A friend reached out not long ago. We had gotten to know each other over several years through simple and ordinary interactions — or at least that’s what we thought. We had not spoken in some time. Then her marriage came apart, and she texted to ask if we could meet for lunch.

We have been turning that lunch over ever since. She is not the only person who has reached out like that. Others have, in their own ways, asked their own versions of the same question. I can tell something is different. I want what you have. How did you get there?

We have wanted to be able to give an honest answer, and the honest answer is harder than we expected. The simple version would be to point to a list of practices, or to a few books, or to the years of therapy and study that brought us here. None of those things are really the answer. They are part of the path. They are not the thing she was sensing. We are going to try, in this post, to say what we believe she was. We have not arrived.

In the car

We met about a decade ago, and almost from the beginning our relationship took shape on the road to Idaho. Both sets of parents lived in the same small town near Idaho Falls, and we drove there constantly — to do chores, to help where help was needed, and most of all because they needed to know they were loved. Val’s mother was diagnosed with cancer; the drives that had been monthly became twice-monthly. Bruce’s aunt — a second mother to him — passed away. Then Val’s mother. Then Bruce’s mother. Three deaths within twelve months. Val’s father is the only parent we have left now.

Three and a half hours each way. North on I-15, year after year.

We have spent a lot of time in the car.

What we did not expect — what neither of us could have planned for — is that the drives became where the most important work happened. We listened to books and to scripture together. We read aloud. But what we mostly did was talk, and the talking is where the miracles came.

We can spend a whole drive on a single verse. A single sentence. Sometimes one word — charity, meekness, long-suffering, compulsion. Yesterday on the way south it was pride. We pick a word up and we turn it over together. We bring our own histories to it. We talk about times we did the word well, but we more often talk about places where we wish we had done better — old conversations we would handle differently now, moments where the word was being asked of us and we did not yet know how to answer. The honest acknowledgment of where we have fallen short is where most of the deeper learning has come from. We ask what the word actually means. We ask what it would change in us, if we let it. Bruce sees something in it. Val sees something different. Neither of us is wrong; we are looking from different vantages, and what each of us brings is real. And then, somewhere in the conversation, something else happens that we cannot quite explain. What emerges between us is more than what either of us brought. It is more than the sum. We have come to believe, without quite knowing how to say it, that we are being taught — that the heavens open over those drives in some way we did not know was possible. Val has called those stretches of road holy ground.

One of the words we have returned to most often comes from a passage about how real influence works. The passage describes how genuine spiritual authority flows — not through pressure or position or persuasion in the manipulative sense, but through persuasion, by long-suffering, by gentleness and meekness, and by love unfeigned; by kindness, and pure knowledge. The promise at the end of the passage is that when a person lives this way, thy dominion shall be an everlasting dominion, and without compulsory means it shall flow unto thee forever and ever.

We had read that passage many times before. The first time we really stayed with it was on a long drive to and from Jackson, Wyoming, early in our marriage. We have come back to it dozens of times since. Hundreds of hours, maybe. We are still not done with it.

Then, on a drive home from a family gathering a couple years ago, we were given a small picture of what without compulsory means looks like in the life of a child.

The drive home

Several of our children and their families had gathered for a long weekend in the southern Utah desert. One of our granddaughters, who had just turned three, was there with her family. The arrangement had been worked out in advance: her older sister rode out with us; she would ride home with us. When she found out, she was so excited she could hardly stand still.

When the time came to leave, she was hesitant to even hug her mother goodbye, or anyone else, for fear it might keep her from riding with us. We strapped her into her carseat and got the door closed. She beamed for the entire drive home — almost four hours. She did not even sleep, as if she did not want to miss a minute of it. We talked with her some of the way; some of the way we just talked to each other while she sat in the back. We stopped for lunch and watched her face the whole time. We kept looking back at her in the rearview mirror, and her face was just radiant. Whatever was happening in our car for those four hours, she was inside it, and she was so glad to be there that it shone out of her.

It has taken us years to begin to understand what we were given on that drive, and we are still learning as we return to those hours.

What we have come to believe is that what our granddaughter was responding to in our car was not us, exactly. She loves us, and we love her beyond words, but children love many people and do not all light up the same way. What she was beaming at was something she could feel in our car that she could not always feel in other places. Some quality of attention. Some welcome. Some absence of the small frictions that come naturally with being three years old in a house full of older siblings. We do not think we put it there. We think we have, slowly and imperfectly, become people through whom something larger can sometimes flow. And small children, who have not yet learned to filter what they sense, feel it before adults do.

That afternoon, after all the conversations about without compulsory means that had come before it, God showed us what the phrase looks like when it is real. It looks like a small child whose love comes toward you with no pressure, no transaction, nothing to earn or ward off. It comes because of who you have, by grace, become.

This pattern has been repeated in our lives many times. We study, we read, we ponder. We turn an idea over until we think we have understood it — charity, patience, meekness, the principles of righteousness. And then God gives us a single experience that shows us the thing is far more than what we had imagined. Always more. Always larger and more wonderful than what we had been able to construct in our own minds. We have come to call these tender mercies. They sometimes seem small. They are not small. They are the moments when we see God’s plan in something close to its real proportion, and where we fit in it. The drive home from that family gathering was one of them.

What it is

We have been describing this for a while now without quite naming what it is. We want to name it carefully — and because we will use three words for it before we are done, we want to flag at the start that the relationships among the three matter as much as the meanings of each. We will come back to that at the end of this section.

The first word is love. We use it with some hesitancy. It is one of the most overused words in the language. It gets stretched to cover infatuation, romantic longing, sibling affection, even relationships that are not loving at all. None of that is what we mean. We have not found a better everyday word, but we use love advisedly, asking the reader to set aside the definitions they may already carry and stay with us.

What we believe our granddaughter was responding to in the car, and what we believe Val’s friend was sensing across the lunch table, and what we have been trying to learn how to live for the last decade — what it is, finally, is love. Not love as an idea or a feeling. Love as a quality of presence. Love that sees the whole person, including what is broken in them, and welcomes them anyway, fully, without conditions and without the small judgments most of us carry without noticing. The kind of love that stops asking what the person across from us deserves and starts asking what they need.

This love is also a form of power. We say that carefully, because power in most of its uses means the ability to force, to control, to make another person do something. That is not what we mean. The power that comes with this love does the opposite. It does not coerce; it blesses. It does not control; it sees. It makes a person feel that they matter. We have come to believe that this is the true power that all the other versions of power are pretending to be — the counterfeits gesturing toward something they cannot actually deliver. Real power is not the ability to compel another person. Real power is to be the kind of presence in whose company another person feels, sometimes for the first time, fully received.

The second word is charity. Our tradition has this more precise name for the same love — the pure love of Christ, the love he has for each of us, the love we are asked to grow into until it becomes the substance of who we are. Charity is the same reality we have been calling love, named in our tradition’s language, with less of the wear that the everyday word has accumulated. We do not believe our tradition has a monopoly on it. We have seen this love lived beautifully by people of many faiths and people of none, and we have learned from them. The love itself is one. The naming is not the thing; the loving is.

We have come to believe something else, which we offer carefully. Charity begins in a person — it is not possible to build it in anything larger if it has not first begun in a heart. But when two hearts both shaped by charity come together, what emerges between them is more than the sum. We have lived this. The everyday word for it is synergy, but synergy is too thin. What actually happens feels like a third presence entering the room. We suspect this is at least part of what the Savior meant when he said that where two or three are gathered in his name, he is in their midst. We have only seen this between two. We believe it can continue to expand as more hearts join.

The third word is Zion. Love and charity are two different names for what can happen in a person’s heart. Zion names what it feels like to someone else — what radiates from a heart that is becoming defined by love or charity, and especially from two or more such hearts gathered together. It is what Val’s friend was sensing across the lunch table. It is what a small child was beaming at in the back of our car. It is not a place you arrive at. It is not a thing you build. It is what emanates from a heart that has been formed long enough by love to begin to carry love’s quality.

This is what we have been trying, slowly and imperfectly, to become.

A voice from Val

A voice from Bruce

What we are not pretending

We want to be honest about something. The home we have been describing is real, but it is not finished, and the road has not been straight. There have been seasons when our table held people who are not at it now. There are relationships in our family that are still complicated, still tender, still in process. Some doors that were once open are not open right now. Some that we hope will reopen, in this life or in the life to come, are still closed.

There have also been seasons we did not expect. Some of our family gatherings, over the years, have included a former spouse and a new partner. We say that not to make ourselves sound generous; we are not. We say it because we want to be honest that the love we are describing is not abstract. It has had to learn, slowly, to set a place at the table for people we once could not have imagined sitting across from in peace. The setting of that place was not an act of will. It came slowly, little by little, in every conversation and every drive. The conversations played a part. But what changed in us went beyond what we learned. Our hearts were changed in ways we could not have changed them ourselves. We believe what we received, in the end, was a gift — given over years, in pieces small enough to absorb, in the ordinary work of a marriage where two people kept trying to love each other better. We did not arrive at those tables as people who had decided to be generous. We arrived as people who had become, over time, slightly more capable of love than we used to be. The capacity grew first. The table came after.

Our hearts have not closed. Our love has not diminished. If anything it has deepened, because love that depends on circumstances staying favorable is not really love yet — it is preference, comfort, the ease of relationships that are easy. The love we are trying to describe is the love that holds when things change. It is the love that keeps longing for the people who are not at the table this year, and believes the table will be larger again someday, and works to be the kind of people who will be ready when it is.

The Zion we have been describing is not the absence of difficulty. It is what stays present when difficulty arrives and circumstances change. We are still learning what that looks like. We expect to keep learning for the rest of our lives.

To anyone who has wondered

To Val’s friend across the lunch table, and to anyone else who has stopped one of us and wondered what they were sensing:

What you are reaching for is real. The thing you sensed is not unique to us — we are not special. We are two ordinary people who have been trying, with many failures and reversals, to live differently than we used to. The capacity is yours as much as it is ours. The source is the same. It begins where you are. Not where you wish you were. In the heart you have today, in the home you have today, with the people who are actually in your life today. It is built in cars, on the way to and from places you did not get to choose. It is built in the rooms you teach, the conversations you have, the prayers you say, the quiet decisions to keep loving when loving has become hard. It is built in seasons of grief, when you find that the love you have been growing is large enough to carry the loss.

You will not arrive. We have not arrived. But you can begin. And as you begin, you will start to notice that something is shifting in you, and then in the rooms you walk into, and then in the people you live with. Slowly. With many setbacks. The way real things grow.

This is what we would like to tell them. This is what we want to tell you.

When you’re ready: I Never Knew →