in my hyper-practical series on family (which isn’t the only thing I write about), check out:

• 7 Sabbath Tips from 15 Years of Practice

• 4,000+ Miles, 3 Kids, Zero iPads: A How-to Guide for Long Road Trips Without Personal Devices for Your Kids

• How to Study the Bible with a 7-Year-Old in Less Than 30-Minutes Each Week

If we’ve never met, I’m Austin Gohn—the author of A Restless Age about Saint Augustine and the five searches of young adulthood, the founder of Everyday Institute that makes it simple to accelerate discipleship every single day, and the lead pastor of Bellevue Christian Church that’s been making disciples since 1896.

My wife Julie, three kids, and I live in Pittsburgh, PA.

I write two emails a month on Substack—one piece of hyper-practical writing and one list. If you like my writing, share it with a friend and like or restack it on Substack.

Hey Yinz,1

Welcome to the forty (!) new subscribers over the past thirty days. Every month, in addition to at least one hyper-practical email, I share a list of ten things that were on my brain over the past thirty days that will now be on your brain too.

1. I’m starting a teaching series on the Ten Commandments this fall—because, you know, our church was starting to feel too big and I wanted to shrink it down. To get ready, I did my classic three-book deep dive into it, but the best resource was the new 10 Commandments video series from the Bible Project. (If you are ever in Portland, be sure to do the studio tour. Like a total pastor dad, I made my family do the tour in 2019. I loved it.)

2. Related: I discovered Lofi Sunday while watching Bible Project videos. They are now my go-to sermon-writing music. (In case you’re wondering, sermon-writing also pairs well with Rikard From and Jon Batiste. It depends on the series.)

3. We don’t eat out much as a family of five, but we like to pretend at home. We do homemade Taco Bell using this Bean and Cheese Burrito recipe from NYT Cooking or pseudo Chick-Fil-A with the huge pack of nuggets from Sam’s club. It’s the same to them but not to our budget.

4. Don’t be a canal, be a reservoir. One pours out only what it takes in, the other is always full and pours out of the overflow. That’s a paraphrase of Bernard of Clairvaux, and I have my sabbatical coach from Soulcare to take for that.

5. “There’s nothing like being in a room with voices rejoicing in worship, hands raised in surrender, and prayers rising like incense before the Lord.” I’ve started using this phrase to shepherd our church’s worship culture after being able to experience so many different church worship cultures during our sabbatical. I’ll be saying it a lot because, like Andy Stanley likes to say, “If you sound like a broken record, they’re hearing you for the first time.”

6. My eight-year-old and I did a boy movie each week over the summer. (They weren’t solely boy movies so much as “edgier” PG movies.) The Sandlot is still legendary and allowed us to talk about cuss words. The Princess Bride was surprisingly helpful at helping us talk about healthy and holy romance. Jumanji is still just a horror movie disguised as a kid movie, but he liked it more than I did at his age (and it had a surprisingly insightful quote about fathers as seen in the clip below). In fact, movie nights have become a surprisingly helpful part of our family discipleship strategy. Following Justin Whitmel Earley’s advice in Habits of the Household, we let the credits roll at the end and use it as discussion time.

7. This month I got to talk on the phone with Will Haussler, who I met through Substack. He’s wise beyond his years. Check out his writing. I also loved listening to Substack writer Eugene Polupan’s conversation on Will Parker Anderson’s podcast The Writers Circle. Speaking of Will…

8. Last year, I wrote a 40-part Substack series on hearing God. As I was closing out sabbatical, I finished up a book proposal on the same topic thanks to fellow Substack writer Will Parker Anderson’s course Proposals Made Simple. This is the second time in my life I’ve created a book proposal, and this one was much easier thanks to his course. Can you pray that it finds the right agent and the right publisher in the next few months?

9. Move over Wordle. My step-brother invented a new daily word game called Wordflow. It’s very popular in our family group chat. Try it, and tell your friends. I’m consistently the worst player in my family. My wife is the best.

10. Looking for a way to close out your week? Try taking ten minutes and writing three wins you can celebrate, three lessons you learned, and three people to thank. (Substack seems to be into it.) When I finish, I’ve started using my walk home at the end of the work week to drop three 60-second gratitude voice memos with people in my life. I’ll be doing that later today.

Thanks for subscribing. What’s one thing on your brain this month? Share it below.

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-Austin Gohn

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P.S. If you’re looking for your next read. Be sure to check this one out.

If we’ve never met, I’m Austin Gohn—the author of A Restless Age about Saint Augustine and the five searches of young adulthood, the founder of Everyday Institute that makes it simple to accelerate discipleship every single day, and the lead pastor of Bellevue Christian Church that’s been making disciples since 1896.

My wife Julie, three kids, and I live in Pittsburgh, PA in a home we’re renovating one room at a time.

I write two emails a month on Substack—one piece of hyper-practical writing and one list. If you like my writing, share it with a friend and like or restack it on Substack.

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It wasn’t entirely screen-free. My wife and I used our iPhones for the map (opting for an atlas at times) and for a few other things I’ll explain more about in a moment. But, we did it entirely without personal devices for our kids.

That means: no Bluey, no movies, no personal headphones, and no video games.1

And, that’s how we’ve been doing road trips since they were born—whether to the grocery store down the street, their grandparents’ house a few states away, or, most recently, to the Black Hills and back.2

Most families don’t think it’s possible and, honestly, I don’t judge you if you give your kids personal screens for road trips. Sometimes, we’re not even sure if this is a good idea, but, before you accuse me of cruel and unusual road trip practices, let me share how we’ve slowly discovered that it’s not only possible but worth it (even if it can also be annoying at times).

With eight years of practice under our (seat)belts, here are seven simple ideas that can help your kids go screen-free on your next road trip—whether it’s 40 miles or 4,000 miles—without costing you your sanity.

Seven Practices to Pass the Time Without iPads

1) Use the “WePod” with Wisdom.

Of course, this is an essay about how not to depend on screens to pass the time on your next road trip. But, in reality, while I enjoy listening to one of our old burned CDs from high school, this is one of those times when the capabilities of a smartphone are worth it to us as long as we keep those smartphones in their place. We’re not analog legalists.

When we do use a device, we try to do a practice Andy Crouch recommends in The Tech-Wise Family called the “WePod.”3 He suggests that if you’re going to listen to something, instead of locking into their own earbuds for a private listening experience, listen to something together as people have done for generations. Just use one iPhone and the aux cable (or Bluetooth) to pump it through the whole car.

With that in mind, on our road trips, here are four ways we’ve used the “WePod” with wisdom:

• Audiobooks: Admittedly, it’s challenging to find something that everyone in our family can enjoy. On our last trip, we listened to Laura Ingalls Wilder’s On the Shores of Silver Lake, and it made us look forward to arriving in De Smet, South Dakota—one of our stops and the location of the story. Later in the trip, for the last few hours of the way back, we listened to George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin.4 My five-year-old regularly complained about the first few chapters, but then out of nowhere, she was hooked and so were the rest of us.5

• Music: We love music. We take requests from our kids, but the driver gets the final say on what we listen to.6 We have a tradition of starting our road trips with the same one-hour playlist, and our kids love it. (And, it’s all yours here. Just don’t judge us, it’s pretty weird and very specific. But, if you like a mix of obscure Michael W. Smith, U2, and Ben Rector, it’s for you.)

• Podcasts: We also listen to podcasts with our kids. At their ages, they enjoy Lamplighters, Circle Round, Tiny Theologians, and the occasional Brains On. If we get one lucky moment when all of them are sleeping for a bit, we’ll listen to podcasts the adults like for a change—like Conan O’Brien discussing The Beatles with Tom Holland on The Rest is History.

• Challenges: In moments of desperation, we’ll find a Disney playlist and see who can guess the movie first with each song. Sometimes, my wife and I will listen to movie scores and see who can guess the film first. (I’m still basking in the time I correctly guessed The Last of the Mohicans, despite never seeing it.) Lately, as part of educating our kids in the classics, we’ve been listening to “oldies” and letting them guess artists like Aretha Franklin, The Temptations, Elvis Presley, and more. My friend Alex Hettinga over at the Musical Father Substack would be proud.

That said, even if you’re practicing the art of “WePod,” it can be tempting to listen to it for the entire ride. But, every once in a while, turn it off. Sit in silence for a bit or talk without the background noise.

Or, as we’ll look at next, you can just read a book.

2) Bring a Mini-Library of Books with High “Miles-Per-Page” (MPP).

Before every roadtrip, we pack a mini-library of books in a basket that sits between the middle seats so that everyone can reach them. But, not just any books.

We try to always pack books with a high “MILES-PER-PAGE” (MPP) average. We have limited space in our van and we don’t have room for books that they’re going to look through once and be done with. We have to choose books that our kids will enjoy slowly and come back to again and again throughout the trip. These are the high-mileage books.

Of our three children, only our eight-year-old can read so we have to select books that are filled with both excellent pictures and words. Over the years, we’ve slowly figured out some of the books that our kids can look at over and over without getting tired of them. We let them be part of the selection process for road trip books, and we work together to finalize the travel canon.

Additionally, we also try to choose a few books that have something to do with our destinations. As you’re thinking about your next road trip: Are there any books you could bring that can build excitement for your destination(s)? For example, we were planning to stop by Mount Rushmore so we bought (and brought) Kid Presidents. We planned to spend lots of time outside in the Black Hills so we brought lots of our nature books like Nature Anatomy. We were visiting a few national parks so we brought a National Parks Guide from National Geographic.

If you don’t know where to start, here’s a list of the fourteen books in the stack pictured below that we took with us on our most recent road trip because they have a high miles-per-page average:7

1. Kid Presidents (David Stabler and Doogie Horner)

2. National Parks Guide: USA (from National Geographic)

3. An Elephant & Pigge Biggie! (Mo Willems)

4. Nature Anatomy (Julia Rothman)

5. Insect Anatomy (Julia Rothman)

6. Wildlife Anatomy (Julia Rothman)

7. Engineering in Plain Sight (Grady Hillhouse)

8. Cloudspotting for Beginners (Gavin Pretor-Pinney)

9. The Secret Signs of Nature (Craig Caudhill and Carry Shryock)

10. Slow Down (Rachel Williams and Freya Hartas)

11. Glow (Noelia González and Sara Boccaccini Meadows)

12. Busy, Busy Town (Richard Scarry)

13. Maps (Aleksandra & Daniel Mizielinska)

14. The 50 States (Gabrielle Balkan and Sol Linero)8

In addition to packing high-mileage books that all our kids can enjoy, we also let our “reader” (the eight-year-old) pick a few chapter books that he could fit in his backpack (more on that in a bit).

What if your kids get car sick when they read in the car? Lean into audiobooks, open the window, and keep some barf bags in the glove compartment.

3) Don’t just stop for gas.

I learned this trick from my dad.

One time, on a road trip to the beach, my dad made us stop by Mount Airy, North Carolina. Not familiar? Neither were we. It’s the town that inspired Mayberry in The Andy Griffith Show. But, all we knew was that it was the town that kept us from getting to the beach an hour earlier. My dad made us stop, though, and we still joke about it to this day. Honestly, I don’t remember anything from the beach that year, but I do remember stopping at Mount Airy.

That wasn’t the first or last time he did something like that on a road trip.

I’ve been doing the same with my kids.

With three kids in the van, who are slowly descending into madness with each passing mile, it can be tempting to keep driving at all costs in order to shave a few minutes off your ETA—only stopping for gas. But, one of the secrets to long road trips is giving your kids something to look forward to every few hours. It’s easy for kids to lose hope if they ask “how much longer” and you tell them “eight hours and seventeen minutes,” but if you tell them there’s a Buc-ee’s coming up in less than two hours, hope springs eternal.

And, I’ve found that these are the moments that core memories are made of.

For example, when we drive across the midwest to my in-law’s house, we’ll often stop at the Hoosier Gym in Knightstown, Indiana. Does it sometimes add an hour to our trip by the time we get back to the interstate? Yes, but we do it anyway. Why? Because our kids love getting to run around in a cool gym and play basketball for thirty minutes (and so do we). And, it’s free.

Or, when we drove to the Black Hills this summer, we stopped at Wall Drug as we exited Badlands National Park. If you’ve ever driven across South Dakota, you know that there are billboards for hundreds of miles. Our kids thought it was the greatest place on earth, and they loved getting “free ice water” and sitting on the giant jack-a-lope. They’re still talking about it.

Not sure how to find somewhere to stop? In addition to just trying out some of the attractions on billboards, one of my favorite ways to find something is Atlas Obscura. I’ve found many hilarious places to stop—like the time we stopped by Casey, Illinois to see many of the world’s largest things (and it did not disappoint). Sometimes, we’ll plan a stop or two ahead of time, but most of the time, we just leave room for spontaneity.

4) Take the scenic route and watch “Nature TV.”

Speaking of detours, it’s counterintuitive but you might find that your kids enjoy a longer drive more than a shorter drive if there’s something interesting to look at. I call it “Nature TV.” Your window is the screen, and it can be more entertaining than Pixar if you know where to look.

It’s possible that one of the reasons kids struggle to endure long road trips is because, sometimes, there’s not much to watch outside their windows. Interstates, as much as I love them when I’m in a hurry, often sacrifice beauty for efficiency.

But, the United States is full of “scenic highways and byways” that often meander through the terrain instead of cutting right through it. They will almost always add time to your drive, but we’ve often found that they’re worth it.

Like the time drove through Spearfish Canyon on the way back to our AirBnB instead of taking the fastest route. Or, when we drove a much longer way to where we were staying in Colorado so that we could drive Trail Ridge Road—one of the highest paved roads in the country.

Did we end up getting to our destination way later every time? Yes. Were we full of regret at moments when we were driving windy roads through the dark? Yes. Do we still share some of those scenic drives as our favorite memories? Absolutely.

They can watch their favorite show just about anywhere, but Nature TV is only available in the moment as you drive by it.

If you’re looking for some Nature TV, here are a few ways you can find good scenic routes:

• A Good Atlas: This is our preferred way to find good roads. In our current atlas, there are little green markings next to roads designated as scenic routes. We bought this one before our summer road trip this year and our oldest enjoyed following along in it.

• Guidebooks: I have a book called the National Geographic Guide to Scenic Highways and Byways and I’ll often consult it while we’re planning a family road trip. It’s one of my best thrift store book finds.

• Scenicbyways.info: I didn’t know this existed until I was researching for this post, but it has a helpful map with clickable scenic highways and byways.

Finally, sometimes, you’ll find a scenic route by accident if, after plugging your destination into the map, you click something other than the fastest route.

5) B.Y.O.A. (Bring Your Own Activities)

Mom and dad are not responsible for bringing all the stuff that will keep them entertained. With a few exceptions, our road trips are B.Y.O.A. (“bring your own activities”).

Their backpacks are where those activities will live. If an activity doesn’t fit in the backpack, it’s not coming with us. It’s a constraint that forces them to make choices. And on our most recent road trip, we gave the kids some age-appropriate freedom to pack their own backpacks the night before. (Let me repeat: some freedom.)

In addition to a few chapter books for the readers, here are a five “activities” we’ve encouraged them to bring in their backpacks:

• Notebook + Pen: I always carry a pocket notebook and pen. My kids are becoming believers in carrying a pocket notebook and pen. Before this trip, we gave each of them a pocket notebook and pen to take with them. Bonus tip: They love those multi-color pens (like these) and they keep things simple. They write and draw all kinds of stuff in those.

• Binoculars: We bought our kids (and ourselves) binoculars before this road trip because we knew they’d love them. It helped them enjoy “Nature TV” even more.9

• Drawing Pad: Our kids love to draw, so we got them drawing pads for this trip. (We got ours from Ikea, but I’m sure you can get them anywhere.) It has a zipper and they loaded them up with as much paper, colored pencils, and crayons as they could stuff in there.

• Activity Books: The right coloring book or activity book can keep our kids locked in for hours. Our two-year-old enjoys those water-pen books (and his siblings try to steal them). We got a Brain Quest Workbook for our soon-to-be kindergartener.10 Our oldest enjoys books with lots of mazes and puzzles like this one and this one. As a bonus, this year I bought a Mad Libs Junior and they thought it was the greatest thing ever—even if “butt” was their favorite word (and honestly it was always funny).

• Toys: We try to take a “less but better” approach to toys and look for toys that fire up their imagination. For example, our daughter was happy with three Disney princess figurines (and distraught every time she dropped one). In the past, we’ve tried bringing LEGO sets, but that’s high risk.

But, there’s one more activity that doesn’t take up any room in your backpack.

6) Reclaim the lost art of conversation.

The table and the car are two of the only places where families are stuck in close proximity with each other for an extended period of time. It’s a recipe for good conversation.

And plenty of arguing, too.

We’ve talked about all kinds of things on long drives. They ask us questions and sometimes so many questions that we have to say: Okay, we’re no longer taking questions. Sometimes we’ll tell stories from our lives, and they love those. Sometimes, they’ll make up their own funny stories for each other.

We also love playing games together that only require talking. For example:

• Guess the Princess (or Disney Character): It’s in the style of 20 Questions where you think of a princess and let everyone else ask yes or no questions. If you can’t figure it out, the answer is “Moana” fifty-percent of the time.

• Spelling Bee: My friend Laura recommended this one to me. They played this with their kids on their last road trip and said it was a blast. One of the adults would say a grade-level word and they would write it down. We’re going to try this on our next road trip.11

• Ruin a Movie Title with “Poop”: I’ve saved this until now, but if you’re desperate, you can usually get everyone laughing and occupy at least 30-60 minutes with this game. All you do is think of movie titles and replace one word with “poop.” For example, Snow White and the Seven Poops or Indiana Jones and the Last Poop. The list goes on, and the Harry Potter movies are some of the best. I shouldn’t say this but, if you’ve made it this far, please leave a good one in the comments.

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If you let it, the car can become one of what Sherry Turkle calls “sacred spaces” where we can learn how to reclaim the lost art of conversation.12 Even if you desecrate it with the “ruin a movie title with poop” game.

But, sometimes, it’s okay to just let kids…

7) Get bored.

When your kid says, “I’m bored,” just remember: That’s a good thing.

In The Extinction of Experience, Christine Rosen argues that boredom is deeply human.13 The problem is that we have less and less tolerance for it when they’re always something within reach to keep us entertained. But, we need boredom, and long car rides are a perfect place to rediscover its benefits. Like how boredom is a springboard for day-dreaming and invention.

Or how, sometimes, boredom is nothing more than a springboard for a good nap.

And, in the end, nothing passes the time on a long road trip like a good nap.

Don’t Start with a 4,000 Mile Road Trip

Those seven ideas might help you survive your next long road trip without personal devices for your kids, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy.

If you’re hoping for a quiet drive, don’t try what I’m suggesting here. If you’re hoping for less complaining, this probably isn’t going to help. If you’re hoping to be able to hear yourself think for long stretches of highway, this is not the practice for you.

But, if you’re willing to give it a try, you might have a conversation that you didn’t know you needed to have. You might hear your kids let out the wow of wonder as they watch “Nature TV.” You might unlock your kids’ imaginations. You might hear them laugh harder than you’ve ever heard them laugh. You might increase their capacity for boredom. You might discover a whole new way to do road trips.

Before you try leaving the iPads at home, though, let me give you three final warnings:

1. Don’t be a legalist about going screen-free. Maybe you let your kids watch a movie together for the last two hours of the trip. Or you let one of your older kids listen to whatever songs are still on your old iPod. Or maybe to save space you let your kids take an e-reader as they get older with nothing but books. We’ve never taken all three kids on a plane at the same time but, if we did, we might not take iPads but you know we’d be enjoying some of that in-flight entertainment. Every family and every kid is different, and I don’t know if we’ll even always do road trips this way.

2. Don’t start with a 4,000 mile road trip. If you’ve never tried doing a road trip without personal devices, start small and build up. As my wife and I were talking about this post on the last leg of our summer trip, she suggested you try a smaller challenge first. For example, you could try not using screens until you reach a certain city or state. You could try going without screens for a certain length of time. Or start with a shorter road trip to a destination you go to a lot. Whatever you do, remember that it takes practice to get better at it.

3. Don’t make your kids do what you’re not willing to do. If you’re saying no screens for your kids but you’re scrolling your phone in the passenger seat the whole time, your kids are going to notice even if you try to hide it inside of Lonesome Dove. Do we take a few minutes to catch up on some texts or scroll social media for a few minutes after switching drivers? Of course we do. But we’re trying to limit how we often use our phones, too.

The first time you try going screen-free, it might be straight-up awful. Stick with it: one road trip, one hour, one mile at a time. Play the long game; it will get easier. Your kids might never stop asking, “Are we there, yet?,” but after a few road trips, they might stop asking for their device. Why? Because they’ve discovered something better, and so have you.

—

I’d love to hear from you: What ideas do you want to try on your next road trip? What questions do you have for me? What have you tried that’s worked for your family? Leave a comment.

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I couldn’t believe what he said in response:

Happy to go fire hose on this one.

No. 1, honor the Sabbath and keep it holy. Man, I wish I’d treated the Lord’s Day differently over the course of my life. I’ve always known it, believed in it and thought: Maybe next week we’ll get better.

We’ve been at Sunday worship every morning forever, but man, am I tempted by 12:45 or 1:30 in the afternoon to get back to work or, to an addictive level, work about the N.F.L.

Boy, I would treat Sabbaths differently — and especially digital intrusions into the Sabbath.

Of all the things he could have said, he emphasized getting your rhythms of rest and work figured out—in other words, practicing a Sabbath.

Right now, we’re in a moment when practicing a Sabbath is growing in popularity. There’s been lots written on the basic theology of Sabbath and lots of data published supporting the practice as good for your overall productivity and quality of life. Yes, as Jon Tyson recently pointed out, there’s been some over-correction around work and rest in the younger generations, but it’s still an essential part of a good basic rhythm of the life you’re made for.

Sabbath might be old news to some of you, but that language might be new to others of you and you might be wondering what it’s all about. The practice of Sabbath goes back to Genesis 1-2 and Exodus 20 in the Bible. With those texts in mind, Peter Scazerro defines it this way: “Biblical Sabbath is a twenty-four-hour block of time in which we stop work, enjoy rest, practice delight, and contemplate God.”1 Or, in the memorable phrasing of Eugene Peterson that my family likes to use, it’s simply a day to play and pray.2

I realized recently that I’ve been practicing a Sabbath relatively consistently since I was a college student almost fifteen years ago when I first learned about it. We kept it up as we got married and, later, as we started having kids. Now, almost fifteen years into it, I’m ready to share seven best practices that can help you get started (including my secret sourdough Google Doc), seven resources for going deeper, and a final word about why sabbath won’t save you.

7 Best Practices for Sabbath

Listen to me now: These are not hard-and-fast rules. These seven best practices are nothing more than wisdom that I’ve picked up over the years. Take what’s helpful and leave the rest. As Jesus famously said, “The Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath. So then, the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27-28).

1) Lock a 24-hour sabbath in your calendar and throw away the key.

I’ve always heard, “The first person to your calendar wins.” That’s either going to be you or it’s going to be someone else. As A.J. Swoboda writes in Subversive Sabbath, “In our 24/7 world, I have never once seen someone accidentally keep a Sabbath.”3 If it’s not in your calendar, especially when you’re getting started, it’s never going to happen.

But, what day should the Sabbath be? Believe it or not, this has been an argument within the church for years, and I’m not going to settle it here. In general, though, I find Peter Scazerro’s advice helpful, “The traditional Jewish Sabbath begins at sundown on Friday and ends at sundown on Saturday. In most Christian traditions, Sabbath has been observed on Sunday. The apostle Paul considered one day for sabbath as good as another (Romans 14:1-17). So the particular day of the week doesn’t matter. What matters is to set aside a twenty-four-hour period and protect it.”4

For most followers of Jesus, it’s going to be Sunday, but for a variety of reasons it might be Saturday for you—or another day. The day we practice a Sabbath has changed over the years, but in this season of our lives, since we work at a church, we practice Sabbath starting at 5pm on Fridays and end at 5pm on Saturdays.

Figure out what works most consistently for you and your family.

2) Do an “hour of preparation”—if you can’t get a full day.

Some of you are the kinds of people that can relax in a messy house, but most people need to clean up the mess before they can relax. Here’s the thing: The better you prepare for your Sabbath, the more you’ll enjoy your Sabbath. That’s why there has always been “day of preparation” in the Jewish world for doing chores, closing up shop, and getting anything else done that you don’t want to do while you’re trying to rest.

But, if you can’t get a day of preparation, try just an “hour of preparation.”

Set a timer for one hour, turn on some music, and sprint through as many chores as you can on your own or with your family. If it’s helpful, make a chore list with prioritized chores on it (maybe, the more visible ones)—like folding and putting away clothes, doing the dishes, paying the bills, cleaning the bedrooms, vacuuming, or mowing the yard. Sometimes, with our kids, all we can get is a quarter hour of preparation and we’ll turn on dance music while they help clean up.

You’ll be amazed at what you can get done in a focused hour of preparation but, if you’re waiting until you get to the end of your chore list in order to rest, you’ll never rest. There are always more chores to get done, but Sabbath reminds you don’t need a completely clean house in order to rest.

3) Write up your “to-don’t list” in pencil.

Obviously, the Sabbath is about stopping anything that feels like work. You could think of “work” as anything you “have to do,” which is more than what you’re paid to do.

To help you with that, it’s helpful to write up a “to-don’t list” instead of a to-do list. I’m not sure where I first heard that language (and I couldn’t find it in my book notes), but a “to-don’t list” is all about clarifying what kinds of activities you don’t want to do on a day you’re trying to rest. It will probably be similar to many of the things on your “hour of preparation” chore list, but it will also probably include things like checking your work email, making progress on work-related projects, and opening Slack. (When I was in college, homework was the main thing on my “to-don’t list.”)

The problem, of course, with a “to-don’t list” is that it’s prone toward legalism—restrictive rules that eventually forget the whole point of the “to-don’t list” in the first place. For example, around the time of Jesus, listen to how the “to-don’t list” had grown:

No kneading. No baking. No slaughtering animals. No hammering. No dyeing wool and weaving. No performing strenuous activity. No traveling. No worrying. No earning money. No tying a knot. No plowing. No planting or harvesting. No lighting or extinguishing a fire. No cutting fingernails. No writing more than one letter of the alphabet. No boiling eggs. No putting out a lamp. No getting a haircut an hour before the Sabbath.5

These were well-intentioned rules that were trying to honor the Sabbath, but they had also made “not working” on the Sabbath into something that was starting to feel like quite a bit of work just to manage. (Check out the gospel story in Mark 2:23-28 for more on that.)

And, they weren’t alone in that.

As the Sabbath became more widespread under the influence of Christianity, more rules were added. Just look up blue laws for some of these, but one of my favorites is a story that Justo Gonzalez tells in A Short History of Sunday: “In Boston, in 1656, a certain Captain Kemble, just returning from a three-year voyage, was met by his wife at the doorstep of his house, and kissed her. But this happened to be Sunday, and the unfortunate sailor was condemned to two hours of humiliation in the public stocks for his public display of lewdness on the Sabbath!”6 You might have PDA on your “to-don’t list,” but it doesn’t need to be on everyone else’s.

While it’s good to have a “to-don’t list,” I suggest writing it in pencil. Be open to the possibility that every once in a while you might need to do something that feels like work in order to “save life,” as Jesus says (Luke 6:9). It’s also okay if your list isn’t the same as someone else’s—because what feels like work to you might not feel like work for someone else. Famously, Eric Liddel chose not to run in competitive races on his Sabbath day, but your Sabbath might be the only day you can get a long run in and you love every second of it. (I am not one of those people.)

4) Bookend your Sabbath with fun traditions.

Without traditions, I’ve found that it’s easy for Sabbath to blend in with the rest of the days of the week. That’s why, in our family, we leverage fun traditions at the beginning of our Sabbath as a way of saying: Sabbath can start now! Kids usually love traditions, and they will remind you of them if you forget. (They’re cute little legalists.) And, you might even have some traditions at the end of your Sabbath to help close it out.

We didn’t have any traditions when we started, but we’ve slowly picked some up over the years (and we don’t always do all of them).

In our family, we start Sabbath on Friday evening and we always kick it off with the same meal. It’s a simple, low-work sourdough pizza recipe that we’ve been using since 2020 (when I “kneaded” something to help me process all my emotions from the week). In general, it’s great to have a feast on your Sabbath when you don’t count calories and linger a bit longer around the table. We will also usually have a big breakfast on Saturday mornings—usually using some sourdough starter for that as well.

(If you’re interested, here’s my secret Google Doc with everything I know about sourdough that I share with people when I share some starter.)

Before we start eating pizza, we’ll also light a candle and sing a song. It’s traditional in many families to light a candle on the Sabbath, and we recently added that into our routine (even if our kids always argue about who gets to light it and who gets to blow it out). We also sing a Sabbath song, even when friends are over, that we made up at some point (and our kids are still too young to be embarrassed by it). You might just want to read through Psalm 92 (“a song for the Sabbath day”), but here’s the lyrics for our Sabbath song if you want them:

It’s a Sabbath day
To “play and pray”
What are we going to do today?
We could go on a walk
We could have a long talk
We could go outside and play with chalk
But whatever we do
We’re gonna do it with you
Do-do-do-do-dood-i-ly-do

Finally, as the meal is winding down, we’ll get out our Sabbath Journal that we started a few years ago, ask just two questions, and write down the answers:

1. What are you proud of this week? Like God in Genesis 1-2, we’re teaching our kids to look back over the week and ask, “What did you do this week that was really good?” We also try to notice things that we saw each other do as well. It’s about fostering a holy pride in good work.

2. What are we praying for this week? When we look back over our Sabbath Journal, it’s wild to see how God has answered some hyper-specific prayers as a family and stirred our faith. After we list something out, we’ll pray together.

At the end of Sabbath, I’d love to start a tradition of getting the journal back out for the closing meal and ask a few more questions like, “How did we play today?” and “How did we feast?”

Feel free to adopt and adapt some of those traditions as you come up with your own!

5) Make time for what you normally don’t make time for.

Peter Scazerro calls this making time for “sabbath delight.”7

What’s something you don’t need to do but really love to do but don’t ever feel like you have guilt-free time to do? These are the life-giving activities that restore you. Without these, Sabbath can become all about what you can’t do rather than what you get to do.

To help you out, A.J. Swoboda, in his book Subversive Sabbath, encourages people to ask what his family likes to ask, “Is the activity in question life giving or life taking? That is, does it bring us life, rest, hope, wholeness? Or does it drain us, pour us out, stress us, or load us down?”8 That question can help you and your family rediscover what gives you life. Another good rule of thumb comes from the oft-quoted saying from Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel: “If you work with your hands, sabbath with your mind. If you work with your mind, sabbath with your hands.” Figure out what those things are for you and what they are for people in your family.

That brings us to hobbies—a lost art. (I recently saw that Substack writer Brianna Lambert has a book coming out called Created to Play, and it’s all about recovering hobbies.) I’ve heard it said that we live in a culture that turns every hobby into a side-hustle, but the Sabbath is an opportunity to have a hobby just for the joy of it.

Play board games. Go for a long drive. Hike outside. Go fishing. Draw. Read a book that isn’t for work or school. Take a long nap. Crochet. Run. Sleep in. Play with your kids. Go play basketball. Get your hands dirty in the garden. Or, do pen and watercolor—like I’ve started doing this year.

And, finally, make time for unhurried space with God—the most life-giving thing you can do. If your Sabbath is on Sundays, do this with the rest of the church. If your Sabbath is a different day, make space to linger in God’s presence in the Bible and prayer.

6) Let your screens rest, too.

In The Tech-Wise Family, Andy Crouch suggests the practice of turning off your devices one day each week, one hour each day, and one week each year.9 In particular, he and his family turn off their devices for their Sabbath day. I suggest you try the same.

Log off social media or, even better, delete the apps. Power down your laptops and iPads and put them away. Put all your screens in a box somewhere if you can (and maybe just leave one phone out with “do not disturb” on for emergencies).

A few weeks ago, I got to interview my friend Julian Cisneros, who founded a movement called Analog Sunday that’s helping people step out of the infinite scroll one day each week and back into their lives. He did a talk at our church to equip people to try unplugging on their Sabbath, and he shared that the first time his family tried to keep their phones off for the day, “We lasted thirty minutes.” But, over time, it’s become easier and easier. Now, they can’t imagine Sabbath any other way.

I’ll admit, I’m still weak at this practice. But, on my most recent Sabbath, I tried to keep my phone off from the moment my kids woke up until the moment they went to bed. Let me tell you, I felt different, and I am going to try to do this practice more and more.

Again, though, don’t be a legalist about it. Often, in my family, we’ll watch a movie together after pizza as part of starting our Sabbath. Instead of letting screens isolate us, though, we’re letting a screen bring us together.

7) Find your Sabbath Support Group (SSG)—for recovering workaholics.

It’s always easier to practice Sabbath when you have people in your life—friends and family—who are also committed to practicing it with you on the same day each week as often as possible. It might be your small group, a few friends from church, or a couple other families.

Almost every book I’ve read on Sabbath recommends this.

But, you might be thinking, “People are exactly what exhausts me. I’m with people all week, and on Sabbath I don’t want to be around people. They’re on my ‘to-don’t list.’” I get it. Finding a Sabbath support group doesn’t mean you have to spend your whole day with people, it’s just about finding some folks who can encourage you to rest—even if, no matter how extroverted or introverted you are, it’s good to get a combination of time alone and time with others

It might be helpful to think of a few people who are “restful friends” that are mutually life-giving when you spend time together. Meet up at a park, invite them over to hang out in the backyard, or even just face-time a dear friend who lives far away.

7 Sabbath Resources for Going Deeper

Everything I know about Sabbath, I’ve learned from other people over the years and through experience. Here are a few of my favorite resources that influenced everything I’ve written here:

• Subversive Sabbath (A.J. Swoboda): He’s also on Substack, and this book covers the theological, cultural, and practical aspects of Sabbath.

• The Emotionally Healthy Leader (Peter Scazerro): He’s written a lot on Sabbath as part of an emotionally-healthy life, and there’s a whole chapter in this book about it.

• The Tech-Wise Family (Andy Crouch): This book is about way more than Sabbath, but his chapter on Sabbath is really insightful—especially his breakdown of the difference between rest and leisure.

• Sabbath as Resistance: It’s Walter Brueggemann at his best—doing good biblical theology.

• The Sabbath Practice (John Mark Comer and Practicing the Way): It’s a four-week course on Sabbath that our church is offering right now. I haven’t watched through it yet, but I’ve heard it’s helpful.

• Analog Sunday: Sign up for Julian’s email. It’s full of ways you can go a bit more analog on your Sabbath.

And, if you want, I preached a sermon on it a few weeks ago and you can listen to it here or watch the video below:

A Final Note on Sabbath

As practicing Sabbath grows in popularity, it’s important to remember: Sabbath alone won’t save you. A day of rest, no matter how life-giving it is, isn’t going to give you the life you’re made for. Only Jesus can do that. Without Jesus, a day of rest is nothing more than another life hack that might work for you until something better comes along.

Sabbath, at its best, points you to Jesus—the one who gives you the rest you long for. As Augustine famously said in his memoir (and I wrote a whole book about it), our hearts are restless until they rest in you.

Every Sabbath is an opportunity to be reminded of Jesus’ invitation to you, “Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.” (Matthew 11:28-30, The Message)

On a personal note, I’m going on a 12-Week Sabbatical from May 4 - July 26. I’ve been on staff at our church for fourteen years, and I’m in my seventh year as lead pastor.

When I started talking with my kids about sabbatical, one of them said, “Sabbatical sounds a lot like Sabbath. Is it kind of like that—except longer?” “Yes,” I responded, “That’s exactly right.” It’s just an extension of the work and rest culture we have already established as a family.

As part of that sabbatical, I won’t be writing on my Substack for the next twelve weeks. Pray for me and my family if you think about it and, if you want to read more, you can read the letter I wrote to our church here.

Analog Sunday

“PAPER MAPS”

The Analog Times (Issue 2)

Mile 0

I was traveling through the arid plains of South Dakota, on a road trip across the country. I was with my college friends, in an overstuffed 15-passenger van, when my friend Dan who was riding shotgun said, “Let’s use the map to get to Wind Cave National Park.”

He wasn’t talking about Google Maps, he was talking about a paper map.

It was 2012, a few years into the era of navigation apps, and Dan was already over it.

“I’m afraid we’re losing our human ability to navigate,” he told me.

This was clearly a hill he was going to die on, and I had no choice but to turn off my app and follow the map.

For the next hour of our roadtrip, Dan was Clark, I was his unwilling Lewis, and the rest of the guys in our van (almost) didn’t know the difference.

Mile 1

The American road trip isn’t what it was a century ago. What began with the rise of little more than reliable cars and paved highway systems, now often involves screens that tell you the fastest way to your destination and screens that keep your kids from asking if you’re there yet.

Christine Rosen, author of The Extinction of Experience, argues that we’ve allowed “valuable human experiences to wither and die” with the rise of digital technology. And, the road trip is one of the experiences where you can feel some of those losses.

We’ve lost the skill of finding our way from one place to the next. There’s the loss of boredom and daydreaming, a state that road trips have always fostered in both children and adults. The loss of conversations as long and meandering as the highway itself, as each person locks into their own earpods until the next bathroom stop.

These might feel like a small price to pay on the road toward a better ETA, but with each loss, we’re losing skills and experiences that, as Rosen says, make us more human.

It seems my co-pilot Dan might have been a prophet.

Mile 2

I’m in my late thirties now, which is old enough to remember the 90s and road trips with my family in our minivan.

There were weekend getaways to Mount Hood, the Columbia River Gorge, or Cannon Beach. But, every few years, we would take a long road trip with friends to a camp in the heart of Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness of Montana.

I would play my Gameboy until the batteries ran out. We would come up with funny adjectives for Mad Libs or flip through a Brainquest. We’d use nicknames and chat with our friends in other cars (and the occasional trucker), not with a text message, but over CB Radios. We would stare out the window and watch the landscape change. We would get bored and complain. And, if we were lucky, we’d get the privilege of flipping the page of the AAA Triptik, every 100 miles or so.

I didn’t know it at the time, but on those long stretches of road, I was discovering what it meant to be human from the backseat of a Ford Aerostar.

Mile 3

Dan did get us to Wind Caves National Park, eventually. It took longer than it should have, we got lost, and there was a near mutiny against him. He didn’t care, though, because it was never about arriving at the National Park, it was about rediscovering something even better.

If you want to find what Dan was looking for, plan a road trip of your own and go analog for at least one stretch of it.

Buy an atlas. Follow the scenic route. Listen to your old burned CDs from beginning to end (use that trusty Aux cable!). Leave your earpods in your backpack. Tell stories. Stop at places to eat without checking reviews. Read a book out loud—or read The Analog Times. Get lost in a tourist trap because you saw it on a billboard. Play the license plate game. Sing songs together. Sit in silence. Stare out the window. Get bored. Take a wrong turn, for crying out loud.

You just might find yourself again.

This summer, my family is loading up our van and taking a road trip to that same corner of South Dakota. I’m sure we’ll use apps for part of the way, but I imagine that, at some point, I’ll turn off the phone and say, Let’s use the map.

And, I can’t wait to see what we discover.

I’d love to hear from you in the comments. What’s one of the best road trips you’ve ever been on?

Easter was coming up in a few months, and he heard the announcement about baptisms. In addition to asking him to watch our baptism videos (through Everyday Institute) as part of a baptism class at church, I said, “Why don’t we get up on Friday mornings at 6:30 AM over the next few months and read through one of the gospels together?”

He said yes, and I don’t think he or I fully knew what we just agreed to.

I didn’t have a plan, and I had no idea what it was going to be like that first Friday morning. I’m a pastor, I thought to myself, I should know how to do this. But, I was feeling overwhelmed by the prospect of studying the Bible with one of my kids. We had read through storybook Bibles together as a family, but this felt like something new. I wanted to be an “intentional father,” like Jon Tyson talks about in his book, but I didn’t know where to start with reading the Bible.

So, that first morning, we opened up the first chapter of the Gospel of Mark and started reading until it felt right to stop. I didn’t have much of a plan beyond that. We ended up watching a Bible Project video as part of it, and I gave him one of my extra pocket notebooks to take notes with. We ended with prayer, ate breakfast with the other kids, and that was it.

Then, the next Friday we did it again.

It’s been over a year since we started, and we’ve missed a few Fridays, but we’re still going strong. He’s eight now, and we call it our “Discipleship Journey. Through trial and error, we’ve figured out a format that works for us. And, sometimes, he’s the one who wakes me up to do it.

You might be a parent like me who wants to study the Bible with your kids beyond reading through storybook Bibles, but you’re not sure where to start. In the rest of this post, I’m going to share the three essential supplies you need to get started, a flexible six-step format for studying the Bible with your kids that takes less than thirty minutes, responses to some questions you might be asking, and, if you’re not convinced to try it yet, a short interview with my now eight-year-old son about his first year.

The Three Essential Supplies You Need

You don’t need much to do a Bible study with your kids, but there are a few essentials that will help you get started.

1) Bible

One of the first Bibles I remember owning is the NIV New Adventure Bible for Kids with its metallic cover. (If you know, you know.) We bought him the CSB Explorer Bible for Kids because that’s the translation we use at our church and, like any good kids study Bible, it’s full of fun pictures and info pages.

We still read storybook Bibles like The Jesus Storybook Bible and The Biggest Story Bible Storybook as a family, but as we’re starting to study the Bible, I want to help him get familiar with a translation that he can grow up with. In general, my advice would be to use a translation that’s somewhere in the middle of the Bible translation spectrum (“dynamic equivalence”), but figure out what works for helping your kids engage with the Bible.

I’ve always felt that, like languages, the first translation of the Bible you use will become your “heart translation” of the Bible—even if you end up using a different translation down the road.

2) Notebook

I’m a notebook guy, and I always have a pocket notebook with me. I’ve also always been someone who studies the Bible with a journal. (Right now, I’m using a notetaking Bible instead of a Bible and a journal so it’s all in one place.)

Instead of a big journal, which might feel intimidating, I bought him a few pocket notebooks. You can find 3.5” x 5.5” notebooks just about anywhere, but I like the ones created by field notes. They tend to be just the right size for what we do in our Bible study.

3) Pen or Pencil

Last thing. Get your kid a good pen or pencil. It was probably a mistake to start with a pen, but I’ve always been a pen person. I’m a fan of the Pilot G-2 07 because they’re inexpensive but they are still an enjoyable enough pen to write with. I’ve found that, if you have a writing utensil you enjoy using, you’re more likely to write with it in the first place and write for longer. While I’m teaching him to read the Bible, it doesn’t hurt to teach him the art of finding the right pen.

A Six-Step Format That Takes Less Than 30 Minutes

After a year of trial-and-error, we tend to follow the same basic six-step format. It almost always takes less than thirty minutes, and you’re free to adapt it. It’s rooted in some of the best practices of people who know far more about family discipleship than I do.

1) SING.

I want my kids to be able to find their way around the Bible on their own. To help with that, we sing one of the songs I learned when I was a kid as part of AWANA growing up—songs that I still sing in my head as I’m looking for books of the Bible. Since we’ve been in the New Testament, we sing the “Books of the New Testament” song. Each week, I sang less and less and let him sing more and more until he could sing it himself.

Early on, as part of helping him find his way around a Bible, we also talked about “chapters” (the big numbers) and “verses” (the small numbers). He’s now more comfortable finding a verse in the Bible all on his own.

2) READ.

In general, I think it’s best to start with a gospel account about the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. We chose to start with the Gospel of Mark since it’s the shortest of the four gospels, but you can figure out what’s best for you.

We didn’t have an official reading plan. We would just read a little bit of Mark each week until it felt like a natural breaking point. Sometimes, it was less than ten verses and, other times, it was close to an entire chapter. Most of the time, we take turns reading. Since we started when he was in first grade and still fairly new to reading, I’ve been able to listen to his reading and comprehension improve each week. (I have also loved watching how he’s learning to mark up his Bible.)

When we started, we also watched a Bible Project summary of Mark so that he could get the big picture—and I explained that I often watch videos like these to help me, too. (It was a good introduction to some of the resources out there to help you understand the Bible.)

3) TALK.

Reading through the Gospel of Mark verse-by-verse has opened up discussions about things we might normally never talk about—from demons to divorce. There have been times when I’ve thought, “I hope you didn’t hear what we just read” or “Please don’t ask me about this thing we just read at 6:30 in the morning,” but he has and it’s led to some of our best discussions.

To get our discussion going, I’ll try to ask some basic questions every time:

• How would you sum up what we just read in your own words?

• What was something that stood out to you while we were reading?

• Was anything confusing? Do you have questions about what we just read?

• What would you feel in that situation?

These are some of the basic Bible study questions that are in my bones at this point and, by asking them out loud, I hope they’re starting to get in his bones, too.

I’ll be honest: Sometimes, we’re both so tired that our discussion can’t get going. There have been times when neither of us were really up for discussing much or, when we both woke up late, and didn’t leave much time for discussion. But, that’s okay because that’s what real Bible reading is like. You don’t always get a ton of insights. You don’t always have enthralling discussions. But, you get up and read it anyway.

4) WRITE.

The last question I always ask him is, “What’s one thing you learned about Jesus?” Since we’re reading through a gospel, this question works, but, depending on what book of the Bible you’re reading through, you might need to find a different question that works better.

We try to summarize it together in one sentence. This exercise is intended to help us find one key takeaway each time we read. Here are just a few of the things we wrote down as we read through the gospel of Mark:

• Jesus can forgive our sins. (Mark 2:1-12)

• Jesus has authority over storms. (Jesus is God!) (Mark 4:35-41)

• Jesus is the saving king. (Mark 8:22-33)

• Jesus loves good questions, but he can’t be trapped. (Mark 12:13-27)

Since we started this journey in first grade, I’ve also enjoyed getting to watch his handwriting and spelling improve from week to week.

5) DRAW.

I always encourage him to take a few minutes at the end to draw some kind of picture of something that happened in what we read. I’m a visual learner, and it’s always helped me to draw something (usually a diagram) as part of the learning process. Sometimes, I draw too.

His drawings typically involve stick figures and thought bubbles, but I know it’s helping him sink the story into his memory. It works a different part of his brain, which is something I learned in one of my favorite books from 2025, and it introduces some variety into how we engage with the Bible.

(By the way, my kids and I love learning to draw with Art For Kids Hub on YouTube.)

6) PRAY.

At the end, we both pray.

When we started, I was doing more of the praying but he’s grown more comfortable praying every week. It’s usually less than a minute of prayer, but we pray through some of the things on our minds and some of the things we’re praying about as a family. I also encourage him to let our Scripture passage shape how we pray so that he’s learning how to let the Bible launch you into prayer.

By the time we say amen, one or two of the other kids have found their way downstairs and are asking when it’s time for breakfast.

FAQ About Bible Study with a 7-Year-Old

You might still have some questions and, if I don’t cover them here, let me know in the comments and I’ll be happy to provide a response.

Leave a comment

What time should you do this?

For us, it’s 6:30 AM on Fridays, but it’s whatever works best for you. The important thing is that you find a consistent time that works for you and your kid so that you can build a habit.

Do you do this every week?

We try to do it every week, but we miss some weeks. Sometimes, both of us stayed up too late the night before. There are times when he’s been the one to wake me up, though, and say, “Dad, it’s time for discipleship journey.”

How can you keep it from feeling like a chore?

The main thing is to keep it low-pressure. Don’t let it turn into a chore, but also find ways to help your kids keep with it when it’s challenging. One thing we did, at the same time, was watch through all nine episodes of Star Wars as well as Skeleton Crew the night before. That helped him to see that not only is he old enough to read the Bible with dad, he’s also old enough to watch Han Solo and Chewie blast some stormtroopers.

Anything you would add to the format?

I think the format works, but one thing I want to add in is memorization. In Family Discipleship, Matt Chandler and Adam Griffin say, “Don’t underestimate what your kids can learn and memorize. From a very young age, kids are capable of memorizing Scripture and repeating catechism answers verbatim.” It would be so easy to work this into the format.

How do you know if your kids are old enough?

I waited until he could read and write before we started, but pay attention to them showing interest in doing something like this. It’s easier to start when they’re interested than it is to when they’re not interested. Let them see YOU study the Bible, and you’ll be surprised by the questions they ask about it!

Interview with My Eight-Year-Old

If you’re still not sure if this is something you want to try, take my eight-year-old’s word for it.

Last week, during our Friday morning discipleship journey, I told him I was working on an article to help other dads and moms open up the Bible with their kids. Here’s five questions I asked him and what he had to say:

Dad: “Why do you think this is important?”

Levi: “Because it’s important to learn about Jesus, and this will help you take steps toward following Jesus.”

Dad: “What have you enjoyed about it?”

Levi: “I enjoy getting to wake up early and be with my dad.”

Dad: “What’s hard about it?”

Levi: “Sometimes, I’m sleepy … or I can’t think.”

Dad: “Anything else people should know?”

Levi: “Reading in the Bible isn’t just a fun thing to do, it’s also a privilege.”

Dad: “Any advice to kids who are starting?”

Levi: “It will lead to a deeper friendship with Jesus, and reading the Bible is also fun.”

We’re a year into studying the Bible together now, and we don’t have any regrets. It’s one of a few things, along with an annual camping weekend I do with two other dads (more on that in a future post), that I’m starting while he’s young that I can build on when he gets older.

If your kids are old enough, start a conversation with your son or daughter about studying the Bible together. Put a time on the calendar. Then, open the Bible and start. Make it fun. Do it again next week. Don’t give up if you both sleep in one week. Before long, you’ll be a year into it and you might be surprised by what God does in your lives.

As I’m getting started, I’m going to try my own adapted quarterly 3-2-1 format with you and I’d love to know what you think:

• 3 Quotes I Highlighted for You

• 2 Lessons I’m Learning Right Now

• 1 Sermon You Might Enjoy

In the rest of this email, there’s a surprisingly enjoyable book about the history of Sunday, a lesson on the power of walking together as a family, and a sermon that’s a follow-up to my most viral note on Susbtack—yet.

Three Quotes I Highlighted For You

I make a reading list every quarter and, as I finish up books, most of the time I make a book note with quotes, ideas, and action steps that I can reference later. Here are three quotes from three books I highlighted for you.

1) “Given their observance of the Lord’s resurrection on the first day of the week, and the manner they related that day with the first day of creation, Christians would soon point out that the first day of the week was also the eighth, and that therefore what they celebrated on that day, besides the resurrection of Jesus and the beginning of a new creation, was also the promise of the eighth, the beginning of eternity.”

-Justo L. Gonzalez, A Brief History of Sunday

I began reading about the history of Sunday in preparation for an upcoming teaching series I’m starting on Easter called Resurrecting Sunday. I didn’t expect this book to become one of my favorite books so far this year. While I know not everyone gets Sundays off work, if you do, you can thank the enduring influence of Christianity even in a secular age. The history of Sunday is fascinating.

2) “You must read. Read something new. Read something old. Reread something you’ve already read. Read a few pages of this one or that one. Linger when a passage strikes you. Read something critical. Read something beautiful. Read something dark. Read something you disagree with. Reflect. Read more. Repeat. Talk to the dead until you die.”

-Ryan Holiday, Wisdom Takes Work

I’ve been a fan of reading since high school, and I’m not sure what kind of husband, dad, pastor, writer, or leader I would be without books. As he also says in this book, one of the four books in his series on virtues, “There are many paths to wisdom, but nearly every one of them runs through books.” I agree. If you’re not sure where to start with reading, start with making a reading list of just three books this quarter.

3) “In my lifetime (I am 48) there has been a shift in the way in which evangelicals pray. When I was a student in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and then in Aberdeen, Scotland, one of the defining features of university Christian Unions was the prayer meeting. Evangelical student groups had two main gatherings each week – one focused on Bible teaching and the other dedicated completely to prayer. Whereas in Belfast about 50% of the members came to pray, in Aberdeen the figure was around 80%. But universally, coming together to pray was a reliable index of spiritual maturity and commitment. For most students this pattern was replicated in their local church, where Sunday’s teaching was accompanied by some kind of prayer gathering through the week. The vibrancy may have varied, but the understanding was that to be at the core of church life involved a commitment to prayer. That is no longer the case.”

-Gary Millar, Calling on the Name of the Lord: A Biblical Theology of Prayer

I try to regularly read something out of the New Studies in Biblical Theology series. I picked up this one on the recommendation of Pastor Jon Tyson at Church of the City. (I think!) Millar argues that prayer, at its core, is simply asking God to deliver on his promises, and he makes the case by tracking this thread from Genesis to Revelation. This quote comes from the “Afterword” and it left me convicted about the state of the church’s prayer meeting. We’ve been pursuing prayer as a church for the past two years, and I’ve seen our growth, but I also see the work we still need to do.

Two Lessons I’m Learning Right Now

On our staff team at our church, we like to say, “There are no wins and losses—just wins and lessons.” At the end of each quarter, I try to write down a few lessons I’m learning. Here are just two of those lessons.

1. Don’t skip from “build” to “scale.”

This is actually a lesson I’ve been learning all year. When you’re building something, the common maxim is: build, prove, scale. Whenever I build something, I tend to move immediately from building something to, “How can I get this into as many hands as possible?” In between those steps, though, you have to prove the idea. Since the fall, we’ve been doing that with Everyday Institute—a series of four courses designed to make it simple for people, ministries, and churches to accelerate discipleship every single day. We’ve been “proving” Everyday Institute at our church with a true pilot year, and it’s been a highlight for me. As we’ve been doing so, I’ve been able to test out some aspects of the experience that will make it even better as we give it away to other churches.

2. Families that walk together stay together.

Julie and I both love to walk, and we have discovered the physical and mental benefits that come with walking. (As I wrote in my Hear From God in Forty Emails or Less series: If you want to hear from God, sometimes you just need to take a walk.) As it’s getting warmer outside and our youngest is finally old enough to do some of the walking on his own, we’ve been trying to go on walks and local hikes together as a family of five. There’s plenty of complaining at times, but simply walking for an hour has made space for wonder, conversations, and the occasional sword fight with sticks that might otherwise not happen. Just make sure you bring snacks.

One Sermon You Can Listen to On Your Next Walk or Drive

If you didn’t know, I’m the Lead Pastor at Bellevue Christian Church in Pittsburgh, PA. Over the past few years, we’ve been teaching through an expository series called Highlights from Acts. We broke it into multiple seasons, with other series in-between, and we’re in Season 4 (Acts 18-21).

In February, I shared a note with a picture of my initial sermon preparation notes on Acts 18:24-28. It went a little viral (at least for me), and I was even asked to write an article about it for a British preaching magazine (look for that article in August). It’s the (mostly) analog first step in the sermon-writing process that involves simply sitting with the teaching text, a pen, and the Holy Spirit for 60-90 minutes.

Here’s the sermon those notes turned into by Sunday. It’s all about how the next generation of believers needs more coaches like Aquila and Priscilla and less critics. (You can also check it out on Spotify or Apple podcasts.)

—

I’m Austin Gohn, and I want to say thanks for subscribing.

Next quarter, I’ll be writing about my journey this past year reading through the Gospel of Mark with my eight-year-old and some of what I’ve learned from nearly fifteen years of practicing Sabbath.

I’d love to hear from you: What would you love me to write about?

Leave a comment

P.S. I’ll also be releasing the next, 100% free course from Everyday Institute in April. To be the first to get access to it as well as a list of 21 Books That Will Accelerate Discipleship, subscribe here.

If you have been subscribed to this Substack for a while, you might know that I have a particular interest in how people hear God in the decisions in that matter most. In 2025, I wrote a forty email series all about it and introduced a simple tool I use to guide people called the H.E.A.R. Framework—designed to help people pay attention to four of the most common ways God guides people.

After finishing Volume 1 of a two-part biography about Hudson Taylor as part of this quarter’s reading list, all about his early years, I saw an opportunity to do a case study on his experience with hearing God in one of the decisions that matter most. In this post, I’ll tell the story of how he experienced God’s guidance as a young adult, imaginatively work his experience through the H.E.A.R. Framework, and share a few lessons for you as you seek God’s guidance in the decisions that matter most.

Hudson Taylor as a Young Adult Who Wanted to Hear God

From a young age, Hudson Taylor was primed to expect God’s guidance.

His parents, James and Amelia, as part of a long legacy of faith going back generations to the First Great Awakening, were committed to teaching their kids to listen for God’s voice through the Bible and prayer.

Despite his upbringing, though, like many teenagers, he began to lose his childhood hunger for God. By the age of seventeen, he had nearly drifted out of faith completely. His mother, Amelia, much like Saint Augustine’s mother Monica before her and many moms and dads since, was desperately praying for him to come back to faith.

Eventually, he makes “the first conscious surrender of his heart to God” after reading a little book on his dad’s bookshelf about the finished work of Jesus.1 When he shares the news with his mom, who was away at the time, she tells him that she already knew. The Holy Spirit had nudged her to pray for him that same day and, after hours of prayer, revealed to her heart that he had finally surrendered to God.

From that moment on, Hudson Taylor’s spiritual growth was fast-tracked.

One afternoon, he was talking with God and felt the nudge toward setting apart his life to be used by God in some way. He said, “I besought him to give me some work for Him, as an outlet for my love and gratitude; some self-denying service, no matter what it might be, however trying or however trivial; something with which He would be pleased, and that I might do for Him who had done so much for me.” As he’s praying, he sensed in his heart, “For what service I was accepted I knew not. But a deep consciousness that I was not my own took possession of me, which has never since been effaced.”2

He knew that God was going to use him.

For the rest of 1849, as a teenager whose faith had just come alive, Hudson Taylor’s main prayer to God seemed to be something like: God, I know you want to use me, but how? It wasn’t until a few months later, on December 2, 1849, that he got his initial sense of God’s answer to that question.

At that time, he was praying to God that, if God would just break the power of sin over his life, he’d do anything for him—a prayer that every teenager at Christian summer camp has prayed at some point. As he’s praying, realizing that he may have over-promised God in that moment of spiritual anxiety, he felt a word from God in his heart. Describing it later, “I felt as though I wished to withdraw my promise, but could not. Something seemed to say, ‘Your prayer is answered, your conditions are accepted.’ And from that time the conviction has never left me that I was called to go to China.”3

For the next few years, his question was something like, “Okay, God, I know I’m supposed to go to China as a missionary, but how and when?”

He read up everything he could on China but, for the most part, he experienced both external and internal roadblocks. “For then it was, almost immediately after he had come to know the will of God for his future,” his biographer writes, “that a counter-current set in, as powerful as it was unexpected.”4

After sharing his desire with a pastor, who had a copy of a book on China that he wanted to read, the pastor asked, “And how do you propose you go there?” Hudson Taylor shared his faith that God would supply his needs. And, the unprompted advice he got from this pastor in return was, “Ah, my boy, as you grow older you will become wiser than that.”5 (He said later that he grew older but not wiser.)

His parents were mostly neutral about it—neither particularly discouraging or encouraging.

For a brief moment, he fell in love with someone, but she did not share his interest in moving to China and they broke it off.

He was in his early twenties and nearly three years had passed since he first felt that he was supposed to go to China. In the meantime, he had begun pursuing medical training as something that might open the door for him to do work in China. He was feeling ready to go, but after asking for wisdom from those closest to him, he writes in a letter his mom, “As to my going to China—in accordance with the unanimous advice of those I have consulted here and with your opinion, I intend, D.V., [meaning “God-Willing”] to remain in Hull another year to wait upon the Lord for guidance. I was much pleased with your judgment, as I had prayed to the Lord, to whom all hearts are open, to bring us definitely to one mind. If it be His will for me to go sooner, He can thrust me out or open his promises.”6 He trusted that God was guiding him through the unified opinion of his friends and family.

Eventually, he ended up in London. There was really only one potential open door to China, and it was through a committee called the Chinese Evangelisation Society. But, he was basically red-taped by it—shutting the only open door right in his face. He also got so sick at the time that he almost died. Anyone else might have given up and discerned that God wasn’t guiding him toward China.

Finally, in 1853, nearly four years after he felt he was supposed to go to China, he dropped out of medical school and went all in on the possibility of getting to China. He received a letter from the Chinese Evangelisation Society on June 4, 1853 telling him that they would send him there as soon as he was ready. And, shortly after, he got on a boat and left for China—and it’s just the beginning of a life of listening for God’s guidance whose impact the world still feels today.

How Hudson Taylor Might Have Used the H.E.A.R. Framework

If you subscribe to this Substack, you’ll get a free one-page H.E.A.R. Framework that’s designed to help you discern how God might be guiding you. If Hudson Taylor subscribed this Substack and used this framework, here is a picture of what I imagine it might have looked like:

I’ve clearly taken some liberties with this, but it’s probably in the ballpark. For more on the steps in his framework, check out this post on Five Steps That Will Prime You to Hear from God.

Three Lessons from Hudson Taylor for the Next Time You Want God’s Guidance

If you’re ever seeking God’s guidance about one of the decisions that matters most, here are three lessons you can learn from Hudson Taylor’s first experience.

1) Resistance doesn’t mean you’re not hearing from God.

Hudson Taylor felt a clear word from God in his heart that he was called to go to China. For the next three to four years, though, all he experienced was resistance and what felt like “closed doors.” If resistance had been the determining factor in God’s guidance, he might have never gone to China.

As I shared in a post called Three Myths about Open Doors, the path of least resistance is not necessarily God’s will for your life. (Neither is the path of most resistance, for that matter.) Sometimes, there’s this idea that if it’s God’s will, it should be easy, but that’s not always (or even often) the case. Resistance is just one factor among many that has to be held in tension with the other ways that God guides.

2) Not all advice is created equal.

Hudson Taylor experienced “wisdom” from a few people about his sense from God that he was called to go to China. They told him it wasn’t wise and that he didn’t stand a chance. If he had listened to their advice, he might have never gone to China.

On the other hand, when he was feeling restless and ready to go to China as an angsty young adult in medical school, he listened to the unified wisdom of a core group of family and friends—discerning that he needed to wait on God’s guidance for another year. He could have said, “But I’ve heard from the Lord in my heart. Forget you guys.” But, he wisely allowed them to operate as what I’ve called a Hearing God Mastermind for him, and he listened to their opinions.

Even if you sense a word from God in your heart, submit that word to a community of trusted people in your life—remembering that not all advice is created equal.

3) Be careful about timelines.

When I walk people through the H.E.A.R. Framework, I encourage them to write down a timeline for hearing God’s voice. I recommend not making it too short or too long—starting with just forty days if it makes sense to do so.

For Hudson Taylor, within just a few months of asking God for guidance on how God wanted to use him, he had a clear word from the Lord to go to China But, it would be three years before the door actually opened for him to do that. He had to balance both urgency and patience—trusting God’s timing.

Sometimes, you’ll experience God’s guidance about something on a shorter timeline, but there will be a longer timeline between that moment of guidance and actually being able to take the next step. Other times, you’ll get to the end of a discernment timeline and the only sense you’ll have from God is, “Wait, take more time with this decision.”

If you’re interested in reading more on Hudson Taylor, I don’t recommend starting with the two-part biography. Start with the shorter biography about him called J. Hudson Taylor: A Man in Christ by Roger Steer. I read that book in my early twenties after a recommendation from a mentor (and made a book note for it), and it’s what made me fascinated with his life.

If you’re interested in learning more about the H.E.A.R Framework for experiencing God’s guidance in the decisions that matter most, start with the last email in my forty email series. It has a full list of all forty emails and asterisks marking the ten best emails.

I’d love to hear from you: What was helpful to you from Hudson Taylor’s experience of God’s guidance in early adulthood?

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The short answer: I don’t.

For the past fifteen years, I’ve been slowly tweaking a system for making BOOK NOTES—a digital note with basic information about a book, anything I want to be able to quickly reference later, and a few other things that I’ll share about in this post. I started in June 2011, as a college student, with Humility by Andrew Murray and Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey, and I’ve made over 300 book notes in the years since.

Using one of the ten books I enjoyed most last year as an example, I am going to walk you through what I do that helps me remember what I read and reference it when I need it most: how to make notes while you read, take notes after you read, and store notes for later (including a template you can use for getting started)—as well as some frequently asked questions.

How to Make Book Notes

If you take just about any book off my shelf, you’ll find that it’s marked up.

There are asterisks (sometimes circled, sometimes not), underlines (sometimes straight, sometimes wavy), circles and boxes, brackets, notes in the margin, a piece of paper stuffed into the pages with scribbled notes on it, the occasional dog-eared page, and more.

For example, here are two pages from The Extinction of Experience—one of the ten books I enjoyed most last year:

Think of these markings like NOTE-TAKING HIEROGLYPHICS that make sense to you even if it would take a team of professionals years to decipher what some of your notes mean. (But, even I struggle to understand my own notetaking hieroglyphics and I am wildly inconsistent in how I mark up my books.)

For the most part, it doesn’t matter what the markings mean. I leave these markings as signposts that can help me rediscover what I want to remember when I’m done with the book. As I flip back through the book, my notes and scribbles are like neon lights telling me where to look for quotes, ideas, and actions (more on that next).

You might feel like it’s sacrilege to mark up a book, or you might be someone who always has the thought of “resale value” in the back of your mind. I’d encourage you, if you never marked up a book, to try it. Unless it’s a first edition of The Hobbit, its resale value went down, like a new car, the moment you drove it off the lot. If you can’t bring yourself to mark it up, at least stuff a few pieces of paper into the book like I do, so you can take notes on that.

You can also take notes in digital books, but your tools are more limited. You can highlight good quotes and leave notes, but my fat thumbs make it hard to type anything I can decipher later using the tiny little keyboard. (If anyone has used the Kindle Scribe, let me know what your experience has been like.)

I read both digital and physical books, for different reasons, but after years of using both, I’ve found that I remember things better from physical books than digital ones. I think that’s because I interact with them differently. Writing in and interacting with a physical book, expanding on what Christine Rosen argues in Chapter 3 of The Extinction of Experience, has a way of slowing you down and priming you for deeper processing.

There’s the physical page you flip, not just the infinite scroll of a digital book (even with the illusion of pages)—locating words in specific places that helps your brain “place” the words somewhere. Then, there’s the act of writing in a book with a pen, whether it’s just a small underline or an essay in marginalia. And, even after the book is over, the act of typing up or writing down what you want to remember will deepen the neural pathways more than simply clicking “copy and paste.”

How to Take Book Notes

When I finish a book, especially non-fiction, I generally try to organize the notes I made while reading into three main categories: actions, ideas, and quotes.

1) ACTIONS: What actions did this book prompt me to do?

Not every book prompts me to do something after I’m done with it. Reading, at times, is simply about the joy of reading itself without making a to-do list. Be careful to not turn every book you read into a village you ransack like a literary Viking.

There are many books, though, that prompt me to do something, and I find it helpful to read with what some have called a “bias toward action.”1 When I don’t read with a bias toward action, I find that I will end up reading multiple books that give me basically the same advice before I do anything about it. Some books are meant to be applied.

It’s easy to confuse reading about doing something with actually doing something. Yes, there’s a time to gather information about a subject but, unless you’re writing a peer-reviewed research paper about it, there comes a moment when you actually need to do something about it.

For example, after finishing The Extinction of Experience, I listed an action item as: “Encourage the kids to do more free-drawing of things they see.” I had read in the book about the value of using your hands to draw things. I intended to encourage my kids to do that, but I ended up starting to do more of that myself by taking up a “pen and watercolor” hobby a few months later with my birthday money.

2) IDEAS: What ideas did this book generate in me?

When it feels like my well of ideas is running dry, I often find that one of the most helpful things to do is simply read a book (or take a walk). Reading tends to activate the idea-generating part of your brain. In fact, one of the reasons why it’s a struggle to stay focused while reading is simply that books unlock new ideas that start floating around in your brain while you’re trying to read.

An idea might be a connection you’re making between what you’re reading and something else you’ve read or an experience you’ve had. Original ideas rarely happen while you’re sitting alone in a room staring at a screen. They often happen in the middle of a good book.

For example, while reading The Extinction of Experience, the question came to mind, “What does the good news of Jesus sound like to a world lacking in experience?” Rosen didn’t ask that question (it’s not the purpose of her book), but it’s a question that came into my mind as a pastor reading her book (and it hadn’t occurred to me before I read the book).

3) QUOTES: What quotes do I want to reference from this book?

The bulk of my notes from a book typically fall into the category of quotes. Whether it’s word-for-word quotes or paraphrased summaries, I want to make it easy for me to find those quotes later without having to go search through the book itself.

I’ll type up some quotes, especially from physical books. If it’s a digital book, most of the time I’ll just copy and paste—but, even with digital books, I often find it helpful (for memory purposes) to type out the quote. Sometimes I’ll organize the quotes by chapter, and other times it’s just one long list of quotes. To help me find the best quotes later, I’ll often bold and highlight certain quotes in my notes as well. Always include the page number.

For example, while reading The Extinction of Experience, here’s just one of many quotes I saved about why painting, drawing, and doing things with our hands matters: “There are times when we have to get our brains out in our fingers.”2

How to Store Book Notes

Your storage system for books notes is what many have called your “SECOND BRAIN”3—a place you can trust to remember things for you.

People have all kinds of second brains:

• Scraps of paper stuffed into the book

• Notes inside the front and back covers of physical books

• A commonplace journal of some kind

• A document in Google Drive

• A document on your computer

• An old-school filing system

• Digital notetaking apps like Apple Notes or Evernote

Personally, I use Evernote—for now.4 I create a new note for many of the books I read, and I add it to a folder simply labeled “Book Notes.” Generally, I use the following template as a starting point, which you are free to copy or adapt:

• Bibliographic Info (Author Name, Book Title, City + Publisher, Year)

• Actions (see above, usually as bullet points)

• Ideas (see above, usually as bullet points)

• Summary (3-5 sentences of how I would summarize the book to someone else)

• Table of Contents (I don’t always include this, but sometimes it’s helpful if I want to remember the overall design of a book.)

• Quotes (see above)

For example, here’s what some of my digital note from The Extinction of Experience looks like:

In general, whatever system you use for storing notes, I recommend that it has two features.

First, your book note storage system should be simple. It can be easy to overcomplicate book notes with things like “tags” or by trying to figure out which folder the book note should be located in. In general, I’ve found that keeping things simple will increase the likelihood that you’ll make a note in the first place and be able to find it when you need it. That’s why I have just one folder called “Book Notes.” Everything ends up there.

Second, your book note storage system should be portable. That’s one reason why I have opted for a digital system because I work from lots of different places. You might be someone who always works from the same place, and you can have some kind of physical system for book notes. But most people need it to be portable in order for it to be useful.

F.A.Q. on Booknotes

These are not, technically, frequently asked questions because no one has ever asked them to me. But, I imagine that, if you’ve made it this far in this post, these are the questions you might want to ask.

Do you take a book note for every book you read?

I don’t always take book notes. Sometimes, it’s because the book didn’t have enough to warrant a book note. Other times, it’s because I just didn’t feel like it and moved onto the next book on my list. If I make a book note for one out of three books I read, I’m doing well.

In general, it’s been a more challenging discipline to keep as work and family life have become busier over the past few years. I’m more tempted to skip the step of making a book note, but I have found that I often regret it when I choose to get started on another book instead of taking a brief pause to make a book note for the last one.

How long does it take you to make a book note?

If I’m estimating, probably 10% of the time it took to read the book. Think of it like a BOOK TITHE. Offer 10% of the time it took you to read that book to the discipline of noting what you read in that book. You will be rewarded for your offering.

On average, I usually give myself an hour to make a good book note. Some books take longer than that, of course, and some less. (For example, lengthy books like A Secular Age took me quite a bit of time, and they are the ones I am most tempted to skip.)

When you’re starting the discipline of book notes, I recommend setting a timer for an hour. Or even just ten minutes, which is enough time to write down three things you want to remember. Force yourself to pick and choose what you’re going to store. If it takes you too long to make a book note, especially the early ones, you’ll never want to make one again.

When do you make a book note?

Book notes are best to make while the book is still fresh on your mind. If I don’t make a book note within two weeks of finishing the book, chances are, I’m never going to make a book note.

Final Note on Book Notes

I didn’t have a good system for book notes from day one. When I look back on my early notes from June 2011, they were mostly just quotes that I didn’t want to forget.

Don’t worry about having the perfect system for book notes, making a book note for every book you read, or trying to go back through all the books you read last year to make book notes.

Start with the book you’re reading right now.

Mark it up while you read it. Open up a journal, document, or digital note. Set a timer for ten minutes and type up a few notes you want to remember.

Start slow, find a method that works for you, and stick with it for fifteen years.

Here’s what you’ll find: Even if you never open that book note again, you will actually remember more of what you read. Yes, I said at the beginning of this post, I don’t remember as much of what I read as people think I do. But, that’s the short answer. The long answer is that I do remember more than I would if I didn’t take a book note in the first place.

I’d love to hear from you: Have you ever made a book note? If you don’t, what was helpful to you from this post about getting started?

Leave a comment

P.S. If you enjoyed this, check out my last two books about ten books I enjoyed last year and how to build a better reading list.

You can read Dan Pelzer’s whole list here.

As I was reading through his list, it made me realize: You have a limited number of books that you will actually have time to read.

That’s one reason I recommend building a READING LIST each year, which is nothing more than a list of books you plan to read this year. Instead of simply logging the books that you read, list the books you want to read.

As someone who has been building reading lists for the past few years that have helped me read hundreds of books (even if they weren’t all worth reading), I want to share five practices with you that might help you build a better reading list of your own—including the four rules that helped me get out of a reading rut.

1) Get Most Book Recommendations from People, not Algorithms

How did you first hear about the book you’re reading right now?

For example, I’m reading the first book in the Wingfeather Saga at the moment. I first heard about it from some other parents I know. Eventually, I bought it from a used bookstore for my oldest son and, recently, he said to me, “Dad, you should read this, too.” It was my son’s recommendation that got it into my hands.

When it comes to book recommendations, I find it wise to prioritize recommendations from actual people (and more than one person). While some books are simply picked up after seeing them on the shelf at the bookstore and others because my soul-less algorithm told me I might like this one next, most books that I end up reading came to me by way of recommendation from actual people.

For example, here are just four ways I tend to discover my next read:

• Asking, “What are you reading?” I’ll often ask people in my life what they’re reading right now or what they’ve read recently. Sometimes, I’ll toss that question out to a group text and crowdsource book recommendations from people I trust.

• End-of-Year Lists. One of my favorite things about Substack is that lots of people make end-of-year lists of book recommendations. But, you can also usually find lists in places like The New York Times, The Atlantic, Christianity Today, or whatever magazine you read.

• Book Recommendation Newsletters. Byron Borger, who runs a bookstore called Hearts and Minds, writes a legendary book recommendation email that I get in my inbox. (He’s also the only physical bookstore I know of that carries and promotes copies of my first book A Restless Age.)

• Podcasts. It’s no secret that many of the people doing podcast interviews are promoting their newest book. Sometimes, after listening to someone talk about their book, I’ll add it to my list—and, sometimes, I find out that everything interesting in the book was in the interview.

In general, if I hear about a book from three different sources (like those listed above), I’ll add it to my list. (That’s how I ended up reading Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine last year.)

If you want some other ideas, I asked people on Substack, a platform that’s full of readers, how they discover what books they read and here are what two people had to say:

• Zack Armfield: “Continuing through known and loved authors’ works, 2) reading books that THEY read, 3) friends, 4) random news of new books from publishing orgs I like.”

• Kiersten D: “I usually read everything (old and new works) from favorite authors. Most of my favorite, currently living authors are all interconnected somehow, so I find out about new books via podcasts or instagram. I also make a point to read a book if it’s recommended to me by a trusted voice (college professors/mentors, leadership coach, my preacher-dad, my best friend).”

If you’re looking for some reading recommendations, here’s a list of ten books I enjoyed last year (out of the 45 I read), a list of five books I recommend on hearing God, a list of books and resources I made for our church (including the five books I recommend people start with), and if you subscribe to my Everyday Institute Substack, you’ll get an email with 21 books that will accelerate discipleship every single day.

2) Start a Backburner Booklist

Scott Belsky, in his book on project management called Making Things Happens, says that you need to keep a “backburner” of projects that aren’t actionable right now but might be one day.

That’s also true of books.

Every time you hear about a book, you can’t just stop what you’re currently reading and start reading it. I mean, you could, but you’ll never finish a book and your life will be littered with abandoned books.

That’s why you need a BACKBURNER BOOKLIST. A backburner booklist is a list of books you might want to read someday but can’t right now. It gets your list out of your brain and ensures you’ll never have a shortage of books to read.

You might keep your backburner booklist in a document on your computer, a note on your phone, an actual notebook, a wishlist on a website, or just in your brain. (Most books often start with a note in my pocket notebook before being transferred to a digital list.)

Periodically, when you’re wondering what to read next, start with your backburner booklist, scroll through it, and take note of any books it might be time to read.

In addition to helping me remember books that I might want to read, I’ve also discovered that a backburner booklist helps me save money on books and find out which books age well. When I’m at my local thrift store, Half-Price Books, or another used bookstore, I have my backburner booklist in mind and often I’ll find a book that’s been on my list for much cheaper than the cost of buying new.

Also, by not purchasing a book the moment I first hear about it, it gives me time to find out if that book, especially if it’s recently published, is going to age like fine wine or get stale like fresh bread. As someone who worked in a used bookstore, I am well aware that despite the popularity of a book at the moment, that popularity often fades over time.

3) Keep These Four Rules for Reading Lists in Mind

Starting with my backburner booklist, I make a reading list each quarter of books I actually plan to read. In general, when building my reading list, I try to keep four rules in mind.

Read Widely.

In Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, David Epstein (who is also on Substack) says that the world needs more people who refuse to specialize only in one subject. Serial innovators, like Thomas Edison, were people who didn’t just stay in their reading lane. By learning across a variety of disciplines, especially through reading, they tend to develop what Epstein calls a “mental Swiss Army knife.”1

That’s why, on my own reading list, I try to pick books that fit into a range of different categories—at least one book in each of the following: biography / history, social sciences / science, devotional literature, Bible / theology, practical leadership, and fiction. I’ve often found that my best insights come at the intersection of different kinds of reading.

Kiersten D. said it this way when I asked readers on Substack how they pick books, “I do have to make myself break up the genres I am reading. I can very easily get in a rhythm of only reading memoir or fiction or spiritual formation or theology. And so if I noticed I have read four or five of the same genre in a row, I will make myself read something different for a book or two.”

That’s a good practice.

Read Deeply.

If you think of different reading topics like a pool, most of the time you never get out of the shallow end. You read one book on a subject and move on. But, pools are the most fun when you learn how to swim in the deep end.

Each quarter, I try to do a “deep dive” into one subject. It’s usually something that’s on my mind or something related to an upcoming project. For my deep dive, instead of just one book on the topic, I try to read at least three books deep into the topic (which, admittedly, is still the shallow end). Sometimes, I know of only one book on the subject and I’ll discover the other books to read in the sources of that book. Other times, I’ll ask someone who knows more about that subject to recommend some books to me.

For example, I’ve never seen myself as much of a fundraiser, but I’m in a position right now and a season of leadership that requires me to do some fundraising. In addition to asking lots of questions to people I know who are good fundraisers, I’m reading three books deep into fundraising as a starting point. I’m not out of the kiddie pool, yet, but I’m on my way there.

Usually, after my deep dive, I’ll make a digital note of key insights across my reading that I can keep in mind for the future. (For more on what I do after I read a book, look for my next post in two weeks.)

Read Classically.

C.S. Lewis, English literature professor at Oxford and author of The Chronicles of Narnia, once wrote an introduction to an old book. In the introduction, Lewis says, “It’s a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. If that is too much for you, you should at least read one old one to every three new ones.”2 Doing so increases what Alan Jacobs calls your “temporal bandwidth” in Breaking Bread with the Dead.3

In general, I try to read at least one book each quarter that has been around for more than twenty years. For example, at the moment, I’m reading a book that I remember my parents reading when I was a kid that’s still popular today. Usually, I’ll read a book that’s much older than that, but even twenty years can count as a classic for me.

Read Diversely.

A few years ago, I took a look at my bookshelf and I realized something: 95% of the books I read are written by people who look like me. When almost the entirety of your reading life is books by people like you, it can be easy to get stuck in a perspective.

As I finalize my reading list for the quarter, I try to consider if there are any books on my list written by people of a different gender than me, people from different ethnic backgrounds than me, or people who believe differently than I do.

4) Read “Less But Better”

A few years ago, I met someone who tried to read 100 books in a year. I asked her, “How did it go?” She accomplished the feat, but she said something to the effect of, “Never again.” Unless you’re a professional reader, it’s just too many books.

In Essentialism, Greg McKeown introduced me to the phrase, “less but better.” You will always have more books you want to read than time to read them, and the temptation for readers will often be to simply get through as many books as you can.

Choose to be a reading essentialist who reads less but better. Yes, keep the four rules for reading lists in mind, but put some constraints on how much you read. It will force you to choose better books.

For example, I try to read about 48 books a year—which breaks down to twelve books each quarter, four books each month, or a little less than a book each week. When I finalize my reading list for the quarter, I try to limit it to twelve. That constraint forces me to be pickier about what I spend my time reading.

If you’re wondering where to start, start with just twelve books a year or one each month. Most people, even busy parents, can make time for that.

5) Leave Room for Spontaneity

Finally, remember that a reading list at its best is still a draft. It’s a plan that will help you read more, but it’s written in pencil (or pixels) that can and should be changed.

Leave room for books you discover along the way that you want to read. Often, I end each quarter having read about twelve books but my reading list only had six books on it when I started. The rest of the books came along the way.

Quit books that aren’t worth finishing—no matter how many people recommended them to you. I’m the worst at quitting books, but you have no obligation to finish a book. As I learned in one book I didn’t finish (not because it wasn’t worth it but because I just needed a break) don’t give into “sunk cost fallacy,” which is the tendency to think that because you’ve already invested time into something you have to keep investing time into it even though it’s clearly not worth it.4

—

Get most book recommendations from people, not algorithms. Keep a backburner booklist. Read widely, deeply, classically, and diversely. Read “less but better.” And, finally, leave room for spontaneity.

I’d love to hear from you in the comments: How do you pick which books to read, and what’s a book on your reading list right now?

Leave a comment

P.S. If you’re looking for a book to read and you’re a young adult, I wrote a book for you called A Restless Age. As I was nearing the end of young adulthood, I wrote the book I wish I had when I was a young adult. It’s about Saint Augustine and the five searches that every young adult is on. I’d love to see it on one of your top-ten lists next year, and if you hate it, tell no one.

You might be thinking about what you want to read this year. Can I help you out?

I read about 45 books last year, and they weren’t all worth reading. Ten books, though, stood out to me more than the others. As you’re building a book list, you might want to consider adding some of these. They aren’t in any particular order and they cover a wide range of subjects.

Next month, I’ll also write a post with some best practices for building a booklist that I’ve learned and another post about what to do after you read a book so you don’t forget everything you just read.

The Extinction of Experience (Christine Rosen)

My mom saw this sitting on the counter during family vacation and said, “Who is reading this?” I told her that I was, and she said, “Of course, this is what you’re reading.” She knows I’ve always been drawn toward books about what we’ve lost in the digital age, and this is the single best book I’ve ever read in the genre. (I enjoyed it more than Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine.)

The best review I can give of it is the fact that, in the middle of this book, I took a few of my kids and some of their cousins down to a creek near where we were staying. I didn’t bring my phone, and we didn’t come back for two hours. A shoe was lost. A beach was conquered. Memories were made and not a single picture was taken, and I have this book to thank for it.

Read this one analog and, preferably, with a view of the outside. You won’t regret it.

The Marriage You Want (Sheila Wray Gregoire and Dr. Keith Gregoire)

I came across this book while I was preparing my annual four-part biblical theology teaching series for our church (after a few people I trust recommended it to me). (You can listen to The Rise, Fall, Redemption, and Future of Marriage here : Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.)

I didn’t agree with everything in this book (I rarely do!), but I was transformed by the way it helped me see the “mental load” that my wife carries around for our household. It made me repent of how little of that mental load I’ve helped carry over the past thirteen years, and we’ve worked together to discover more ways that I can carry that load with her.

How Big Things Get Done (Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner)

One of the reasons I believe there’s a God is because of the way that sometimes the right book comes into my life at the right time. This was one of those books.

Pastor Jon Tyson (Church of the City New York) shared somewhere that he was reading it, and I added it to my list. (By the way, many of the books I read come by way of recommendations. More on that in my next post.)

I decided to finally read it right as we began to plan out a major project at our church that involves fundraising, construction, and more. It’s one of the biggest projects I’ve ever helped lead, and the advice in this book has been immediately applicable. (The “Eleven Heuristics for Better Project Leadership” at the end of the book are pure gold.)

I loved it so much that I sent a copy to the person who is leading the construction side of the project, and he said it affirms lots of the wisdom he’s learned over the years.

All My Knotted Up Life (Beth Moore)

I’m a Beth Moore fanboy, and I don’t care who knows it.

A number of years ago, while my dad was downsizing and going through old things, he came across a box of Beth Moore workbooks from my mom (who died when I was eleven). He gave them to me, and I read through one of my mom’s workbooks. I came away with a whole new respect for Beth Moore, and I admire her teaching as much as my mom did before me. For more on that, read one of my most well-read essays called “Me, My Mom, and Beth Moore” for Fathom Mag. Even Beth Moore read that essay and found it meaningful to her. (She also thought it was written by a woman and didn’t realize I was a man until a few back-and-forth interactions back at the height of Twitter.)

Reading about her life and how she ended up teaching the Bible inspired me as a Bible teacher, and it helped open my eyes to people in my life that God might want to raise up to teach the Bible.

Untangle Your Emotions (Jennie Allen)

I read this book as part of a deep dive into the “emotional life” as part of researching for the Everyday Life course from Everyday Institute. (We’ll be releasing this course in the next few months. It’s all about following Jesus into the six areas of the life you’re made for. If you want to be the first to know, subscribe to the email.)

Untangle Your Emotions is incredibly practical and biblically sound. It helped me not just talk about emotions with our church, but talk about emotions with my kids as I try to make sense of my own emotions. I keep coming back to the five-stage progression she unpacks for navigating different emotions.

I love this story she tells:

“Jennie,” Dr. C said, in his endlessly empathetic tone, “how long did it take you to get here?” By “here,” he meant “this emotional state you’re in.”

“About forty years,” I said, knowing exactly where he was going.

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s going to take you a minute to get out.”

Raising Emotionally Strong Boys (David Thomas)

Speaking of emotions, this book changed the way I talk with my eldest son about what he’s feeling (and what to do about it).

After reading this book and Jennie Allen’s book, I hung up a chart that gives him language for his emotions (it’s called practicing “emotional granularity”) and we also talk about some healthy ways he can process feeling angry, sad, ashamed, or frustrated.

One of the most helpful parts of the book was about teaching your son to come up with at least five constructive things he can do when he’s feeling big, intense emotions that he’s not sure what to do about. The list we came up with includes building something with LEGO bricks, throwing a football or baseball outside, and playing drums.

If you have sons, read it.

The Mythmakers (John Hendrix)

I’ve read quite a few books about C.S. Lewis over the years, but this was a favorite.

It’s about what happened at the intersection of the lives of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, and it felt like one of those moments when there’s a crossover between two of your favorite tv shows (like when Steve Urkel from Family Matters showed up on Full House).

It’s written as a graphic novel, and, from an artistic standpoint, it’s beautiful. I’m glad I bought a hard copy, and my kids loved looking through it.

The Workshop Survival Guide (Rob Fitzpatrick and Devin Hunt)

Here’s the truth: I haven’t finished this book, yet. And, I didn’t realize it until I started making this list of my top ten books. It’s still on the list, though, because it was so helpful that I put it down and started applying some of the core principles to a workshop I was preparing at the time. Apparently, I forgot to pick it back up.

I’ve been teaching workshops in some form for over a decade, and it’s hard to believe how long I’ve ignored hard-and-fast rules for good workshops. It gets so practical that it even describes how long (and when) breaks should be depending on the length of the workshop. I immediately tried the advice that weekend, and it made a difference.

If you teach workshops, read it.

Redwall (Brian Jacques)

I don’t read much fiction.

This might be a controversial take, but I prefer to engage fiction in the form of good television shows. (And, I’m interested in what you think are the different benefits of reading high-quality fiction versus watching high-quality fiction.)

At the same time, I’m trying to read more fiction—at least one book a quarter (more on that in my next email about picking books). This is partly because, after I shared my top ten booklist a few years ago, my brother-in-law asked me if I read anything fun.

I’m still offended, Brad.

Redwall has been on my list for years, and if a story about a rat army attacking a monastery of mice isn’t fun, I don’t know what is. I enjoyed it, and I’m looking forward to recommending it to my kids as they get a bit older. (It was more violent than you’d think a story about mice could get.)

Unreasonable Hospitality (Will Guidara)

One of the shows we enjoy, but can’t fully recommend because of the language, is The Bear. And, the book that helped me enjoy that show even more was this book (which inspired the show).

I originally picked it up because our staff team at the church where I work was rethinking our approach to hospitality. Unreasonable Hospitality helped with building a culture of hospitality, but it’s about so much more than hospitality. It’s about organizational culture, and it’s the reason we now have a “non-negotiables” list of all our go-to phrases on the office wall where our staff team meets.

I hope you add one of those books to your booklist this year.

You might be wondering, “How do you pick which books to read?” I have a loose strategy, and I’m going to share about that in my next email.

I’d love to hear from you, though: Have you read any of those and, even if you didn’t make a top ten list, what’s a book you read in 2025 that would definitely be on your top ten list?

Leave a comment

P.S. Are you interested in another list of books? I made a list of “21 Books That Accelerate Discipleship Every Single Day” over at Everyday Institute. Just subscribe to my Everyday Institute substack and I’ll send you a PDF of that list.

P.S. Again. Last year, I wrote a forty-part series about hearing God in the decisions that matter most and, near the beginning in one of my most popular posts, I shared my top five book recommendations. You can check those out here.

Let Me Reintroduce Myself

With that in mind, let me introduce yourself (so that you know I’m not a robot either).1

My name is Austin Gohn. My wife and I have been married for over a decade, and we’re raising three kids in Pittsburgh, PA in a home we’re renovating one room at a time.

I’m the lead pastor of Bellevue Christian Church in Pittsburgh, PA—a church that’s been making disciples since 1896. (You can subscribe to our podcast on Spotify here and Apple podcasts here.)

I’m the founder of Everyday Institute—a series of courses designed to make it simple for people, churches, and ministries to accelerate discipleship every single day. (Our next course is coming out in March, but our first three are available for free on our website.)

I’m the author of A Restless Age from Gospel-Centered Discipleship—a book that’s all about Saint Augustine and the five searches of young adulthood. I tried to write the book I wish I had as a young adult.

What’s Next for This Substack

And, I’m also working on my next book that’s all about hearing God in the decisions that matter most, which is what this Substack has been all about so far.

The series that the book will be based on might be over, but this Substack is not. A few changes are in order, though.

First, I’m going to need a new name for this Substack. I’m open to ideas, but I just don’t want to end up calling it “Austy McAustyFace’s Newsletter.” For now, until I come up with something, it’s just going to be my name.

Second, instead of sending posts every week, I will be sending out posts on the first and third Thursday of each month—starting this Thursday. Weekly is fun, but I want to make space to start working on my next book.

With that in mind, here’s what you can look for in your inbox over the next few months:

• A 3-Part Series on Reading Books—including an annual list of ten books I enjoyed this year and might want to add to your own list, a short guide you can use to make your own reading list, and what to do after you read a book (and before you pick up your next one)

• A Series on Practicing Sabbath—including some of what I’ve learned after practicing a weekly sabbath for over a decade and a recipe for sourdough pizza just about anyone can try.

I’ll be experimenting this year with what this newsletter is all about, but for now I want to keep it as practical as I can and always send you something that will help you live everyday life like Jesus.

Thanks for subscribing and for letting me reintroduce myself!

Now, I’d love for you to introduce yourself and one interesting fact about you in the comments so I can get to know you a little better.

Leave a comment

Imagine it’s a few weeks from now, and you’re out to coffee with a friend. As you’re catching up with each other, he shares about a looming decision he’s facing and how he’s not sure what he’s supposed to do.

Normally, you would just tell him what you think he should do and that would be the end of it. You’re usually right anyways. This time, though, you slow down and ask, “What do you feel like God might be saying to you about it?”

“I honestly don’t know,” he says, “I just don’t feel like God speaks to me like he speaks to you. I’ve never heard his voice.”

“I get it, I used to feel like that, too,” you share. Then, you ask, “Can I draw something on a napkin for you?”

“Sure,” he responds, “but I’ve got a feeling you were going to draw it anyway.”

You grab a napkin—complete with a coffee stain. And, because you’re the kind of person who always carries a pen, you click it into action. (If you’re not the kind of person who carries a pen, I recommend the Pilot G-2 07.)

Then, on one side of the napkin, you write three words with space underneath each: QUESTION, OPTIONS, and TIMEFRAME.

“In one sentence, what’s the question you’re asking God?,” you ask him. He tries to nail it down and, when he does, you write it down.

Next, you say, “It seems like you can think of at least two options for what to do. Are there any other options you haven’t considered?” He thinks about it for a moment, and he can come up with at least one more possibility. You write down the three options with space for more down the road.

Finally, you say, “When’s the latest you think you need to make a decision by?” He says, “Before the semester is over.” You write it down.

Then, you flip the napkin over (or open it up) and you draw a vertical line down the middle and horizontal line across—making a quadrant. In the top-left quadrant, you write HEART in capital letters with enough space left in the quadrant for him to write some of his thoughts. In the top-right, EXPERIENCES. Bottom-left, ADVICE. Bottom-right, READING.

“It’s kind of basic,” you explain, “but it spells out H.E.A.R. It’s a simple tool I learned called the H.E.A.R. Framework that’s designed to help you pay attention to four of the most common ways that God guides people like you and me. I used to think God only speaks through something like an audible voice or a burning bush, but I’ve learned since that he speaks through your heart, experiences, the advice of friends like me, and, of course, what you’re reading in the Bible. I used this framework last time I was facing a decision like the one you’re facing now.”

“Oh, that’s helpful,” he says, “When you put it like that, I can actually already think of a few ways God might have already been speaking to me about this decision—even if I think that acronyms are dumb.”

“I do, too, but keep this napkin with you between now and the end of the semester and take note of any ways you sense God might be speaking to you,” you encourage her, “And, let’s set a date on the calendar for around then to get together and talk through how you sense God speaking to you.”

You set a date and add, “By the way, while we have our phones out, let me text you a link to a Substack series I read that goes more in-depth about each part of the framework—stuff like the Could-it-be-God flowchart?, the fleece confirmation spiral, and how to build a biblical operating system through your normal Bible reading plan.”

“What’s Substack?,” he says.

“Nevermind.”

It’s Your Turn to Be a Guide

That conversation was imaginative, but if you’re paying attention and listening well to your friends, you’ll notice all kinds of people who are trying to make a decision and want to hear from God about it. Instead of leaving them to fend for themselves or just offering them your unsolicited advice about what you think they should do, you can now step in as a guide with a tool that will help them hear from God in the decisions that matter most.

That’s my dream.

I want the H.E.A.R. Framework to take on a life of its own as people like you teach it to other people in your life and they teach it to others—until no one really knows who came up with it and it’s just common knowledge for anyone who is following Jesus.

I’ve had so many guides on my journey toward hearing God (as I shared in one of my most popular emails in this series), and I hope I’ve been a helpful guide on your own journey. Now, it’s your turn.

If you enjoyed this series and found it helpful, teach the H.E.A.R. Framework to someone else as opportunities arise and tell me about it (and let me know how it’s helped you, too).

If you need the H.E.A.R. Framework on one page, you can download it below.

H.E.A.R. Framework on One Page

30KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

You Made the H.E.A.R. Framework Better

As a final note, this series has been the early drafts of what I’m planning to turn into a book proposal. I knew that, with three kids in my house, the only way I was going to get this book started was if I had some public accountability.

I had thought about submitting a book proposal about this framework a little over a year ago (after already thinking about it and using it for a few years), but as I was praying about it, a friend of mine suggested I wait a little bit longer. I took his advice, as if it was a word from the Lord to me, and I started a Substack newsletter instead a few months later to start testing out the material a bit more.

I’m so glad I did because the encouragement and feedback from this small community of readers as I’ve been testing out the material has been so helpful. When this content finally does take the form of a book, it will be so much better because of you. Thank you.

As I begin to work on a book proposal, will you pray for me? Pray that I finish the proposal, the right agent believes in it, and the right publisher sees its potential. I’ve never had a large platform, which I know publishers look for, but I sense this is one of the books I was born to write and I’m going to write it.

Links to All Forty Emails

By the way, if you’re looking for links to all forty emails in Hear From God in 40 Emails (or Less), you can find them all below. I’ve asterisked the ten essential emails.

Does God Guide You?

• *Hear From God in 40 Emails (or Less)

• My Top Five Recommended Guides for Hearing from God (and Why You Need a Guide Like Eli)

• 25 Ways God Guides People in the Bible

• *A Simple Framework for Hearing God

Four Views of God Guides

• *Four View of How God Guides

• Does God Only Speak Through the Bible?

• Does God Operate Like a Helicopter Parent?

• Does Your God Always Seem to Agree With You? That might be a problem.

• What God and Free-Range Parents Have in Common

Five Steps That Will Prime You to Hear From God

• *Five Steps Will Prime You to Hear from God (But You Might Only Be Doing the Last One)

• Are You 100% Clear on What You’re Asking God?

• When “God’s Timing Isn’t Your Timing” is Unhelpful Advice

• A Simple Rule for Naming Your Options

• Is God Like the Sorting Hat in Harry Potter?

• How to Ask for God’s Guidance

Before You Use the H.E.A.R. Framework

• Stop Looking for a Formula for Hearing God

• The Best Advice About Hearing God I’ve Ever Heard

• How (Not) to Hear God

• *Want to Hear God? Carry a Notebook.

Hearing God in Your HEART

• *Was that Thought from God or Just Me?

• You Don’t Need to Go to a Monastery to Hear God

• The “Could It Be God?” Flowchart

• When God Nudges You

Hearing God Through EXPERIENCES

• *God’s Guidance in a Used Bookstore

• How to Lay Out a Fleece Like Gideon (and Why You Shouldn’t Most of the Time)

• Was That a Sign from God (or Just Confirmation Bias Again)?

• Three Myths About Open Doors

Hearing God Through ADVICE

• *Hearing God Isn’t a Solo Project

• How to Build a Hearing God Mastermind

• Be Cautious About Artificial Wisdom

• Making Room for the Prophetic

Hearing God Through READING

• *Is Your Bible Open or Closed?

• Biblical Operating Systems (OS)

• My Year of Lectio Divina

• Want to Hear God? Go to church.

Making a Decision

• *Divine Data and Decision-Making

• What would you ask Mother Teresa?

• Are You Listening or Just Hearing?

• The Final Email in Hear From God in 40 Emails (or Less)

I’d love to hear from you: What was one of your favorite emails in this series?

Leave a comment

P.S. I’ll be continuing this Substack, but I’m going to change the name and frequency of writing in the coming year. Stay tuned.

This is email 40 out of 40 in Hear from God in 40 Emails (or Less)—a Substack series designed to give you biblical and practical guidance on hearing from God in a decision that matters to you. Read this email for how to get caught up in just seven emails.

Share Hear From God in 40 Emails (Or Less) - with Austin Gohn

In the years leading up to 1930, Frank Laubach was at a crossroads in his life.

Nothing, it seemed, was working out as he planned since moving to the Philippines almost two decades earlier. He missed out on the opportunity to be president of the local university by a single vote (his own). He lost children to malaria. His wife, and the only son they had left, were hundreds of miles away in Manila.

Now, he’s living alone in Mindanao, struggling to figure out how to move forward with a people group called the Moros, and it feels like his spiritual life is nowhere close to where it should be. He’s actively wondering what he should do next.

That’s when, at the lowest point in his story so far, he hikes up Signal Hill near where he lived and begins an experiment that will change the course of life—and, not just his own life, but the thousands upon thousands of lives that his life would impact. It’s an experiment that, after quietly beginning to practice on his own during one of the “lonesomest” and “hardest” years of life, he began to share more about in a series of letters written to his father starting on January 3, 1930 called Letters by a Modern Mystic.

What was the experiment?

It’s an experiment that has everything to do with avoiding the biggest mistake that people make when they want to hear from God about the decisions that matter most—a mistake you might be tempted to make once you finish this series. But, it’s a mistake you can avoid with one simple (but strenuous) resolution this year.

When You Limit Your Relationship with God to Big Decisions

It’s possible that you started reading this email series, Hear From God in Forty Emails (or Less), because you had a big decision on your mind. You were trying to figure out what to do for work, how to get through a relational challenge, where you should live, where to go to church, or something else.

And, maybe, you’ve heard from God—or, at the very least, you’ve made a decision about what to do next whether or not you feel like you’ve heard from him about what you should do next. The decision is in the rearview mirror, and you’re walking forward with trust and trying your best to obey.

The problem is that, once the decision has been made, you often quit listening for God’s guidance until the next big decision. Your relationship with him is limited to the intense decision-making moments of your life, and that’s it. You still have his number, of course, and you’ll call him again when you need him. Until then, though, you’ve got this.

David Benner, a Canadian psychologist working at the intersection of psychology and spirituality, says that we all have a tendency to limit the search for God’s will to major decisions in our lives.1 “So if a person had already settled into a job, chosen a husband or wife, or wasn’t facing an obvious decision whether or not to sin,” Benner writes, “God’s will receded into the background.”2 If God is nothing more than a useful guide through the decisions that matter most, you’re free to move on once the decision is made.

For much of my late teenage years through early young adulthood, this was me.

My relationship with God was full of activity as I moved through the stages of a big decision, but my relationship receded into the background once the decision was made. I barely noticed, though, because, as clinical psychologist Meg Jay points out in The Defining Decade, that stage of life is nothing more than one decision after another, which meant that I kept coming back to God again and again.3

But, eventually, most of the decisions dry up for a while—at least until you transition into middle or late adulthood. And, as a result, so can your relationship with God, which is what was beginning to happen to my own.

It was then, though, that I began to discover what so many before me have also discovered: that God doesn’t just want to talk with you when you’re making big decisions. God wants what Dallas Willard calls a “conversational relationship” with you.4 Of course, this doesn’t mean that God is a helicopter God always telling you what to do, but like any parent, he longs for a relationship with you that goes beyond seasons of guidance.

Moving Beyond the H.E.A.R. Framework

What could an ongoing conversational relationship with God look like—one that’s not contained to desperate moments of decision-making?

That’s what Frank Laubach wanted to find out in his experiment, an experiment he eventually called his “game with minutes.” It’s an experiment that a monk named Brother Lawrence had tried centuries earlier, as recounted in The Practice of the Presence of God.

Frank Laubach, like Brother Lawrence before him, wanted to see what could happen if he invited God into everything he did. His goal was every minute of every day, and he “gamified” it long before that terminology existed. In his own words, here’s how he summarized the experiment in a letter from January 29, 1930, “My part is to live this hour in continuous inner conversation with God and in perfect responsiveness to His will, to make this hour gloriously rich.”5

It was challenging at first, but the more he practiced, the easier it got. Eventually, it became intuitive, as automatic as breathing. He was no longer just listening for God’s voice when he had major decisions to make, he was talking with God throughout each minute of the day.

And, he kept that conversation with God going for the rest of his life. As he did so, he developed a literacy system that taught hundreds of thousands of people to read, and he was even featured on an American postage stamp. (You can read his obituary in The New York Times here.)

When I read his letters shortly after college, I began to experiment with it in my own life and discovered a deeper relationship with God than I had previously experienced. It was a relationship that was no longer dependent on a decision I needed to make. While it’s still easy to let my relationship with God recede into the background when I’ve “settled into” my life a bit (as David Benner says), I’m no longer content to just reserve God for when it’s time to make a big decision.

As you prepare to close out this series with a new year right around the corner, I encourage you to try the same. Make a resolution, like Frank Laubach wrote on January 3, 1930, nearly one hundred years ago, “As for me, I resolved that I would succeed better this year with the experiment of filling every minute full of the thought of God than I succeeded last year.”6

Resolve to not wait until your next big decision to talk with God. Resolve to talk with him and listen for his voice as part of your daily life. Keep a journal about it or, like Laubach, write some letters. Gamify it if you must. Whatever you do, move beyond the H.E.A.R. Framework into a life of hearing God. You’ll never look back.

I can’t wait to hear what happens.

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P.S. Here’s a roundtable discussion that Dallas Willard, Richard Foster, and John Ortberg had about the enduring influence of Frank Laubach.

This is email 39 out of 40 in Hear from God in 40 Emails (or Less)—a Substack series designed to give you biblical and practical guidance on hearing from God in a decision that matters to you. Read this email for how to get caught up in just seven emails.

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I know my kids can hear me.

After each of my kids were born, before we were even allowed to leave the hospital, a nurse came into the room and tested their hearing. She performed the test with a little hearing device, and she confirmed that each of my kids could hear just fine. As proof for anxious parents like me, she gave each of them a sticker that said, “I had my hearing tested today.” And, after a few more hours in the hospital, we took each of them home with the knowledge that they are fully capable of hearing us.

It’s official: My kids can hear my voice. The nurse told me so.

I have to remember that moment in the hospital because, most of the time, I have my doubts that my kids can actually hear anything that I’m saying. I can say something like, “Clean up your room,” but there’s no response—not even a twitch. So, I say it a little bit louder. Still nothing. If it hadn’t been for the hearing test in the hospital, I would start to wonder if they are starting to lose their sense of hearing.

If I need confirmation, though, I don’t need to call the hospital or schedule a hearing appointment. All I need to say is something like, “Who wants a snack?” Suddenly, it’s as if their hearing has been healed, and they come running.

The problem isn’t with hearing. It’s with listening.

As journalist Kate Murphy says in You’re Not Listening, “But it’s important to emphasize that hearing is not the same as listening, but rather its forerunner.”1 You can hear the words coming out of someone’s mouth without listening to a word that they are saying. Hearing is nothing more than the opportunity to actually listen.

If the first enemy of hearing God in the decisions that matter most is the need for clarity, the second is simply the failure to listen. Even if you heard from God using something like the H.E.A.R. Framework, which is what this forty email series is all about, you could still not listen to God—and you wouldn’t be the first.

Listen = Obey

Listening is about more than simply understanding what God is saying to you. In the Bible, there’s an essential connection between listening and obeying.

At the beginning of Deuteronomy 6:4, for example, the Hebrew word shema shows up. In fact, often this series of the verses in the Bible is simply called “the shema.” It opens with, “Listen [shema], Israel…” It’s a word that can sometimes simply mean hear, but often it’s translated as listen with obedience baked into it. (Even the etymology of the English word obedience can be traced back to listening.)

In other words, if God is speaking to you, you’re not really listening in any meaningful sense of the word if you’re not obeying.

Repeatedly, though, you’ll see that God’s people don’t listen and obey. In Psalm 95:7-9, it says, using the same word shema, “Today, if you hear his voice: Do not harden your hearts as at Meribah, as on that day at Massah in the wilderness where your ancestors tested me; they tried me, though they had seen what I did.”

The problem wasn’t with their hearing, it was with their listening—and, the human impulse to hear God without listening to him hasn’t changed. You want to hear from him, but when you actually do hear his voice through one of the ways in the H.E.A.R. Framework, you don’t want to obey him.

When Your One Job is to Listen to God

Nowhere in the Bible is the human tendency to hear but not listen more obvious than in the story of Jonah.

Jonah was a prophet in ancient Israel, which means that he had one job: listen for what God might want to say to you, someone else, or to an entire community. There was nothing else in his job description. That was it.

But, when “the word of the Lord came to Jonah” (Jonah 1:1), the classic way the Bible describes the moment a prophet hears from God, Jonah doesn’t listen. We aren’t told how exactly he experienced God’s guidance, just that he experienced God’s guidance.

Here’s what God says to him, “Get up! Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it because their evil has come up before me” (Jonah 1:2). For all we can tell, Jonah receives the kind of clarity we long for God to give but aren’t guaranteed to receive. He’s told where to go and what to do with his life next.

Instead of obeying, though, it says, “Jonah got up to flee to Tarshish from the Lord’s presence. He went down to Joppa and found a ship going to Tarshish. He paid the fare and went down into it to go with them to Tarshish from the Lord’s presence” (Jonah 1:3-4). If you aren’t familiar with the geography of the Ancient Near East, Tarshish is about as far in the opposite direction of Nineveh as you could imagine. Jonah bought a one-way ticket away from God’s will for his life with no intention of ever coming back.

That’s why, even if you do get clarity for God about a decision you’re facing, you’ll often discover that clarity was never the problem. It’s more often a failure to listen. The human impulse to run to Tarshish lives in you and me. God could write his will in the sky for you about a decision you’re facing, but the only thing that would crystallize for you is that you’re not interested in doing what he says.

You don’t need your hearing checked, you need your listening checked.

God Doesn’t Quit Speaking When You Aren’t Listening

If you keep reading Jonah, you’ll notice that God, in his mercy for you, doesn’t always quit trying to get your attention when you choose not to listen to him.

Jonah’s boat gets hit by a storm, an experiential set of circumstances, that God uses to get Jonah’s attention. He sleeps through it, and he’s clearly still not listening. Next, the pagan sailors “cast lots” to see what the gods might be trying to say, and God uses that to single out Jonah and speak to him again.

At this point, though, Jonah thinks it’s over for him and he tells everyone to just throw him overboard—in what feels like either a last ditch effort to avoid doing what God is saying or an acceptance of his destiny for disobedience. He’d rather be dead on the ocean floor, it seems, than go to Nineveh.

But, he’s swallowed by a fish that God sent his way, and three days later, after what probably felt like a lifetime, the fish vomits him up on dry land again. He’s back to where he started when he heard God’s voice before, and listen to what it says, “The word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time: “Get up! Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach the message that I tell you” (Jonah 3:1-2). This moment is almost an exact replica of what happened just two chapters earlier before the storm and the fish, and Jonah has to be feeling some deja vu.

This time, though, it says, “Jonah got up and went to Nineveh according to the Lord’s command” (Jonah 3:3). God circled back to what he spoke to Jonah and gave Jonah a fresh opportunity to obey, and this time Jonah listened and obeyed.

Terry Walling, who has helped many leaders pay attention to what God might be saying through their lives, said somewhere that God will often repeat things in your life that he said before but you haven’t listened to yet.2 Like Jonah, God will sometimes bring you right back to the place where you started again and again until you’re ready to obey.

And, I’ve also heard it said that if you feel like you aren’t hearing from God, maybe what you need to do is go back to the last word you sensed God speak to you and consider whether or not you obeyed what he’s already said.3 Sometimes, you’re begging God to speak to you, even though he’s already spoken to you, and he’s just waiting on you to listen and obey.

Obedience Takes Practice

If you want to be the kind of person who obeys God when he speaks to you about the decisions that matter most, it starts with practicing obedience in your everyday life. Don’t wait until you’re facing a big decision to start obeying God, start obeying God as often as you can starting right now.

For example, when you read the Bible, practice obedience. Eugene Peterson says, “The most important question we ask of this text is not, ‘What does this mean?’ but ‘What can I obey?’ A simple act of obedience will open up our lives to this text far more quickly than any number of Bible studies and dictionaries and concordances.”4 Don’t settle for finding the Bible interesting or even just trying to understand it. Look for one thing you can obey starting today.

Or, when you feel something that might be God in your heart, obey it. You might be walking and sense, “Go talk to that person,” go talk to that person and see what happens. Or, you hear about a situation that someone is going through and you sense God might be saying to help out, do it. As long as it’s within the boundaries of the kinds of things God could say (i.e., it’s loving, not sinful), practice obedience when you can.

If you’re practicing obedience in the little things, you’ll be more likely to practice obedience in the big things—the decisions that matter most. As the classic saying says, how you do anything is how you do everything, and that’s true for what you do whenever God speaks. (And, in the next email, we’ll explore how to live a life of hearing God, not just in big decisions.)

Maybe you heard God speak to you in a variety of ways about a decision that you’re facing throughout this forty-email series. Even if you don’t have total clarity about the next step, at some point, you have to decide if you’re going to take a step forward and obey regardless of your degree of clarity.

If the two final enemies of hearing God in the decisions that matter most are the need for clarity and the failure of obey, then the antidote is simply to do what the words of the old hymn says, ”Trust and obey, for there’s no other way to be happy in Jesus, but to trust and obey.”

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This is email 38 out of 40 in Hear from God in 40 Emails (or Less)—a Substack series designed to give you biblical and practical guidance on hearing from God in a decision that matters to you. Read this email for how to get caught up in just seven emails.

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As a freshman in college, I was absolutely certain what I was going to do with my life in four years after I walked across the stage in my cap and gown at graduation—even though I was far less clear about how to put on a fitted sheet (see photo below).

I was at college to get a degree that would help me fulfill what I felt like God had spoken to me just over a year earlier at summer camp. It was there, surrounded by other teenagers, I heard a guest speaker share about her experience as a cross-cultural missionary. That’s the moment it all clicked for me, and I knew what I wanted to do.

I felt like I had heard clearly from God about my calling. It wasn’t audible, there wasn’t a burning bush, but it was clear enough for me.

So clear, in fact, that at my high school graduation, the administration shared what I would be doing next with everyone in attendance as if it was a historical fact.

But, about halfway through college, when I was closer to the end of it than the beginning, my freshman confidence had waned into uncertainty—a story that had unfolded, not just in my own life, but in the lives of most of my friends. I still knew what my degree was going to say, but I had no idea what I was going to do with it, if anything at all. I craved the undeniable clarity I felt back at summer camp, but I didn’t know how to find it.

That’s around when a spiritual mentor of mine introduced me to one of the many books I’d discover through him in the next two years. Any student who knew him knew that book recommendations were his “love language,” and he always knew the right book to recommend at the right time.

This book was no different.

I don’t remember much of the book at this point, but I’ve never forgotten one story from just a few pages into the first chapter. It’s a story I’ve carried with me ever since, and I’ve shared it in many of the conversations I’ve had over the past fifteen years with people who feel uncertain about how God might be guiding them.

If you’re longing for clarity about a decision you’re facing, keep reading.

Clarity Isn’t the Goal

One of the problems with a tool like the H.E.A.R. Framework is how it can make you believe that, if you just use the tool right, it will result in the clarity you want. If you just master the technique, you’ll gain the certainty you’re looking for and make better decisions.

H.E.A.R. Framework on One-Page (PDF)

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I don’t want to disappoint you now, but clarity was never the goal. In fact, none of my favorite guides to hearing God in the decisions that matter most promise clarity if you just follow their advice.

It can be easy to read the Bible and think that people like Abraham, Moses, Mary, Paul and so many others had clarity as they followed God—and, if you just pray hard enough, that’s what you’ll always have as well. But, I don’t think they had as much clarity as you might think they did from the outside looking in.

If you’re waiting for clarity before you make a decision, I have bad news: You might never make a decision about what to do next. In conversations with people who are facing big decisions, I’ve discovered over and over again that the need for clarity is one of the final two enemies that get in the way of making a decision and following God’s guidance into the next step. (And, we’ll talk about the next one in the next email.)

“Are there times God speaks in our lives that are undeniable? Yes. I’ve experienced these decisive moments. And perhaps you have as well,” A.J. Swoboda, author of Slow Theology, shared in his own Substack newsletter, “But clarity is often the exception, not the rule, to the Christian faith.”1 (He shared this just before sharing the same story I’m about to share, which speaks to the sticking power of this particular story.)

The Low-Level Theologian w/ Dr. A.J. Swoboda

Stop Praying for Clarity

When I was younger, it almost felt like I heard Jesus every day give me direction for my life. He felt so clear, so near, so audible. There was a tangibility to God in those early years of faith. But, as I’ve grown older, that same clarity rarely comes to me in the same ways it used to. I’m always walking in faith, for sure. But I don’t always have the …

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2 years ago · 130 likes · 27 comments · A.J. Swoboda

If clarity isn’t guaranteed, what is?

Something Better Than Clarity

As I was longing for clarity midway through college, I started reading Ruthless Trust, and just a few pages into it, Brennan Manning shares a story about a conversation John Kavanaugh had with Mother Teresa. It goes something like this.2

It’s 1975, and John Kavanaugh is trying to figure out what to do with the rest of his life. So, he does what anyone would do.

He goes looking for Mother Teresa—a person who must have a clear sense of what God wanted her to do with her life and might have some guidance for those, like him, who don’t. He wasn’t the first to have this idea, and he wouldn’t be the last.

Mother Teresa is where she’s been for decades, doing what she’s always done, working among the poor in Calcutta, India. Eventually, Kavanaugh joins her in Calcutta, and on day one, he’s able to have a conversation with her. At one point in their conversation, after he asks for prayer, she asks him, “What do you want me to pray for?”

Imagine for a moment that you’re in his position. What would you ask her to pray for? You have one of the decisions that matter most hanging over your head like a cloud, and now you have one shot to have someone like Mother Theresa pray for you.

So, he says, “Pray that I have clarity.”

It’s a minor request, and he’s clearly not asking for much.

Then, she says, “No, I will not do that.”

It had to feel a bit deflating to travel halfway around the world, searching for clarity about what to do with your life, and being told by one of the people you admire most that they won’t even pray for the very thing you’re desperate for. Mother Teresa will pray for many things, but apparently, clarity is not one of them.

She doesn’t leave him hanging, though.

“Clarity is the last thing you are clinging to and must let go of,” Mother Teresa says to him, “I have never had clarity; what I have always had is trust. So I will pray that you trust God.”

Trust > Clarity

After I read that story and the rest of Ruthless Trust as a college student, I was still the same young adult who preferred clarity—if God were to offer it to me. Who wouldn’t prefer to have clarity if it was available? But, from that moment onward, I began to cultivate a heart that would trust God even when clarity felt out of reach.

Brennan Manning, elsewhere in the book, says, “Craving clarity, we attempt to eliminate the risk of trusting God. Fear of the unknown path stretching ahead of us destroys childlike trust in the Father’s active goodness and unrestricted love.”3

If you turn to Hebrews 11 in the Bible, you’ll find a chapter that’s sometimes called the “Hall of Faith.” Notice, it’s not called the Hall of Clarity. Why? Hebrews 11 isn’t a snapshot of all the different people throughout the Bible who had always had clarity, it’s the people who, like Mother Teresa, often had trust.

Just take Abraham, for example.

In Genesis 12, we don’t get many details about how God guided him. It simply says that, “The Lord said to him,” which can happen in a variety of ways. Then, God says to him, “Go from your land, your relatives, and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.” He isn’t told which land to walk toward, just which land to walk away from. Then, at 75-years-old, it says, “So Abram went, as the LORD had told him.”

Never once does it say that he had clarity.

Here’s what Hebrews 11:8 says he did have, “By faith Abraham, when he was called, obeyed and set out for a place that he was going to receive as an inheritance. He went out, even though he did not know where he was going.”

What’s faith? It’s just another word for trust.

Trust isn’t about taking a blind leap. It’s about taking a next step in light of what you know about who God is and what he’s like even if you’re not totally certain it’s the right step.

In general, this is why, if you do experience God’s guidance about a decision you’re facing, even if you think it’s 100% clear what God is saying, leave room for ambiguity when sharing it with others. Instead of saying, “God told me,” which often communicates a false level of certainty (and is difficult for anyone to disagree with), say something like, “I’m not 100% certain, but after some thinking and praying, I sense God might be guiding me toward _________ and that’s what I’m going to do.”

If you’ve been reading Hear From God in 40 Emails (or Less), I’m praying for you. I’m praying that you hear from God about the decisions that matter most, but I’m not praying that you will have clarity. I’ve never really had clarity, but I’ve often had trust. I’m praying that you’ll end this series with a deeper trust than when you began.

And, even if you did have 100% clarity about God’s guidance in your life, you still might not make a decision and move forward. In addition to the need for clarity, there is still one more enemy that gets in the way of making a decision and following God in your next step. That’s what the next email is all about.

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This is email 37 out of 40 in Hear from God in 40 Emails (or Less)—a Substack series designed to give you biblical and practical guidance on hearing from God in a decision that matters to you. Read this email for how to get caught up in just seven emails.

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When the Apostle Paul and his team were on their second missionary journey, they found themselves at a literal crossroads deep in modern-day Turkey.

Here’s how Luke describes it in the biblical book of Acts:

They went through the region of Phrygia and Galatia; they had been forbidden by the Holy Spirit to speak the word in Asia. When they came to Mysia, they tried to go into Bithynia, but the Spirit of Jesus did not allow them. Passing by Mysia they went down to Troas. During the night Paul had a vision in which a Macedonian man was standing and pleading with him, “Cross over to Macedonia and help us!” After he had seen the vision, we immediately made efforts to set out for Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them. (Acts 16:6-10)

Paul and his team are asking God where they should preach the gospel and plant a church next, and they need to figure it out before they reach the end of the road they’re on. As far as we can tell, they have a few options:

• They could take a left turn and walk toward the Roman Province of Asia to the southwest—with leading cities like Ephesus.

• They could take a right turn and go toward the region of Bithynia to the north.

• If they just go straight and follow the road long enough, eventually they would end up in Troas where they could catch a ship to Macedonia across the sea—or just find a nice Airbnb and hang out for a while.

As they’re trying to discern which way to go, in the most literal sense of the word, they experience God’s guidance in a variety of different ways:

• We don’t know how, but they were “forbidden by the Holy Spirit” to go to Asia for the moment—maybe, it was a prophetic word from Silas, who we know had a prophetic gift (Acts 15:32).

• We also don’t know how, but the “Spirit of Jesus” doesn’t allow them to go to Bithynia—maybe, it was like his previous experience on the road to Damascus in Acts 9, a thought that came into Paul’s mind, or simply some other kind of circumstantial closed door like construction (for all we know).

• Then, Paul has a strange dream about a Macedonian begging them to cross the sea that was either from God or something weird he ate.

You could think of all these moments as DIVINE DATA—raw information, most likely from God, that needs to be prayerfully processed as part of making a decision about what to do next.

If you’re in a season of decision-making and you’ve been using something like the H.E.A.R. Framework to listen for God’s guidance, you probably have gathered some DIVINE DATA of your own. But, in the end, you still have to make a decision in light of that data about what you’re going to do next—just like Paul and his team did.

As we’re closing in on the end of Hear from God in 40 Emails (or Less), I’m going to share a spectrum of four questions you can ask to help you make sense of the “divine data” you’ve gathered as you try to discern the next step you’re going to take.

The H.E.A.R. Framework: A Quick Review

The H.E.A.R. Framework is a tool I designed to help you discern how God might be guiding you in the decisions that matter most. I’ve refined it over years of conversations with people in and beyond my church, and I’ve used it to walk many people through decisions about work, relationships, and more. In what follows, I’m going to include lots of links to previous posts in this series that go into more detail.

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In the middle of the H.E.A.R. Framework, there are three essential steps for you to take before you begin using it—in addition to praying for indifference to anything but God’s will and actually asking God to speak:

1. Question: In one sentence, clarify the question you’re asking God. Make sure it’s not too big, too vague, too shallow, or too soon.

2. Timeframe: When do you hope to make a decision? Live somewhere in the tension between too long and too short of a timeframe.

3. Options: List more than two but less than seven options—with space for options you might not have thought of yet. Avoid false binaries and the paradox of choice.

After these steps, you’re in a position to start paying attention and taking note of four different categories of ways that God might be guiding you: Heart, Experiences, Advice, and Reading. It’s not a formula, and God won’t always guide you through all four ways, but they are helpful categories.

• HEART: Make space for monastic moments and take note of how God might be speaking to you through thoughts that come into your mind (see the “Could It Be God?” Flowchart) or gut-level divine nudges.

• EXPERIENCES: Keep an eye out for potential signs and open (or closed) doors. Just watch out for cognitive biases like “confirmation bias” and don’t get stuck in the “fleece confirmation spiral.”

• ADVICE: Ask some trusted “gray-haired Yodas” for wisdom and make room for the prophetic—even if you don’t consider yourself charismatic. If you want, build your own Hearing God Mastermind.

• READING: Keep your Bible open and dig into your Biblical Operating System (OS) for any principles, verses, or anything else from your past reading of the Bible that might be relevant to the decision at hand. See how God speaks through the practice of lectio divina in your normal Bible reading plan as well as the practice of active sermon listening on ordinary Sundays.

What does the H.E.A.R. Framework looks like when it’s filled in? I’ll give you an imaginative sample of what it might have looked like for Paul and what it might have looked for me in a decision I made in the past.

Sample H.E.A.R. Framework 1: Paul and His Team

Let’s imagine for a moment that, in Acts 16:6-10, Paul had been following along with this Substack and had a copy of the H.E.A.R. Framework downloaded to a piece of parchment. Taking a few liberties into account, since we don’t know the details, it could have looked something like this.

Sample H.E.A.R. Framework: Me

Or, consider one of the stories I’ve told in this series, across a few different emails, about the time that I was trying to decide what to do at a vocational crossroads of my own. I hadn’t developed the H.E.A.R. Framework at that time, but if I were to fill one out now based on what I was experiencing then, it might have looked something like this.

Heck No, Maybe No, Maybe So, Heck Yes

In the end, everything you take note of in your H.E.A.R. Framework is divine data—raw information, no matter how clear or unclear some of it might feel, that still requires prayerful processing by you.

Data is helpful, but it can’t make a decision for you. That’s up to you.

Whether you feel like you received guidance in every one of the four categories or barely any guidance at all (which is normal), it’s still up to you to discern what you are going to do based on the data you have. Paul still had to “conclude” with his team (Acts 16:10) that his next step was into Macedonia, and I still had to discern that it was time for me to go to seminary. Even after hearing God’s voice from a burning bush, Moses still had to discern if he wasn’t losing his mind and that he really should go back to Egypt.

As you’re closing out a season of listening for God’s voice about a decision you’re facing, I encourage you to set aside some extra time to prayerfully discern which of your options God might be pointing you toward—or, at the very least, which options he might be pushing you away from.

Here is a spectrum of four questions you can consider as you’re trying to discern your next step to take among multiple options—including options that weren’t on the table when you started the process:

• Which of my options, if any, seem like a “heck no”? They might be options that lie behind a closed door. They might be options that some wise people in your life told you weren’t a good idea no matter how good your intentions might be. They might even be options that the Bible clearly prohibits. Just cross those out and kiss them goodbye.

• Which of my options, if any, seem like a “likely no”? The door might not be totally closed on these options, but at a gut-level, they just don’t feel like the right way to go—or, at the very least, not yet.

• Which of my options, if any, seem like a “maybe so”? These still feel like good options that are within the realm of possibility. The doors are still open, but you haven’t heard anything one way or the other about them. These options are still on the table. In many decisions, you will discover that there might be a few good roads you could take within God’s will.

• Which of my options, if any, seem like a “heck yes”? Sometimes, even when confirmation bias is taken into account, it feels like all the data is pointing in one direction. It might not be 100% clear, but to do anything else feels like you would be “kicking against the goads” (Acts 26:14)—to use a first-century idiom that I’m sure you can relate to.

If you’re facing a decision right now and you’ve worked through the H.E.A.R. Framework, which option are you discerning is next for you based on the divine data you have available?

Maybe, you had to scratch all your options because none of them seem within God’s will for you and you’re back to the drawing board. Or, maybe you ended up with one option that God seems to be elevating above the rest. Often, you end up with multiple good options and you just have to choose one.

But, you might be thinking, “What if I’m still not 100% clear about my next step?” If that’s you, you’re just like everyone else I’ve ever walked through this process with, and you’re just like me. In my next email, I’m going to share the game-changing story I first read as a college student that made me realize that clarity was never the goal.

I’d love to hear from you: Have you been using the H.E.A.R. Framework with a decision in your own life, and how has it helped you discern your next step?

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This is email 36 out of 40 in Hear from God in 40 Emails (or Less)—a Substack series designed to give you biblical and practical guidance on hearing from God in a decision that matters to you. Read this email for how to get caught up in just seven emails.

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