Can be hard to reckon with. If I’m being completely honest, even after 30 years of following Jesus pretty darn seriously, and after quite a number of prayers significantly answered, I’m sometimes still a little sore about the ones that were not.

Some of them I know never will be. The opportunity has passed. Some of them still could be, I suppose, but it’s been so long that I’ve pretty much stopped asking. And I suppose some of them may be answered in an unexpected way, but if the answer looks so different from the request that it doesn’t help me connect the dots—well, I don’t know what to do with that.

Jesus was sent into our world, not kept out of our world. In the same way, he sends his followers into the world; he does not extract them out of it. The endgame of the kingdom of God is not a life lived in religious domesticity, but a sojourning out in the wild.

“I’d like to repeat the advice that I gave you before, in that I think you really should make a radical change in your lifestyle and begin to boldly do things which you may previously never have thought of doing, or been too hesitant to attempt. So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future.”

-Chris McCandless, Into the Wild (by John Krakauer)

An important point when it comes to Jesus’ life in the wild—how he lived, how he sent out his disciples to live—is that it was not the “helter-skelter style of life” of McCandless. Jesus lived a bit more purposefully. Unpredictable, yet not unintentional. Jesus’ life was “set apart,” specially commissioned. This is the meaning of the religious word sanctified. His was not merely a rescue mission, but an invasion mission. Salvation is not merely from but to.

As with Jesus, so with us.

Binge watching the latest Netflix series. Youtube rabbit holes. The non-stop scrollability of social media. Even more old-fashioned means such as going to the movies, reading books, and workaholism still get a lot of traction.

There is no shortage of escape hatches to help you forget about reality and all its troubles. And there’s no shortage of someone trying to make a buck off of helpuing you check out.

And that includes religion.

By intensity? By frequency? By duration? By its cause? By its intentionality or spontaneity?

Perhaps these are all good qualities to consider. If you feel like you’re lacking joy, weighing these kinds of questions might pinpoint some barrier to joy. Or maybe even point out some joy that has been running deep in your heart like a subterranean stream, quiet and subtle and as of yet unnoticed.

It’s hard to hold anything together over the long haul. If for no other reason than it’s our human tendency to break up. To divide. To disagree. To rub each other the wrong way. To find it easier to go our own way.

And on the whole, this isn’t just because humans are rotten, but because life is challenging. Life is hard. Adversity comes. Seemingly insurmountable challenges come. We end up facing things we have no idea how to face. There are questions posed to us to which there are no simple answers.

“Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life.”

“I am going away, and you will look for me, and you will die in your sin.”

“You will weep and mourn while the world rejoices.”

“The time is coming when anyone who kills you will think they are offering a service to God.”

“In this world you will have trouble.”

A lot of his more difficult sayings tend to be pretty dark. At worst depressing; at best mysterious. But then there’s this, at the beginning of the longest prayer of his that we have recorded, a prayer for his disciples: “And glory has come to me through them.”

Not a taker. More generous than exacting. More keen on blessing than extracting. More into surprising than expecting. More interested in what he can contribute than what he demand.

It can be easy to unwittingly accept an image of God as the Great Demander. The Domineering Father. The Exacting Boss The By-the-Book Judge. Always with a keen eye to whether or not we’re paying our dues or living up to his standards.

And doing the work in front of you that day is all that God really asks of you. Just attending to and finishing to the best of your ability whatever the work is he has given you to do. Maybe simply living your life to the best of your ability brings all the glory to God that he desires from you.

Brew the coffee. Make the bed. Pack the kids’ lunches. Get them to school. Show up to the office. Respond to the emails. Pay the bills. Prep the meals. Take your meds. Get back to bed at a decent hour.

All the normal, uneventful, innocuous tasks that come with being human. Nothing fancy. Nothing extravagant. Nothing with the potential of going viral on social media.

According to Jesus at least, doesn’t simply mean living forever, on into eternity. Nor does it simply mean existing in a blissful, pain-free state. Those may very well be true. I suspect that they are.

For the record, by “eternal life” Jesus also does not mean going on to live in some sort of disembodied, floating-in-the-ether, angel-like state. No. There is something about embodied existence that is good and that will forever be a part of “eternal life.”

For the voice of God is this: peace.

Whether it’s a though popping into your own head, or a feeling stirring in your own heart, or a word from a trusted spiritual friend, or a supposed prophecy from a stranger—or a more abnormal source like a talking donkey—wherever or through whomever your receive a possible communication from the Divine, begin by asking one simple questions: Does this bring me peace?

Not fear, or anxiety, or anger, or contempt, or judgment, or hopelessness—not anything like that. Only peace. That almost nonsensical, beyond-understanding, doesn’t-make-sense-given-the-circumstances-kind of peace. Everything on the outside may remain the same, but deep down there is equanimity. Calm waters.