The Middle Matters Too
Tish Harrison Warren’s latest work explores how God makes a way in the desert seasons of our lives.
By Hannah Miller King
The internet is replete with stories about conversion and deconversion. We are drawn to them because they are exciting, often edgy, and conclusive: at the end, a person has arrived somewhere. In Christian circles we celebrate conversions to faith, and offer numerous takes on deconversions (including, most notably in the last decade, various iterations of “deconstruction”). But most of our lives are lived not in the excitement of conversion or the safety of settled conclusions, but in the long “middle” of discipleship. The Christian life is more of a marathon than a sprint, but we rarely talk about how to keep going when the race feels long. Thus, Tish Harrison Warren’s new book What Grows in Weary Lands: On Christian Resilience is a welcome contribution to the conversation.
Warren sets the stage by casting herself as the weary one in need of coaching. After an intense season in a high-profile job as a religious writer for The New York Times, Warren admits to feeling distant from God: “God began to seem less like a kind, present friend and more like a corpse on a table that we . . . analyzed and debated in the comment sections of my articles. . . . I wasn’t sure anymore who I was, where I was in life, or how to keep going. I was disoriented.”
This willingness to name her own experience of spiritual dryness and doubt builds trust with the reader, and it normalizes seasons of aridity: if a priest can get the doldrums, we should expect them to befall us all from time to time. “If the Christian life were meant to feel like a perpetual rock concert or an ecstatic mystical journey,” Warren writes, “if it was not difficult to pray or believe or obey God, the apostle [Paul] would not have had to encourage us to keep going, to not give up.” Warren reframes faith itself as something that survives—and even thrives—apart from our feelings. Yes, the zeal of conversion is wonderful and it’s good to long for feelings of closeness to God, but seasons of aridity are not a sign of failure or a reason to panic. Warren reflects on the “odd extra-terrestrial lusciousness” of plant life she witnessed out her train window on a trip through the Arizona desert—life she didn’t expect to see—and compares it to the life that can grow in us during our spiritual journeys in the desert. “Things grow, not occasionally, but everywhere . . . relentless, hardier than I ever expected.”
The bulk of the book focuses on how to keep going when we grow weary or feel dry. Seven chapters, each organized around a different saying of a desert father or mother, function as a collection of short essays as opposed to traditional book-length chapters—a format that might make the book more readable for someone who is weary or burnt out.
Warren expounds on the advice from the desert monastics of the third and fourth centuries of the church because sometimes, ancient voices offer the most contemporary word to the world. These men and women were also students of the landscape which Warren seeks to explore: the desert. “In the time and culture of these early monks, the desert was not just a physical place but a psychological reality, an internal landscape. . . . In spite of—or, more likely, because of—their spiritually difficult and ascetic lives, these early monks and mystics had intense seasons of languishing, weariness, and a sense of God’s distance.” The lessons they learned in the arid places, both geographically and spiritually, can speak uniquely to Christians of any era suffering similar malaise. Most of us won’t experience the pangs of physical hunger while living in a literal desert, but we can learn from the wisdom the desert monastics developed under such circumstances.
A lifetime of faithfulness eventually catches fire.
Though the book is geared toward those who feel weary, its encouragement to embrace the mysterious collaboration between our effort in the Christian life and God’s effort on our behalf can speak to all believers. I would not describe myself as struggling with doubt or dryness, but I needed to hear the desert fathers and mothers’ call to “stay in your cell,” “relax the bow,” and “let the silt settle.” These metaphors illustrate the ways in which discipleship is not only about engaging in the right activity; it is also about learning to be still and patient, trusting God’s activity on our behalf even when we can’t see or feel it.
Alongside monastic wisdom, Warren weaves into each chapter her own metaphor for faith as craft:
Growing in a craft, of any kind, involves struggle and change. And if life itself—including work, marriage, parenting, friendships, love, and Christian discipleship—is a kind of craft, we can have hope that if something feels difficult, even profoundly so, it is not necessarily because we are doing it wrong or because the thing we are attempting isn’t worthy.
Conceptualizing the Christian life in this way further illustrates the interplay between our work and God’s. Creatives know that they must continue to show up if they want anything to happen. But they also know that to make real art requires an element of reception, a willingness to wait for inspiration and power from outside. The weariness comes when the wait seems long or fruitless. It’s the feeling of striking a match over and over again only to watch the kindling stay cold and dark—an illustration Warren herself uses at the start of the book.
Appropriately, Warren also closes the book with a story about fire. The final chapter “All Smoke, All Flame” tells of Abba Joseph, an elder monk whose fingers once mysteriously danced like lamps of fire as he told a younger monk, “If you will, you can become all flame.” The point of the story is not that if we just want it enough or work hard enough, we can discover the perpetual rock concert version of Christianity that Warren debunked in the book’s introduction. Rather, the older monk illustrates to the younger how the long, slow work of formation is leading somewhere. A lifetime of faithfulness eventually catches fire. Warren’s closing paragraph captures both the beauty of this culminating flame and our hope in the long wait to see it: “Abba Lot can’t force fire through his effort. And neither can I. Yet, in God’s timing and by God’s grace, all our little practices of perseverance, our faithful and flailing habits of prayer and work, of doubt and faith, of silence and listening, become the kindling that the Spirit of God mysteriously sets ablaze.”
Though this is a book on weariness, I ended it feeling energized. God is at work, even when we can’t see it or feel it. In times of aridity, he is cultivating the hardy, resilient kind of life that only grows in places that require such hardiness. In that hope, we can embrace the desert seasons of our lives, expectant that nothing will be wasted.
Hannah Miller King is a writer and an Anglican priest. She is associate rector of The Vine Anglican Church in Clyde, NC and author of Feasting On Hope: How God Sets a Table in the Wilderness.
What Grows in Weary Lands: On Christian Resilience by Tish Harrison Warren was published by Penguin Random House on May 12, 2026. Fare Forward appreciates their provision of a review copy. You can purchase your own copy here.
