Trust in the Lord and do good;
dwell in the land and cultivate faithfulness.
Delight yourself in the Lord;
and He will give you the desires of your heart.
Commit your way to the Lord,
trust also in Him, and He will do it.
Psalm 37:3-5
My iPhone and I are currently in a very strained relationship.
I’m grateful for the things it allows me to do,
the problems it helps me solve,
the connections it helps me keep.
But it is also a deep well of frustration,
mostly because of how well it’s designed.
It hacks our brains to treat it like a source of pleasure
and reward while quietly pulling us deeper
into bottomless holes of content and conversation.
But honestly, the algorithms aren’t even my real problem, currently.
It’s the photos.
That “featured memories” feature,
the one that surfaces pictures
from five, ten, sometimes fifteen years ago without asking.
My phone apparently thinks I want to be reminded
of how much time has passed and how young I used to be.
I don’t remember opting into that.
I’ll pick up my phone
and find a picture of my oldest son as a baby in my arms,
all wonder and weight and new-father disbelief,
and then set it down just in time
to watch that same son shuffle through the kitchen
with a middle school sigh that could deflate a room.
It’s delight and dread arriving at the same time.
I can never quite figure out what to do with that combination.
Most of the time I just put the phone face-down
and go pour another cup of coffee like that helps anything.
Honestly, I am naturally pain avoidant
and conflict-averse.
It isn’t just a survival mechanic either;
it has genuinely helped me lead to success.
However, I don’t think it’s a new thing for humans;
avoidance is old and well-worn.
But I’m more apt to flee discomfort than most,
and it’s not something I love about myself.
It’s something I wish I were better at.
A struggle, nonetheless.
Work doesn’t tire me, especially work I love.
My endurance surprises even me
when the wind is at my back and there’s momentum.
I can go a long time.
But conflict has always drained me.
Whatever kind it is.
It can be the conflict between what I feel and what I think.
For so long I’ve believed the lie that if there’s conflict,
then it’s bad.
The conflict of losing, or not being able to succeed at something.
The conflict of what I need not being what I want,
or what I want putting someone else in a hard spot.
Or just the garden variety kind
that shows up on a Wednesday for no particular reason.
Whatever it is, conflict costs me.
The deepest conflict I carry most days
is the one between who I am
and who I thought I’d be by now.
I’ve constructed a version of myself somewhere along the way;
more disciplined, more prolific, more finished.
He followed through.
He didn’t leave so much in the tank.
He seized the moments when they came
and didn’t spend hours on his phone
watching other people do interesting things.
I measure myself against him constantly.
And I lose.
Those photos make it worse.
They put me in the room with younger Mike.
And younger Mike is evidence,
evidence that more time has passed than I accounted for,
that the window I thought I had is a little smaller now,
that the version of myself I was building toward
may have already been decided.
There are no other options because now is right now.
I can’t dream or ideate my way out of it.
I have to sit in it.
And while I don’t hate my life, honestly, the opposite,
there’s this low hum underneath things
that keeps reminding me I left a lot in the tank.
That I wasted time I can’t recover.
That the opportunities have already passed the window.
I know that’s a lie.
Even writing it and reading it back,
I know it’s not true.
But knowing something is a lie
and actually being free from it are two very different things,
and I’m not going to rush past that distance
with a resolution I haven’t actually earned.
What I do know is that the voice telling me I wasted it,
missed it, fell short of it, that voice isn’t love.
It doesn’t produce anything good or true or useful.
It’s accusation wearing the costume of accountability.
And those two things are not the same.
While this story is mine, I imagine I’m not alone.
We all have fallen short of some idealistic view
of ourselves or the ways things have turned out.
The fallacy of progress is real and a trap.
So what do you actually do with this?
I don’t think the answer is a morning routine, though those can help.
I don’t think it’s a productivity system, though I have several.
I think it’s something slower and less satisfying than either of those things.
I think it’s learning to dwell.
Psalm 37 talks of dwelling.
Dwelling is an act of will,
a decision to be present to this land,
this life, this season,
rather than spending all your energy
grieving the one you imagined
or rushing toward the one you’re hoping will finally feel like enough.
Most of us are not great at this.
We’re much better at leaving
mentally, emotionally, spiritually,
than we are at staying.
We numb ourselves through fantasy, busyness, and comparison.
Anything that gets us out of the uncomfortable reality of right now.
But the Psalm says: stay.
Dwell.
Be here.
And then it says cultivate faithfulness
which is the part that really gets me,
because cultivation is slow by nature.
You don’t cultivate a harvest in a day.
You tend something over time,
in the same direction, with the same attention,
long before you can see what’s growing.
Eugene Peterson called it a long obedience in the same direction.
It doesn’t trend.
It doesn’t go viral.
It just quietly becomes something real.
The goal is faithfulness to this day.
This conversation.
This kid shuffling through the kitchen.
This work in front of me.
This prayer I barely have words for.
Not a perfect record or a fully realized version of myself.
Just, did I show up,
tend what was mine to tend,
and trust God with the rest?
Here are a few specific things
that have actually helped me dwell and cultivate:
name what you’re avoiding.
Not to shame yourself, just to see it clearly.
Avoidance only has power in the dark
and awareness is the first step towards action.
separate the accusation from the invitation.
Not every hard feeling is the voice of God calling you to change.
Some of it is just the accuser doing what accusers do.
Romans 8 says condemnation for those in Jesus
is not a thing.
Learn to believe that.
do the next faithful thing.
Not the thing that catches you up.
Not the thing that proves you haven’t wasted time.
Just the next right thing that’s actually in front of you.
Faithfulness doesn’t compound through grand gestures.
It compounds through small, consistent, present acts.
let the photos be what they are.
Grief and gratitude can coexist.
You don’t have to resolve the tension
between who you were and who you are now.
Psalm 37 doesn’t promise you’ll become
the version of yourself you had planned.
It promises something better:
that if you trust, dwell, cultivate, delight, and commit,
God will do something in and through your actual life
that your imagined life could never contain.
That’s not a consolation prize but it’s the whole point.
I’m still here.
Still in the land.
Still learning what it means
to cultivate something I can’t fully see yet.