So What?

Monday, June 15, 2026

Happy Monday, my friends! If you were following Monday Moments before January 6, 2026, you probably noticed how the essays and reflections came to a rather abrupt end. That wasn’t entirely planned. The last essay I published was never meant to be a farewell, but life has a way of making decisions for us before we have time to make them ourselves.

The short version is this: the last several months have been a season of reassessment. LOVEboldly’s financial constraints, which many of you know about, required me to step back my paid hours significantly last fall. In practice, that meant making hard choices about where my limited time and energy would go. My weekly sermons at Blue Ocean Faith Columbus took priority, as they should, and Monday Moments gradually slipped to the bottom of the list. By the end of 2025, I simply didn't have the passion or the capacity to keep them going. Taking a break was the right call, even if I didn’t know I was making it at the time.

Here’s some of what I’ve learned about myself during these five months of relative quiet: I miss writing these essays. I miss the discipline of sitting down each week and working out what I think, feel, and believe in a space very different from my sermons. I miss the conversation these essays create. And I’ve come to believe, perhaps more clearly than before, that this kind of writing, pastoral, personal, and occasionally prophetic, is part of my call.

That realization has intersected in interesting ways with some bigger questions I’ve been sitting with about my theological education. Through the end of 2025, I had been enrolled in seminary, working toward a formal degree, and somewhere along the way I started to wonder whether that was the right path. Not because I’ve lost my love for learning or was struggling in my faith, but because I’ve come to understand that while I enjoy theological discussion; while I find it genuinely exciting to wrestle with ideas about God, scripture, tradition, and the church, what compels me is lived faith. It’s the question of how what we believe shapes what we do, how our faith moves us to act in and for the world.

Theology asks, “What do we believe?” Lived faith asks, “So what?” I need both questions, but I’ve realized I belong most fully in the space where the second question lives.

I don’t nearly have all of this figured out. I’m still discerning what my next steps in formation and education look like. There’s a practical reality that TFAM requires that I complete a theological degree, but there’s also the practical grace that they don’t have a set schedule for that degree. I continue to learn that discernment isn’t the same as paralysis, and waiting until everything’s clear before showing up again is its own kind of avoidance.

So, here I am showing up again. Monday Moments are back.

What seasons of reassessment have you navigated? How do you know when it’s time to start again?

Let us pray: Gracious God, you are familiar with seasons of wilderness and return, of quiet and of beginning again. Thank you for the grace that meets us in the pauses of our lives and for the courage you offer when we are ready to start moving again. Help us trust that our questions are not obstacles to faith but invitations deeper into it. Walk with us as we discern our next steps and remind us that you are already present in whatever comes next. We ask this in the name of Jesus, our liberator and companion. Amen.

Blessings on your weeks, my friends! Please let me know if there is anything I can do for you.

Faithfully,

Ben +