We’ve been reading in the ancient accounts from Israel’s early kings… real history, at least as I’ve always believed it, not something I read like a storybook. My wife and I have been going through it together in the mornings, usually with coffee, the city still half-asleep around us.
There’s something about those mornings that makes everything feel closer than it should. Like the pages don’t stay in the past where they belong.
One stretch of reading stayed with me more than the rest. Josiah. 2 Kings.
Not just his name, but the moment they read the scroll to him—an old written law his people had not been hearing for years. I don’t know why that detail sits with me. Maybe it’s the idea of something familiar becoming unfamiliar again all at once.
He tears his clothes.
I keep thinking about that sound… fabric giving way in his hands. Something physical. Grief finding a way out before words catch up.
It’s strange how much can sit in plain sight until something finally makes us see it again.
After that moment in the story, things begin to change quickly. Things get cleared out. Practices that had been sitting there so long they stopped feeling unusual are taken down and removed. Objects, habits, whole patterns of life that had just become part of the background.
I tend not to do what Josiah did. I usually work around things instead. Adjust without really confronting them. Let them sit until they become part of the room I stop noticing.
There’s something harder that keeps showing up when I read these accounts. Not just what gets removed, but how long things can stay in place before anyone admits they no longer belong.
That part feels closer to home than I like.
These days I hear conversations—not just online, but in ordinary places too. Grocery stores. Small talk. Comments that don’t seem like much on their own. It doesn’t usually start loud. Just a tone. A certainty about other people.
And then things sort themselves into sides.
Us.
And then, almost without noticing, the other side begins to form.
It’s human nature, if we’re honest. I can feel it when it happens. That small quiet tightening inside. When a person stops being a person and becomes a label I’ve already finished thinking about.
It doesn’t stay abstract for long.
What unsettles me is how normal it can feel in the moment. Almost reasonable. Almost necessary. Especially when everything already feels charged, like the air itself is leaning one way or another.
And yet, something in me resists it—even while I’m standing inside it, like a quiet correction I can’t quite claim as my own.
It doesn’t happen all at once. It happens in pieces. A repeated story. A frustration that lingers. A label used often enough that it starts to feel like truth instead of shorthand.
And then suddenly there’s very little room left for patience.
There are moments I catch it mid-thought and don’t like what I see. Not anything dramatic. Just a small internal conclusion that feels too clean to be honest.
And I have to sit with that for a while, because I can’t claim to follow and then quietly set aside what that means.
Sometimes I wonder if I can talk about these things too much too. Keep reaching for conclusions before I’ve listened long enough to hear anything underneath them.
There’s a kind of certainty that starts sounding like wisdom after a while, especially to the person speaking.
There’s a line in the Psalms—those ancient soul-wringing songs and prayers from Israel—that says:
“Some trust in chariots, and some in horses: but we will remember the name of the LORD our God.” (Psalm 20:7)
I read it recently and it didn’t feel distant. It felt like pressure. Like a reminder I wasn’t just reading words, but being addressed by them.
Most days I don’t fully know what that looks like in practice. It’s less insight than a slowing down inside my own reactions before they harden into conclusions.
I’ve been trying something small to get out of my bubble sometimes. When I start sorting people too quickly in my head, I try to step back from it. Not to fix anything. Just to remember there’s more in a person than the version I’ve already assigned to them.
It doesn’t change much outwardly. Not quickly.
But it changes something in me in that moment.
And maybe that’s where anything has to begin anyway.
