The Good Life is a Long Game
LETTER BY BRIAN MORYKON
I’ve been trying to write this email for an embarrassingly long time. And while I’ve typed some things that are clever, and hopefully things that are true, I haven’t struck that chord that makes the strings of my heart sing with a resonant Yes. So I’m starting over.
Really all I want to do is remind you and remind myself of what we already know. A prophetic word is a word that, for the one who is ready, feels at the same time fresh and familiar.
And here, I hope, is such a word. The truly good life is a long game. It is a life of continual surrender and returning to Jesus, moment by moment until the moments have made a life worth living.
All day long we’re being pitched substitutes and shortcuts for this life of continual surrender to the one who loved us into being. Don’t buy them. Don’t hold back little parts of yourself for fear of what God will do with them. God will be good to all of you and will resurrect glorified any part of you that needs to be crucified.
Maybe you’ve been following Jesus for a long time. Maybe you’re tempted to check out or be on cruise control. Maybe you’re tempted to be on full control — to take by force what God hasn’t seen fit to give you yet. Take a breath. Christ is near. Surrender again. Listen to the quiet voice, and if you can’t hear it listen to the silence. Live as if God is real. Live as if God is capable of taking care of you. Live as if you didn’t have to manage your own safety, security, and reputation. Live as if God thinks you are worth dying for. Don’t take matters into your own hands. Don’t make a deal with the devil to get the good you have coming to you before God wants to give it to you. The good life is a long game. Trust the process. Christ is the process.
Brian Morykon
Director of Communications
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LET’S DIVE IN...
CURATED BY GRACE POUCH
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1.
Lisa and Mark McMinn join Nate on Life With God to talk about their farming adventures and finding the right pace for a flourishing life.
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2.
“Your way, Jesus, is the way of the Beatitudes,” Pope Francis proclaimed in his Good Friday meditation last week just before his death.
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3.
Thomas Kelly writes about “the flaming vision of the wonder of such a life” as one lived by those who truly follow the Way of Jesus.
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4.
Read a review of Walter Brueggemann’s Hopeful Imagination: Prophetic Voices in Exile by Renovaré Ministry Team member Jeremy Chambers.
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5.
What vision of the good life are we absorbing from cultural values? Mark Casper explores the question in “The Good Life Cannot Be Optimized.”
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6.
Mark and Lisa McMinn explain why living well requires slowing down — ”to see what needs to be seen, and to think deep thoughts while held in the loving gaze of God.”
Grace Pouch
Content Manager
WORTH QUOTING
Today’s builders of Babel tell us that there is no room for losers, and that those who fall along the way are losers. Theirs is the construction site of Hell. God’s economy, on the other hand, does not kill, discard or crush. It is lowly, faithful to the earth. Your way, Jesus, is the way of the Beatitudes. It does not crush, but cultivates, repairs and protects.
– Pope Francis, Good Friday Message (2025)
The Vatican
(source)
TO CONTEMPLATE
Lily Crucifix, Godshill Village Parish Church, Isle of Wight
Anonymous c. 1450
(source)
In the film A Hidden Life, the main character Franz visits a church where a painter is creating a fresco of a cheerful looking Jesus. The artist speaks of himself and other artists who erase the evidence of struggle from Christ’s life in pictures: “We create admirers. We don’t create followers. Christ’s life is a demand. You don’t want to be reminded of it. So we don’t have to see what happens to the truth. A darker time is coming — when men will be more clever. They won’t fight the truth, they’ll just ignore it. I paint their comfortable Christ… Someday I’ll paint the true Christ.”
The Way of the Cross is death, but it is also life. I love how this painting from the 1400s shows Christ in the agony of death — his body stretched, the thorns piercing his sad head, but also gives us a glimpse of the glory — the long game — by painting the cross as a lily with branching, budding arms.
TO PONDER
Consider putting one of these prayers from Thomas Kelly on a sticky note where you’ll see it in the week to come.
Be Thou my will.
I open all before You.
See earth through heaven.