This season of Lent, I invite you to join me online six Thursday evenings from 7-8 on Zoom from March 6 – April 10 for a conversation about life, death, grief, new life, and hope. This is one of the first books I read in 2025 and I had to share it with you!

Each Thursday evening during the course of the conversation, we’ll gather around a question or two everyone can explore based on one of the central themes of Matt Haig’s The Life Impossible. I’ll put a more detailed schedule together closer to our start date, but they will include:

• integrating grief into our lives,
• finding (and rediscovering) meaning,
• discerning patterns in chaos,
• the blessings of both familiarity and disruption,
• and perhaps a dabble into the nature of good and evil in ourselves and in life.

For now, let me know you’d like to join the group and enjoy reading The Life Impossible.

For our third gathering, March 20, let’s focus on the issue of faith and belief. Please see the third quote below and in particular the following line: “We make our own faith just as we make our own stories.” Narrative therapists encourage the person receiving care to reconstruct a meaningful story from the detail pieces surrounding a traumatic or painful event that they previously formed to create a traumatic story that reverbrates the pain into the future.

We might resist this invitation because truth is truth, but we live out our interpretations (as well as our unique perspective) of the truth (a persistently elusive concept). And the truth is, a different interpretation can lead to a different life experience (which is probably how forgiveness works). We do this kind of re-storying of our lives especially when revisiting and revising stories of our childhood as adults.

Think of a time in your life in which you revisited a story you had been persistently telling yourself that magnified the pain of a certain event – and discovered a new story of the earlier event that led to healing, transformative insights not only about the earlier event, but also about yourself. What invited you to reinterpret the persistent story? How would you describe the effort it took to do that important work?

At first, the notion of this kind of reinterpretation can offend our sense of “truth” that stands over and against any interpretation we might impose upon it. Yet we can never escape the responsibility of interpretation (and the consequences of our interpretation). And mistaking any particular interpretation as singular truth blinds us to the grace of learning, growing, and healing. The question is not whether an interpretation/story is true, but what kind of life does any particular interpretation lead to? This question becomes crucially important when we think of the stories that form our faith (and inform our lives).

How has the story of your faith and life changed since you were a child?

For our second gathering, March 13, since I was unavoidably detained (!) during what would have been our online gathering, let’s share some of our thoughts with each other by journaling and perhaps sharing with each other by responding to everyone on the email that I send you as we think together about some of the questions below. I’ve recorded a little intro video that expands on the following journaling/conversation ideas:

Upon arrival in Ibiza, Grace encounters many surprises (experiences not according to expectations – feeling like an outsider). How do you deal with the unknown variables in your life?

This quote really grabbed me by articulating both the problem of the expectation-reality gap and one way to address it:

Indeed, the willingness to be confused, I now realize, is a prerequisite to a good life. Wanting things to be simple can become a kind of prison, it really can. Because you end up staying trapped inside how you want things to be rather than embracing how they could be.

Can you think of a time you were confused about life – stayed with it – and embraced how things could be. What was the key(s)? Remember the first rule of improvisation: never say no.

For our first gathering, Thursday, March 6, please take a look at the videos below or others of your choosing to give yourself a feel for the setting of The Life Impossible (note that Brits pronounce the Z as TH, as in the book). We’ll share stories of our experiences of islands IRL and through books, movies, songs, and other virtual experiences. Though I don’t want to make our time together into a book report (!), we might make time to talk about the different ways we reacted to this story, and the ways in which the various themes intertwine with the setting.