The Long Way Around to Soul Friendship

An introduction to this blog, and to the journey behind the Anam Cara work.

If you’ve found your way here, there’s a chance you’ve heard a question you couldn’t unhear. Mine came in different ways, but it always sounded like:

Do you trust Me?

I’ve been answering it slowly. This blog is a place to gather what’s come of that answering, for the people praying with me, supporting the Anam Cara work, or just trying to understand what it is and where it came from. Before I go any further, I want to walk you through how I got here.

The interior work — Summer through December 2024

Before anything visible changed in my life, the inside changed. The summer of 2024 began with me wrestling with the same story I’ve always loved and always resented: Jacob, refusing to let go until God blessed him. I was asking with the wrong heart, the wrong motives. What I had to admit was that I had been doing something similar for a long time. I was a good do-er. I was not a good be-er. I had built a life on performing for love, both the human kind and what I imagined the divine kind required, and I was tired in a way no schedule could explain. I was drowning and my mask was not able to keep up.

So I started over. I went back to the little girl in me — the highly sensitive one I hadn’t let speak in decades. I asked God to bring me memories from a childhood I’d let go blank, and they came back, one tender thing at a time. Wandering in flower gardens. Picking wild raspberries. A tea party for the air. All which was alone. This is where I learned that isolation was safe, or so I thought. My spiritual director, Libby, gave me three things to focus on — identity, my voice, and beauty — an image I couldn’t shake was the shepherd’s tent, where I was waiting in His presence to make a place of rest for others, not knowing that this was going to first become my place of healing and restoration.

By September I was naming what I had been doing instead: hiding. I had been a lone wolf, in a box of my own making, lowering my expectations to keep myself from being hurt. I had to go back to that little girl and help her take down the walls of hypervigilance and self-suffiency.

By December I was doing forgiveness work I had been avoiding for most of my life. I called my dad. We didn’t get all the way to the repair I hoped for. But we did get to a conversation. I reached out to old friends and offered my apologies to areas of my life these survival mechinisms were used to keep me safe, but pushed community out.

The realization — June 2025

By the early summer of 2025 I could put the whole interior year into one sentence: my greatest temptation is not immorality; it is to live a moral life. Self-sufficiency in religious clothes. Doing all the right things by my own power and mistaking it for surrender.

I was learning, slowly, that His kingdom is upside down, or right side up in reality. That you cannot earn His grace, and that a life lived for God still misses if it’s not lived from Him and more importantly, with Him.

The leaving — August through September 2025

And then the question came in a louder form. I had been at my company for six and a half years. I had loved my team. I was making the most in salary ever, I had a lot of responsibility with what I thought was job security. From the outside, the picture was working. Inside, the still small voice was already saying it was time. As my selfmade protections started to fall off, the role I was in was starting to no longer fulfill me. But I don’t have another job to go do.

“Do you trust Me?”

Surely this isn’t God, that isn’t wise or responsible.

“Could you live on less income?”

Then a partial furlough made less a real number. Then a full furlough. Then a severance offer. I was presented with two options: wait for man to determine my future, or take the offer and trust that God did. I took option two.

I wrote about it on August 10 — the next chapter — and named the place I had landed: total trust, full faith, my Father as my Provider. Psalm 23 felt more real, "He MAKES me lay down in green pastures..." My assignment was to rest. My earthly father told me my full-time job was now to find a new job. My heavenly Father told me my full-time job was to learn how to rest.

In September, the temptation that surprised me most wasn’t fear. It was familiarity. There were old shapes of life I knew how to fit into. "Don’t go back to Egypt," I kept hearing. The Israelites longed for the pleasures of the place that had been crushing them; I understood that for the first time. There is a kind of slavery you miss because at least it has a schedule. It took me a good 30 days to stop. I still looked for a job, but it was not in desperation.

The silence and the naming — October 2025 through April 2026

And then I went quiet for about five months. Nothing on the page. Outwardly there was little to report; inwardly the wilderness was doing what wildernesses do. I learned the difference between waiting for something to happen and waiting with Someone for something to be born. I started to get into new rhythms, daily and weekly ones. Not rules but pillars that became the consistent support to my faith walk, but holistically my life. Things started to be reordered in priority, striving ceased. I was striped and limited for my own benefit. My life became more or less still. Provision was something to be stewarded, in time and money. Then I noticed something, friends were asking me to sit with them in the parts of their lives no one else had room for, and I had all the time in the world.

When I came back to the page in March, I was challenged to create the opportunity for making this coffee date thing more permanent, so out of obedience and curiosity "Anam Cara" arrived. Soul friend. The Celtic tradition of the one who walks alongside another’s interior life with reverence and without agenda. I wasn’t being given a new identity — I was being given language for what had already been happening. The shepherd’s tent from a year and a half before had been there the whole time.

Now, I’m writing this from the part of the journey I’d describe as birthing. Quite literally, its been about 40 weeks since I took that offer. I’m not sure exactly what is being born. I'm not trying to make it happen. I’ve filled my jars to the brim and I’m waiting on the One who turns water into wine to do the miracle of new life.

Who this is for

The piece of this work that has become clearest to me is the people whose lives don't have built-in space for it. Executives. Leaders. Builders. The ones whose calendars have made room for everything except their own souls, intentionally. I know this because I was that person. I don't think there is anything wrong with ambition or wealth, but I think there's something missing when the inner life of the people carrying them gets quietly forgotten to your mantra or tasklist. Anam Cara is, in part, my answer to that gap.

But I want to say plainly: this work is not only for the marketplace. It's for the stay-at-home mom, the college student, a barista, or even a person who has been a long time away from any kind of faith — there is a thread of soul friendship for you in this too. The need is the same. The door is the same door. We are all imagebearers of an Almighty God and we have all been called to one purpose, to bear witness to the love and truth of Jesus Christ. The problem is that our tabernacles look abandoned or full of too much junk that we have barely enough room for Him to dwell. He deserves all of us. We need Him to consume all of us.

Why this blog

I'm starting this blog as a place to bring a deeper glimpse of the journey — for the people praying with me, supporting the Anam Cara work, or just trying to understand what it is and where it came from. I'll write here about what I'm learning. I'll write about the practices that have held me. I'll write about the parts of my faith I'm still being undone by, because I'd rather tell you the truth than pretend I have arrived.

If you've ever heard your own Do you trust Me? and didn't know what to do with it, I'm glad you found your way here. The wilderness is wide enough for both of us.