Here was a myriad of Christian pilgrims—Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant—not consumed by their theological differences but centered on articulating a universal way of being with Christ in order to become like him.

Each of these saints lived in a unique time and place, and yet buried within their pages were striking similarities:

Many talked of purification, cleansing, shedding of sin, a kind of detachment from the distractions that hindered their relationship with Christ. Others described a process of illumination—a deepening of their awareness, a recognition of the Spirit’s transforming presence, marked by increasing clarity and growth in virtue. And it was impossible to miss their insistence on unity or oneness, as if they were arriving at a deeply intimate friendship with God.

The more I read, the more I realized that these weren’t just rare experiences unique to a few—they were developmental stages everyone encounters on the journey to becoming like Christ.

In other words, I was reading dispatches—firsthand reports from people who had actually been there. I was tracking footprints—these saints were sharing transformational terrain.*

*From Chapter 1 of my first book Dwelling in Christ: Discover the Threefold Path of Spiritual Transformation

A Voice from the Christian Tradition

“When by purgation the self has become detached from the ‘things of sense,’ and acquired those virtues which are the ‘ornaments of the spiritual marriage,’ its joyful consciousness of the transcendent order returns in an enhanced form ... Illumination brings a certain apprehension of the Absolute, a sense of the Divine Presence: but not true union with it. It is a state of happiness ... Union must be looked upon as the true goal of mystical growth; that permanent establishment of life upon transcendent levels of reality, of which ecstasies give a foretaste to the soul. Intense forms of it, described by individual mystics ... In the old, frank language of the mystics, it is the deified life.”

—Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism

A Question to Carry

Where have you already seen purgation, illumination, or union at work in your life?

On the journey with you,

—Jon

Almost fifteen years ago I was driving Gary Moon—a psychologist who also founded the Renovaré Institute—to the airport. Just before he shut the car door, he leaned in and suggested I read a book. It was The Orthodox Way by Kallistos Ware.

That one recommendation sent me down a path I didn’t expect. If you were to flip through it now, you’d see that almost every page is starred and underlined.

Up to that point, much of my Christian understanding had been framed in transactional terms: do this, get that; fail here, pay there. Ware’s writing—a more ancient and Orthodox version of Christianity—offered another vision. One that was older, deeper, and more transformational. One that didn’t reduce sin to a debt ledger but described the Fall as a wound we carry, something we suffer and then pass along to others.

That shift mattered. It made Christianity more viable to me, more honest, more beautiful.

I’ll always be grateful for Gary’s passing word in the car that day, and for how God used it to turn me toward a broader stream of Christian faith. A book can become a doorway. A conversation can redirect a whole life. Maybe you’ve had something like that too—a person, a word, a book—that helped you see differently.

A Voice from the Christian Tradition

“For the Orthodox tradition, then, Adam’s original sin affects the human race in its entirety, and it has consequences both on the physical and the moral level: it results not only in sickness and physical death, but in moral weakness and paralysis.

But does it also imply an inherited guilt?

Here Orthodoxy is more guarded. Original sin is not to be interpreted in juridical or quasi-biological terms, as if it were some physical “taint” of guilt, transmitted through sexual intercourse. This picture, which normally passes for the Augustinian view, is unacceptable to Orthodoxy. The doctrine of original sin means rather that we are born into an environment where it is easy to do evil and hard to do good; easy to hurt others, and hard to heal their wounds; easy to arouse men’s suspicions, and hard to win their trust. It means that we are each of us conditioned by the solidarity of the human race in its accumulated wrong-doing and wrong-thinking, and hence wrong-being.

And to this accumulation of wrong we have ourselves added by our own deliberate acts of sin.”

—Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Way

A Question to Carry

Who in your life has pointed you toward a broader stream of Christian faith?

Thanks Gary,

—Jon

Sometimes I look at the flame of a candle and marvel at its energetic stillness. How can something be so full of energy and yet so still? That’s the mystery of the flame.

To live like that—to be a bright and shining light, to burn wildly with love, while at the same time being still—is a mystery worth longing for. I don’t mean being still in body, though that matters, but still in mind, in attention, in desire. A kind of stillness that comes from an inner ordering, where love for what is good steadies my every movement.

That’s how I imagine the experience of contemplation.

I’ve read the old descriptions—of souls stilled in God, of hearts lifted into a quiet fire—and it sounds almost too good to be true. I don’t know if I’ve experienced it. Maybe I have, maybe I haven’t. But I can dream...

The dream looks something like my attention resting on God with ease as I water my hanging baskets on the porch. I’m not straining to attend, I just am. There’s no tug-of-war. No restless shifting of thoughts. Just a steady interior gaze, as reliable as my breath.

I guess that’s why the mystics spoke of contemplation as gift more than achievement.

I can’t muscle my way into it. I wait, I long, and sometimes—if grace permits—I’m given the gift of contemplation.

A Voice from the Christian Tradition

“This love divine in its nature and glimpsed only through the gift of divine light, is the greatest of all mysteries. It is the source, means, and end of all life, yet no one can explain or define it ... It is the one sheer gift of contemplation, completely unattainable by autonomous human effort. The realization of this love always remains mysterious. We may fall into it, wake up within it, discover that it pervades us, but no matter how we might try, we can never reduce it to an object for study or definition.”

—Gerald May, The Dark Night of the Soul

A Question to Carry

What image best captures your dream of being united with God?

Until next week,

—Jon

I look around and see how many good things fill a day: sun on my face, a smooth stone in my palm, a Mary Oliver poem, a Wendell Berry essay, Erroll Garner at the piano, Nat King Cole’s voice, a steak cooked just right, a grilled peach, a frozen margarita.

Life is full of these kinds of gifts—ordinary and extraordinary all at once. But here’s the trouble I keep running into: I can take something good and turn it sour by overdoing it. I can eat too much and feel sick. I can lose myself in a book and ignore the needs around me. I can overwork in the yard while neglecting the people inside my house.

The problem isn’t that the gifts are bad—it’s that I don’t always know how to receive them well.

That seems to be one of the hardest lessons of the Christian life. The real challenge isn’t only resisting what is destructive, it’s learning how to partake of what is good without twisting it. I suspect this is part of God’s training for all of us—learning how to handle joy without harm, so that in the end we can be ready for the one great Good that all these smaller gifts point toward.

A Voice from the Christian Tradition

“We live in an age in which right discipline and control over one’s life are so little understood that obsession and abstinence are the only categories that make sense for the modern mind. Either we reject a thing out of hand or we accept it without reservation. This is why dogmatism is so popular today–whether in religion, politics, or economics.

It is precisely this that makes it so incumbent upon us to teach children use without abuse in all of life. We show them by example that it is quite possible to watch a single television program and then turn the set off, to eat what is required for good health and then stop, to enjoy good music and then experience silence.

Once children see from us that it is possible to exercise restraint over human passions, then it will be possible to convey the notion of money as servant rather than master.”

—Richard J. Foster, The Challenge of the Disciplined Life

A Question to Carry

What good thing are you tempted to overdo?

Still learning all of this,

—Jon

Gluttony isn’t something from my past—it’s still with me. I haven’t conquered it yet, and God hasn’t taken it away. I’m not sure why. But maybe it has something to do with what we’ve been exploring. Maybe some failures remain—not to condemn us, but to cultivate something deeper within us.

There’s an old piece of Christian wisdom that explains it:

Humility deepens as we learn to patiently tolerate our imperfections.

Patiently tolerating our imperfections doesn’t mean condoning them; it means recognizing that transformation takes a long time. The further I’ve traveled, the clearer this has become: some imperfections don’t have to be obstacles to transformation—they’re invitations to a deeper kind.

Even succumbing to temptation, though never something we should seek, can lead us into a raw honesty about where we are on our journey. It pushes us toward a dependence that dismantles our carefully constructed illusions of self-sufficiency and sets in motion the most powerful force in the world: humility.

This humility has changed how I see myself—not as a hero, but as someone vulnerable, wounded, and still journeying. And from that humble recognition, compassion has emerged within me, softening my heart and opening me to empathy.

*From Chapter 4 of my first book Dwelling in Christ: Discover the Threefold Path of Spiritual Transformation

A Voice from the Christian Tradition

“What is humility? In some important respects it is the master virtue that includes all the others, It is not a matter of deliberately cultivating low self-esteem and a doormat mentality, as we might think. Rather, for the monastic teachers being humble meant knowing that we are all beloved children of God, that the worth of each person comes not from ourselves but from God. Because this is true, the humble man or woman knows that it is not part of any Christian’s job to judge or be scornful of other people.

A humble person is one who is, on the one hand, able to accept responsibility toward others for what he does wrong without feeling humiliated by it, and, on the other, to accept praise or thanks without feeling particularly embarrassed or lording it over others because of his or her accomplishments.”

—Roberta Bondi, To Pray & To Love

A Question to Carry

How might weakness in you grow compassion for others?

More soon,

—Jon

Yesterday my son said something that lit a fuse inside me. The anger rose so fast that before I even knew what I was doing, words flew out that I wish I wouldn’t have said.

In these kinds of moments, the emotions feel stronger than me. Too strong to manage, too strong to love from inside of.

Even after decades of formation, I can’t always react rightly. This is frustrating—I wish I were further along. But there is no shortcut. Christlikeness is reached the way any road is walked: one step at a time.

So in the meantime, when anger flares, I lean on a simple technique—distance: an hour, a night’s sleep, sometimes more. Once the fire cools, I can reflect, I can respond better. I can see myself, the other person, and the situation more clearly. Then I can return steadier, able to respond with more love—hopefully more like Christ.

It doesn’t erase the internal eruption I feel in the moment, but it does give me a chance to not to erupt on the person!

And maybe this is part of a developing holiness—not perfection in every reaction, but patience with ourselves while God keeps shaping us to react well. The saints remind us that even small irritations are teachers if we stay with them long enough. Perhaps one day my internal reactions will change.

But for now, distance feels like a grace.

A Voice from the Christian Tradition

“Teach me, O God, to use all the circumstances of my life today to nurture the fruits of the Spirit rather than the fruits of sin.

Let me use disappointment as material for patience;

Let me use success as material for thankfulness;

Let me use anxiety as material for perseverance;

Let me use danger as material for courage;

Let me use criticism as material for learning;

Let me use praise as material for humility;

Let me use pleasures as material for self-control;

Let me use pain as material for endurance.”

—John Baillie, A Diary of Private Prayer

A Question to Carry

What strong emotion from this week would you like to revisit with someone today?

Grace and patience conquer all,

—Jon

When I first started trying spiritual practices, I treated them like lifting weights. Do the reps, see the results. That’s how I understood practice—through basketball drills, through jogging, through the repetition of push-ups. You repeat the action enough and eventually you grow.

I thought prayer, fasting, and silence worked the same way. Put in the effort, get the outcome.

• Fast, and gluttony will fade.

• Repeat the Jesus Prayer, and attention will sharpen.

• Practice silence and my words will grow wiser.

To be fair, sometimes those things happened. But over time I began to see a danger in expecting them to. When the expectation grew too strong, I felt I was the one in control. I became more like an engineer instead of a farmer.

In other words, I began to think of grace as a guaranteed return—a simple matter of managing inputs and outputs.

But spiritual practices are not exercises for acquiring virtue; they are ways of opening myself to God, to be filled with his life. God gives virtue in measure to my capacity to receive it, so that it does not harm me or others. The timing is never predictable. My effort has a place, but it is never decisive.

When it comes to spiritual practice, the question is not so much am I becoming stronger, but whether God’s love is taking deeper root within me? Am I growing in compassion, gentleness, self-control? Am I feeling less self-concerned? Self-focused? Am I growing more at ease with irritation?

That’s why I think it is always wise to pair the athlete metaphor with that of the farmer. The athlete builds skill. The farmer tends soil and waits. Both matter. But only one reminds us that growth is ultimately God’s work, not ours.

A Voice from the Christian Tradition

“A discipline for the spiritual life is, when the dust of history is blown away, nothing but an activity undertaken to bring us into more effective cooperation with Christ and his Kingdom. When we understand that grace (charis) is gift (charisma), we then see that to grow in grace is to grow in what is given to us of God and by God. The disciplines are then, in the clearest sense, a means to that grace and also to those gifts. Spiritual disciplines, “exercises unto godliness,” are only activities undertaken to make us capable of receiving more of his life and power without harm to ourselves or others.”

—Dallas Willard, The Spirit of the Disciplines

A Question to Carry

Where have you mistaken discipline for control?

Keep tending,

—Jon

Hi Everyone,

This fall, I’ll be giving a series of talks on my book Dwelling in Christ. In preparing them, I keep returning to a morning twenty years ago that changed everything.

I walked down the stairs into the living room where my dad was preparing a sermon. Books were scattered across the floor, instrumental music was playing, and a candle was lit.

I filled my cup with coffee, walked back in, and picked up one of the books—The Life You’ve Always Wanted by John Ortberg. I wasn’t really reading. Just flipping. Until I stopped at the second chapter and read the quote at the top of the page. It changed the entire trajectory of my life:

When I read that, it was as if someone had touched an old wound, it was as if they had put their finger directly on my pain. Growing up, I didn’t understand how Christian spirituality worked. And that misunderstanding made me miserable.

I looked down to see who had written it. The name was unusual: Dallas Willard. I had never heard it before. So, I got online and ordered my first book … I devoured it.

Dallas showed me a new kind of spirituality (which was actually ancient), a transformational way of life with Christ. He offered me a process: taking up the spiritual practices and actually becoming Jesus’ apprentice. My life has never been the same.

But as I lived that life over the last twenty years, I kept running into experiences I didn’t fully understand. Seasons of dryness where God felt distant. Periods of temptation and affliction that seemed to expose my illusions. Moments of radical clarity and freedom. Times of growth followed by regression. And occasionally, fleeting experiences of union with God that felt almost impossible to describe.

At first, these moments felt disconnected, almost random. But over time, I realized they weren’t.

As I read my way back into the Christian tradition, I began noticing these same patterns everywhere: Thomas Merton. Evelyn Underhill. George MacDonald. Francis de Sales. François Fénelon. The Desert Fathers and Mothers. These writers, and others like them, weren’t merely theologizing abstractly. They were describing what tends to happen to a human being over a lifetime of apprenticeship to Christ.

It was as if they had mapped the inner terrain of transformation. And over centuries, their observations crystalized into a path.

It’s known today as the Threefold Way: the path of purgation, illumination, and union.

And the more I learned about that path, the more I realized something surprising: I was already walking it.

I didn’t need to understand the path in order to experience it. But once I could name it, I could participate in the transformational process more thoughtfully. It was like being given fresh eyes for the life I was already living … and for the journey still unfolding before me.

That’s why I wrote the book: to capture some of what I found, and pass it along.

If any of this resonates with where you are, I’d love to share more of the story with you. You can pre-order Dwelling in Christ on Amazon right now.

Pre-order Now

And as a thank you, if you forward your receipt to book@jonathanrbailey.com, I’ll send you Chapter One—along with the foreword by Richard J. Foster, another pivotal figure in my journey—one I look forward to telling you more about soon.

With you on the journey,
Jon

Behind my chair sits a ficus tree I bought four years ago. I imagined by now it would be taller, stretching its branches wide. Instead, it stayed small. I know why—too little water, too small a pot.

Six months ago I started giving it more water, more soil, and a bigger container. Now I see new lime-green leaves pushing out. It’s growing!

During that four year period, I often thought about just buying a taller tree, one that would fill the room. But I know now what would have been lost.

I would have had a bigger tree, but I wouldn't be any bigger.

I wouldn't have grown. I wouldn’t have learned. Through my blunder I’ve become a little stronger gardener. And that, I think, is the mercy of it. Growth can still happen through blunders—maybe especially through them.

I think love grows like this too...it grows through our blunders—the times we forget to water, the seasons when we’re distracted.

I don’t know, maybe our failings slow growth down, maybe they don’t. Maybe our failings are mysteriously a part of a deeper kind of growth happening below the surface of our life. Who knows?

But here’s what we do know, none of it can stop God. He will grow us into his loving likeness.

And in the end, our joy will not just be realized in what we’ve grown into, but in having been given the privilege of growing itself.

A Voice from the Christian Tradition

“We must not rush onward to great measures before the time, lest God’s gift be debased by our hasty reception of it. For anything that is quickly obtained is also easily lost, whereas everything found with toil is also kept with careful watching.”

—Saint Isaac the Syrian, The Ascetical Homilies

A Question to Carry

How could tending one thing slowly change your view of love?

Thanks for reading,

—Jon

I often imagine that one day life will slow down.

I picture myself older, maybe in my sixties, with fewer responsibilities and more room to follow Christ without hurry. Those quiet days sound glorious. But here’s the irony: when quiet moments come now, I often resist them. I look for ways to fill the stillness, to push life back into motion, to speed up.

That’s when I realize how strong my illusions are.

I think I want slowness, but when it comes, I’m not so sure. At first that feels disappointing, almost paralyzing. But the longer I walk with Jesus, the more I appreciate seeing the illusion. That sight is a seed of freedom. It reminds me that I’m not living fully in reality yet—and that awareness can be the start of change.

Maybe the kind of slowness I long for isn’t something that just arrives later in life, when circumstances shift. Maybe it’s learned, like the way I had to grow into the taste of black coffee or red wine. It took time and patience to finally enjoy it.

Perhaps slowness works the same way. I need to let a little of it into my life now, not later, and learn to sit with it as it shapes me.

Deep down, I do believe I want slowness. I just need a little time to grow into it.

A Voice from the Christian Tradition

“When I took a closer look at this I realized that I was caught in a web of strange paradoxes. While complaining about too many demands, I felt uneasy when none were made. While speaking about the burden of letter writing, an empty mailbox made me sad. While fretting about tiring lecture tours, I felt disappointed when there were no invitations. While speaking nostalgically about an empty desk, I feared the day on which that would come true.

In short: while desiring to be alone, I was frightened of being left alone.

The more I became aware of these paradoxes, the more I started to see how much I had indeed fallen in love with my own compulsions and illusions, and how much I needed to step back and wonder, ‘Is there a quiet stream underneath the fluctuating affirmations and rejections of my little world? Is there a still point where my life is anchored and from which I can reach out with hope and courage and confidence?’”

—Henri Nouwen, The Genesee Diary

A Question to Carry

Can you name one of your illusions? How might naming it lead to fruit?

Keep watch,

—Jon

As I’ve learned to sit with my own affliction, I’ve come to realize that it’s not a one-size-fits-all kind of thing. It wears many masks. It has many degrees of intensity, each revealing something different. Just as a bruise differs from a break, affliction presents itself in different depths, each one asking something unique of me.

There are those small, almost laughable irritations, and then the kind of hardship that settles in for a season, and sometimes tragedy strikes. This realization led me to create a more nuanced way of thinking about affliction, eventually dividing it into three layers or degrees—maybe naming them could help me hold them:

• Irritation, for me, represents the everyday annoyances that disturb me…

• Hardship refers to the challenges that persist for a season…

• Tragedy is the kind of affliction that alters life in a way that cannot be undone…

Recognizing these degrees of affliction has given me a framework to better understand my experience of purgation and how to respond to it. Because affliction, in and of itself, doesn’t transform us.

It’s not the tragedy, hardship, or irritation that shapes us; it’s the opportunities they present and the grace that meets us right in the middle of it.

*From Chapter 3 of my first book Dwelling in Christ: Discover the Threefold Path of Spiritual Transformation

A Voice from the Christian Tradition

“God has not been trying an experiment on my faith or love in order to find out their quality. He knew it already. It was I who didn’t. In this trial He makes us occupy the dock, the witness box, and the bench all at once. He always knew that my temple was a house of cards. His only way of making me realize the fact was to knock it down.”

—C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

A Question to Carry

What irritations in your week might be small invitations to grace?

Until next week,

—Jon

Most days I step outside to tend the flowers in our hanging baskets and pots. It’s not much—trimming here, watering there—but it gets me out into the sunshine, or the wind, or even the rain when it comes. Each moment carries its own kind of beauty. Just this morning, turning the corner of our house, I noticed the long stretch of Saint Augustine grass lit up in dappled light, the blades in different shades of green, moving slightly with the breeze.

That simple scene stopped me.

Beauty has a way of doing that—slowing us down and reminding us that the world is more than errands and responsibilities. And for me, that moment of beauty opened into gratitude, a prayer without words. I thought of the one who made such beauty possible. The One who thought up light and shadow and the way green grass shifts between them.

Moments like that don’t last long. But they change me a little. They stir a small devotion, a longing for the source of all of this beauty. Such moments never fully satisfy. But they grow in me a greater hunger for the God of beauty.

A Voice from the Christian Tradition

“Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where Nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike. This natural beauty-hunger is made manifest in the little window-sill gardens of the poor, though perhaps only a geranium slip in a broken cup, as well as in the carefully tended rose and lily gardens of the rich, the thousands of spacious city parks and botanical gardens, and in our magnificent National parks—the Yellowstone, Yosemite, Sequoia, etc.—Nature’s sublime wonderlands, the admiration and joy of the world.”

—John Muir, The Yosemite

A Question to Carry

Where could you slip away today to catch a little beauty?

Grateful for glimpses,

—Jon

I return to this longing again and again in my diary: to live more completely like Christ, to stop circling around it in words and actually do it, love like Christ loves. But then I notice how much waiting there seems to be.

Waiting for deeper change.

It’s frustrating—the pace of transformation. Like staring at a tree, you know it’s growing, it’s getting closer to the sun, but you can’t see the movement in the moment.

The question, then, is not whether the growth is happening. It’s whether I can trust the slow, almost hidden pace of God’s work in me?

Can I keep showing up: praying, forgiving, listening, serving, trusting that the small deaths will one day take the shape of Christ’s life in me?

Maybe that’s what transformation takes: living with the mystery that trees really do grow, even when we can’t see it.

A Voice from the Christian Tradition

We have it in us to be Christs to each other and maybe in some unimaginable way to God too—that’s what we have to tell finally. We have it in us to work miracles of love and healing as well as to have them worked upon us. We have it in us to bless with him and forgive with him and heal with him and once in a while maybe even to grieve with some measure of his grief at another’s pain and to rejoice with some measure of his rejoicing at another’s joy almost as if it were our own.

And who knows but that in the end, by God’s mercy, the two stories will converge for good and all, and though we would never have had the courage or the faith or the wit to die for him any more than we have ever managed to live for him very well either, his story will come true in us at last.

And in the meantime, this side of Paradise, it is our business (not like so many peddlers of God’s word but as men and women of sincerity) to speak with our hearts (which is what sincerity means) and to bear witness to, and live out of, and live toward, and live by, the true word of his holy story as it seeks to stammer itself forth through the holy stories of us all.

—Frederick Buechner, Listening to Your Life

A Question to Carry

Think back one full calendar year, where do you notice one small sign of growth?

More soon,

—Jon

P.S. Just as a reminder, my book Dwelling in Christ is now available for pre-order on Amazon. If you grab a copy, forward your receipt to book@jonathanrbailey.com and I’ll send you Chapter 1 so you can start reading before September.

Growing up, Easter mostly meant new clothes, an egg hunt, and a long church service. I knew it had something to do with Jesus dying, but I mostly thought of that as something he did so I wouldn’t have to.

It was his job, not mine.

Only later did I begin to hear the invitation hidden in the gospel story. Jesus doesn’t just ask me to thank him for what he went through. He asks me to join him, to learn his way of self-giving love, to take up a cross of my own.

That’s a harder truth. It means following him into places where my self-centeredness dies—when I listen instead of defend, forgive instead of cling to a grudge, give up comfort to serve someone else. These are small deaths, but they’re real. And I think they matter more than we know.

Maybe that’s the point of Holy Week. It’s not just about remembering what happened long ago. It’s practicing how to die before we die, so the life of Jesus can take shape in us now.

A Voice from the Christian Tradition

“Christ shows us his divinity not in a superhuman—inhuman—manner, but as truly human, human in the end common to us all. Put to death on the Cross, he voluntarily laid down his life in love for us, showing us what it is to be God in the way that he dies as human...

...It now remains for us to follow him to the end, not simply to stand by and watch, but to use our own mortality, our capacity for death, to follow him, taking up the Cross, being crucified with him, dying now to all that is fallen and sinful in ourselves and in the world, that we might rise with him, and he might live in us, as he promised.”

—John Behr, The Cross Stands, While the World Turns

A Question to Carry

In what small way might you join in Christ’s self-giving love this week?

Grace and peace this Holy Week,

—Jon

Subscribe now

I’ve been holding onto something for a few weeks now, and I’m finally ready to share it.

My book has a cover!

This thing started as a digital file on my iMac … just chapters and cursor blinks on a screen. Then it became a printed manuscript I could hold in my hands, flip through, mark up with a pen. And now it has a cover. The IVP design team did an incredible job.

Here it is:

This is the cover of Dwelling in Christ: Discover the Threefold Path of Spiritual Transformation, releasing this fall from IVP Formatio with a foreword by Richard J. Foster.

Let me walk you through what I see.

Look at the water in the foreground. To me, that’s the purgative journey—the early, often difficult work of moving through what needs to be shed.

Then your eye moves to the rising plane of land leading toward the house. That’s the illuminative way—where we start to gain our footing in the Christian life, even as it’s still an uphill climb toward something we can see but haven’t quite reached.

And then there’s the house in the distance. That dwelling place is union—life with God, life with the Trinity. If you look closely, there are three small lights glowing from within: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

I’m so thankful for this cover. It communicates so much of the journey.

This book has been ten years in the making, shaped by my own winding path of spiritual formation, by the deep wells of the Renovaré community, and by a growing conviction that most of us are exhausted by a version of transactional faith.

Pre-order Today

Today, pre-orders officially begin:

Pre-Order Now

Pre-order Bonus

And if you pre-order, I’ll send you the entire first chapter as a PDF so you can start reading right away. Just forward your order confirmation to book@jonathanrbailey.com and I’ll send it your way.

Pre-orders are how a book like this gets a fighting chance. They’re what tells the industry that people are paying attention. If the themes of this book resonate with you, ordering now makes a real difference—and sharing this email with someone who needs it makes an even bigger one!

More to come in the weeks ahead. For now, thanks for being with me on this journey.

Grateful,
Jon

P.S. Now that you’ve seen the outside, stay tuned … in the coming weeks I’ll be giving you a look at what’s inside.

Pre-order Today

When I first started following Jesus, the emphasis in my circles landed squarely on doctrine. Get those straight, and you were on your way to Christian maturity. That’s where the thrust was—learning the “right” things, information acquisition, getting answers for thorny issues.

I’m not against learning. I love to learn. Books and ideas have shaped me in deep ways.

But as I’ve read my way into the Christian tradition, I’ve come to see that living your faith—what’s known as spirituality—came before study.

In other words, living with Christ came before developing theological clarity. The early church lived first, then reflected. They prayed, forgave, ate together, cared for the poor—and out of that life, theology was born.

When we reverse the order, there’s a danger. Theology without spirituality can be wielded like a weapon. Right ideas can end up hurting people when they’re cut off from the living Christ.

But when theology grows out of our lives with Jesus, it takes on a different character. It becomes less about proving and more about guiding, less about winning arguments and more about shaping us in love.

That shift changed everything for me.

A Voice from the Christian Tradition

“No one in the earliest Christian communities thought in terms of a ‘theology’ developing alongside a ‘spirituality.’ What we see is an evolving practice (both communal and personal) that generated a variety of challenges to language, imagination and self-understanding. As has often been said, Christian doctrine took its distinctive shape only through reflection on the distinctiveness of how Christian women and men actually prayed.”

—Rowan Williams, Passions of the Soul

A Question to Carry

What have you discovered about God through fasting, prayer, or almsgiving (giving to those in need)?

Until next week,

—Jon

Share

Some weeks I feel caught up in Christ—reading, praying, listening, and sensing God’s nearness. Other weeks, I feel dull. Distracted. Even disinterested. The swing between these two states can be disappointing.

When I was younger, I thought these ups and downs meant something was wrong. The dissonance made me feel like a fraud. But then I started reading through the Christian tradition and I realized this is the story of everyone who seeks God. Saints, mystics, and monks all speak of the same struggle: hearts that burn one moment and flicker the next.

It helped to see that I wasn’t alone.

My hot-and-cold emotions toward Christ weren’t proof of failure but proof of humanity. Feelings rise and fall, but they don’t define the depth of my life with Jesus. What matters more is the return, the steady choosing, the quiet turning toward Christ again and again—even after seasons of emotional distance.

So when you notice the distance, don’t panic.

Try not to put too much confidence in feelings. Instead, keep moving, one step at a time, trusting that God understands, nothing takes him by surprise, and even when we ignore him, he both waits and beckons us back.

A Voice from the Christian Tradition

“Like waves in the sea do all these feelings in my soul constantly displace each other: inspirations and then dejections. How surprising is the life of this sea! If only this present depth would remain forever, if only the sea of my soul would not prove the plaything of every wind.”

—Sergius Bulgakov, Spiritual Diary

A Question to Carry

What helps you keep moving when your interest in Christ fades?

Turning,

—Jon

Share

Looking back on my early days of training in the Purgative Way, I can see how it was juvenile:

• I wanted immediate union

• I wanted to be holy, now

• I wanted divine-likeness, quick

Again, who doesn’t look at the fruit of the Spirit, the virtues of Christ’s life, the beauty and radiance of God and grab for it? Like Mary in the garden—or Eve and Adam in Eden, we grasp.

It’s not all that bad, just premature.

I think what surprised me most about those early days is that I was still living out of my old transactional mindset even though I thought I left it behind.

What’s worse is I thought a mindset could be left behind. I guess I thought of it like a raincoat or a baseball cap, something I could take off after a thunderstorm. But, of course, a mindset doesn’t work like that—it was embedded within me, woven into the way I viewed the world, and it wasn’t going to disappear because I wanted it to...

...There was a silver lining though, I was noticing it.

And noticing, the spiritual masters say, is actually a kind of growth in itself—a kind of advance, a first step in the Illuminative Way.*

*From Chapter 2 of my first book Dwelling in Christ: Discover the Threefold Path of Spiritual Transformation

A Voice from the Christian Tradition

In a letter to a married woman, Francis de Sales offers counsel to someone eager to advance too quickly...

“I approve the idea that in your prayer you remain with the beginners’ method a little longer, preparing your mind by reading and arranging the points, using your imagination only as needed in order to focus your thoughts...Persevere in overcoming yourself in the little everyday frustrations that bother you: let your best efforts be directed there. God wishes nothing else of you at present, so don’t waste time doing anything else...I beg you, moderate your spiritual exercises, and in this regard give a good deal of weight to how your husband feels about them.”

—Letters of Spiritual Direction

A Question to Carry

When have you caught yourself grasping for growth too quickly?

Keep noticing,

—Jon

Subscribe now

There’s a practice I’ve returned to again and again for the last twenty years. You won’t find it in any classic list of disciplines. Yet I’ve seen it tucked into letters of spiritual direction, hidden in footnotes, passed along quietly like a secret. It isn’t dramatic, but it has helped me so much.

The practice is simple: getting up early.

In my Rule of Life I name it this way:

Early Rising

Early rising is how I make space for meditative prayer and study. It’s how I seek first the kingdom of God.

Some years that has meant 5:00 a.m., other seasons 6:00 or even 7:00 in the summer. The clock shifts, but the heart of it stays the same. Early rising is what allows me to begin unhurried, to seek God first. It is a keystone habit, one that sets others in motion too.

I’ve come to see it as a kind of abstinence—an ascetical practice of self-denial. By giving up a measure of sleep, I gain space for God. The trade is costly in its own way, but the return is greater: time set apart for prayer, for quiet, for steady attention.

When I miss it, I feel it. The day moves faster, my attention scatters. But when I keep it, I find margin—space to breathe, to listen, to be.

After so many years, I can’t live without it.

I don’t practice it perfectly, but I do practice it persistently.

A Voice from the Christian Tradition

“You greatly need certain free hours to be given to prayer and recollection (deep reflection). Try to steal some such hours, and be sure that such little parings of time will be your best treasures. Above all, try to save your mornings; defend them like a besieged city! Make vigorous sallies (sudden attacks) upon all intruders, clear out the trenches, and then shut yourself up within your keep!

—François Fénelon, The Complete Fenelon

A Question to Carry

Do you have a daily or weekly practice that gives you unhurried time?

Thanks for reading,

—Jon

Subscribe now

One of the practices in my Rule of Life is called Looking Back: One Day and One Year. It goes like this:

Every morning I read two of my past diary entries, one from exactly a year ago and one from a day ago. It’s a quick way of tracing where I’ve been long-term and short-term, noticing growth and change I might otherwise miss. Sometimes it surprises me. Sometimes it humbles me. And it always reminds me that I am on a journey.

This morning, the entry I came across was from the start of Lent last year. It was a note to myself about fasting:

“Why do I do it? Not to perform, not to prove, not even mainly to train my appetite. At its heart, fasting is about love…it’s about cultivating God’s kind of love within me. It’s a way of saying no to something small, so that my yes to God’s transforming work inside me can deepen and mature.”

What does God’s kind of love look like?: Patience, kindness, gentleness—to name a few.

And what does that look like in real life? For me, patience is listening to my teenager's whole story without jumping in to fix it. Kindness is noticing my wife looks tired and handling the dishes without being asked. Gentleness is correcting my daughter without raising my voice.

So that’s what I keep reminding myself during this lenten season of fasting. I’m doing this because I want to become a more loving person, I want to love like God loves.

For Lent this year I’m fasting seconds—only one plate of food for me and no more!

One plate. One small no. Making room for a deeper yes.

A Voice from the Christian Tradition

“Don’t say to me: ‘I have fasted for so many days! I have not eaten! I have not drunk wine! I have gone without bathing!’ Show me instead that, being wrathful, you became meek; and being cruel, you became compassionate. If you are intoxicated with wrath, to what end do you afflict your flesh? If you are filled with envy and covetousness, what benefit is there in drinking only water? I am not concerned with what is on your table, but whether your evil disposition has been transformed.”

—John Chrysostom, On Fasting and Almsgiving

A Question to Carry

What small fast can you train with this Lent?

Keep it simple and easy (Remember modest practices nurture humility, grand practices can breed pride).

A blessed Lent to you,

—Jon