When Did I Stop Dreaming?
For the past few weeks, my church has been teaching a sermon series called Living the Dream, following Joseph's story.
By the second week, I felt something familiar in the story. Something I’ve contemplated a lot during what I call my Intermission season:
Who am I, and what life am I living? Or even more importantly, whose life am I living?
Seven years ago, significant changes in my life forced me to begin asking those questions. You know those moments when you look up and realize everything has changed and almost nothing looks the way you once imagined it would?
But asking those questions only led to more questions.
And lately, a new one has surfaced:
When did I stop dreaming?
I’ve certainly had desires over the years. Goals. Things I wanted to accomplish.
But dreams?
I couldn't remember.
That had me thinking about the space between the life we imagine and the life we actually live. Eventually, I found myself asking:
What did I dream my life would be?
I had to sit with that one for quite a while, actually.
And then I had to go surprisingly far back to the sixth grade.
I wanted to be an architect.
I don't remember exactly why anymore. Maybe it was the creativity. I remember loving drafting paper and the idea of imagining something that didn't exist and then figuring out how to create it.
But more than the dream itself, I find myself thinking about the girl who had it.
Because I can't remember many dreams after that.
Now I’m wondering if When did I stop dreaming? isn't the right question.
As I sit with this today, I’m asking:
When did my dreams begin becoming someone else's?
Somewhere along the way, I began learning what a life was supposed to look like.
What a good girl did.
What success looked like.
We all receive those messages. Some are spoken directly to us. Others we absorb simply by watching the people around us.
Go to school. Find a career. Get married. Have a family. Build a home. Be responsible. Be successful. Be good.
There is nothing inherently wrong with any of those things. Some became beautiful parts of my life.
But I wonder how often, while learning what a life is supposed to look like, we stop asking ourselves what we actually want our life to become.
I know I did.
I slowly began tucking away pieces of myself long before I had language for what I was doing. I molded myself around relationships, expectations, belonging, and approval. I made choices, sometimes poor ones, while trying to create the life I thought I was supposed to create.
Eventually, I became very good at “building a life.”
I just never stopped to ask whether it was my life I was building.
And that brings me back to Joseph.
Joseph was still a teenager when he received a dream about his future, long before he could possibly understand what it meant or what it was actually for.
Then his life went in almost exactly the opposite direction.
Betrayal. A pit. Slavery. Prison.
An enormous gap separated the future Joseph had glimpsed from the life he was actually living.
I think we know something about those gaps, too.
Some dreams don't happen. Some are interrupted by circumstances we never anticipated. Some change because we change. And there are long stretches when we find ourselves somewhere we never intended to be, wondering how any of this could possibly be part of the story.
I've become interested in Joseph's story because the dream wasn't the whole story.
I’m no longer asking, Did my life turn out the way I dreamed it would?
The entire process of becoming Untucked has been about a different question:
Who have I become along the way?
When I look at the different thresholds of my life, I'm becoming less interested in whether I arrived where I thought I was going and more interested in what each threshold taught me about myself.
Did I move forward?
Did I remain stuck in an old version of the dream?
Did the dream need to change because I had changed?
I don't have all those answers yet. Maybe I never will.
What I do know is that the desires God has placed within me look nothing like what I once imagined and certainly not like what I thought life was supposed to look like.
It’s possible that I couldn't have imagined them in an earlier season of my life.
How could I have dreamed about a life I didn't yet know was possible?
And then I met someone special.
About ten years ago, during a difficult season of my life, I began practicing an Inner Mentor meditation. In the meditation, you imagine meeting your older self, the woman who has already lived the years you haven't.
An image came to me so vividly that I still see it today.
My older self was standing at a cottage in the woods.
Something about that image felt like freedom. Peace. A life that belonged to her.
The strange thing is that the life I was living at the time couldn't accommodate that image at all. I couldn't have told you how I would ever get from where I was to where she seemed to be.
So I didn't make a plan.
I didn't dream about it.
I just carried the image. It was always close by.
And nearly ten years later, it's still here.
The cottage in the woods has become something I think about often. I can see myself there. I can feel myself there.
And now, thinking about Joseph and dreams, I'm wondering if I've been wrong about something.
I didn't stop dreaming.
I stopped believing I was allowed to consciously imagine a different life for myself.
And perhaps, during those years, some deeper part of me kept imagining anyway.
I don't know why that particular image came to me ten years ago. I don't know whether I'll ever live in that cottage.
But I wonder now if the cottage was ever really the point.
I don’t think my eighty-year-old self was showing my forty-five-year-old self where she would live someday.
I believe she was telling her:
There is a life beyond the one you can see from where you're standing.
You're going to be okay.
And now here I am at 56, somewhere between those two women.
I can almost imagine my eighty-year-old self smiling at me:
See? I told you.
What if dreams aren't always maps to destinations or even images of what life should look like?
What if dreams are glimpses. Something we carry through the years when the life we're living looks nothing like the one we can barely imagine?
Becoming untucked isn't about going back and becoming the sixth-grade girl who wanted to be an architect.
It's about remembering what she knew.
She allowed herself to imagine a life she hadn't lived yet.
And that's what the cottage gave me, too.
Not a blueprint for where I was going, but permission to imagine that something existed beyond what I could see.
I’m writing this reflection as I prepare to help teach a class at church next month about another part of this ancient story, the Israelites' journey out of Egypt, through the wilderness, and toward a new understanding of who they were becoming.
And something is happening as I prepare.
I'm beginning to see my own story differently.
I've spent years writing about what it means to live untucked, to uncover the truest parts of ourselves we've molded, quieted, or tucked away.
Now, for the first time, I'm beginning to think dreaming belongs in that journey too.
So over the next few weeks, as I study Joseph, the Israelites, wilderness, freedom, and becoming, I'll follow this thread and see where it leads.
I hope you'll come along.
For now, maybe you can begin where I am beginning:
What did you dream about before the world told you what your life was supposed to look like?
And perhaps another question:
What dreams have been quietly carrying you all along

​For more than a decade, I've been slowly removing noise from my life.
It started with taking the television out of my bedroom because I no longer wanted the news to affect my sleep. When smartphones came along, I turned off nearly every notification. And eventually, I removed social media apps from my phone.
None of these decisions felt particularly radical. I simply noticed what was competing for my attention and decided I didn't want to give it that much access.
Then I wrote Untucked.
And suddenly I'm being told I need to build an audience, create content, post consistently, and stay visible.
There's an irony in that I can't ignore.
I write about stillness, presence, authenticity, and learning to hear the quiet voice within. Yet I'm being told that to get that message into the world, I need to promote it on platforms designed to compete for our attention.
I'm writing about stillness while hoping you'll pick up your phone long enough to see my post telling you to put it down.
That doesn't sit well with me.
I still share my writing on social media, but not on my phone. Posting from my computer is more cumbersome, but I'm beginning to think inconvenience isn't always a problem.
Sometimes it's a boundary.
And yet, this is about something much larger than my phone.
It’s the Epidemic of Distraction.
This week, I had a frustrating situation caused by someone simply not paying attention. And honestly, I got a bit hot under the collar.
My first response was irritation. But almost immediately, I was presented with the three-second rule. NO, not the three-second rule to calm myself down.
The rule that says I have three seconds to get your attention before you move on.
Whether or not three seconds applies directly to the human attention span isn't really the point. What struck me was the assumption behind it: we don’t stay very long.
We scroll. We skim. We react before we understand. The moment something fails to hold our interest, something else is waiting.
And I started wondering about the moments when our attention really matters.
What if it's something we need to understand?
What if it's someone we love trying to tell us something?
What if it's the quiet nudge of our own intuition?
What if it's God?
We live in a world constantly competing for our attention, and there is growing research (and lawsuits) examining what our increasingly fragmented digital lives may be doing to our nervous systems, relationships, and mental health.
I see it as something much simpler.
As I continue to talk with people, especially women, about Untucked, I've repeatedly heard some version of the same thing:
"I don't know how to be still." Or "I don't have time for stillness." 
But I don't believe time is really the problem.
I think we've lost some of our tolerance for an unfilled moment.
Think about all the little empty spaces that once lived in an ordinary day. We waited in line or for an appointment. We walked somewhere, sat on the porch or just lay in bed before falling asleep.
We looked around. We daydreamed.
We got bored.
And boredom wasn't necessarily a problem that needed to be solved.
Now nearly every empty moment can be filled. The moment nothing is happening, we can reach for the phone.
But what if boredom isn’t empty?
I believe it’s where the mind wanders and imagination lives. Where an idea arrives. Or simply where we finally notice what we're feeling.
Maybe it's even where prayer happens without us necessarily calling it prayer.
What does it say about us when we can't sit through a movie or finish a book? When we react to a headline without reading the story? When someone we love is talking, but part of our attention is somewhere else?
What happens when silence becomes uncomfortable? And we can't stay with an uncomfortable feeling long enough to understand what it's trying to tell us.
And what happens to our spiritual lives when we lose the ability to be still?
"Be still, and know that I am God."
Before the knowing comes the stillness.
Across contemplative traditions, the invitation has always been remarkably similar: be here, pay attention, listen.
If God sometimes speaks in a whisper, what happens when we create lives in which we can only hear the loud?
Stillness isn't simply relaxation. It's where we notice and process, where creativity appears, where we sit with what we're feeling instead of immediately distracting ourselves from it.
For me, it's where I hear God.
And IF every empty space is filled with someone else's thoughts, opinions, images and lives, when exactly do we hear our own?
I'm not advocating that we throw away our phones or abandon social media. I use and appreciate technology every day.
I'm simply asking us to pay attention to what is distracting us.
What we give our attention to shapes what we notice, what we miss, who we connect with and perhaps even how we experience God.
I believe we need to take this epidemic of distraction seriously.
Through my writing, I’m being called to guide and help bridge the gap between our inner lives and how we show up in the world, for ourselves and our loved ones.  
It is what was spoken to me very clearly on the Camino, and it’s what came through Untucked.
So today, I'm encouraging you to be a little inconvenienced.
Let yourself be bored. Don't fill every empty space.
And then pay attention.
Notice the impulse to reach for something when silence comes. Notice the discomfort of having nothing to do.
And, for a little while, don't do anything with what you notice.
Just let it belong to you.
Because the epidemic of distraction isn't only costing us our attention.
It is costing us our ability to hear. To hear our bodies, one another, ourselves, and God.
And if that's true, reclaiming our attention isn't really about using our phones less.
It's about learning how to inhabit our lives again.
Peace be with you.
J~

​Last night, I turned on the Chiefs game.
I wasn’t particularly interested in watching it. I had been working in my office, listening to an audiobook that still hadn’t captured me and when I realized it was almost 8:00 p.m., I knew it was time to stop working.
So I turned on the game, because that’s what you do when you live in Kansas City.
Except apparently, I don’t.
Within minutes, I was overwhelmed by the noise. The commercials. The constant stimulation. I wasn’t enjoying any of it.
So I turned it off.
This morning, sitting in the quiet of my house, I started thinking about how much I have stripped away from my life.
Beliefs that weren’t mine. Expectations I inherited. Roles I learned to play. Ideas about what a life is supposed to look like.
The years of my intermission have required me to look at those things one by one and ask:
Is this actually mine?
And lately, I find myself asking the same question about my attention.
I spend most of my days working from home in almost complete silence. There is the hum of the air conditioner, the wind against the side of the house, and the occasional sound of a passing car. Most days, my house is quiet.
And that quiet means something to me.
For a long time, I lived inside someone else’s chaos. There was noise I didn’t create and couldn’t control, yet somehow had to manage. I learned to pay attention to someone else’s emotional weather, to anticipate what might be coming and adjust myself accordingly.
I believe that is why I am so protective of quiet now.
I am also learning more about my sensitivity. I am accepting it without explaining it, apologizing for it or feeling ashamed of it, as I was taught to do.
Right now, I’m still learning to find balance.
The fact is, I spend a great deal of my time alone. There is solitude that nourishes me, and there are times when I need to step out of my quietude and be with people.
I don’t want quiet to become another way of hiding.
And I don’t want noise to become another way of escaping.
That is the distinction I am trying to understand.
Because when I encounter the noise of the larger world now, I feel it differently.
The outrage, opinions and endless commentary. A culture that seems increasingly unable to sit still.
There is an entire world competing for our attention. News alerts and advertisements. Devices designed to be hard to put down. Even things we genuinely enjoy can become another way of filling every unoccupied space.
Sometimes I think we are living through an epidemic of distraction.
Maybe even an addiction to it.
And because distractedness has become so normal, I’m not sure we recognize it anymore.
There is always something available to occupy us. Something to watch. Something to scroll. Something to listen to. Something to buy. Something to learn. Something to improve.
We rarely have to be bored anymore.
And I’m beginning to wonder if boredom might be trying to give us something.
I notice it in myself when I’m not working or writing or outside exploring. When there is nowhere I need to be and nothing in particular that needs to be accomplished, I can feel the impulse to reach for something.
What am I going to do now?
That is the moment I want to become more conscious of.
What do I reach for when nothing is demanding my attention?
Because distraction can give us somewhere to go when the truth feels too close. It can keep us from having to look at what is actually happening inside us.
The grief. The fear. The loneliness. The choices we regret and the ways we have participated in our own unhappiness.
And we are being offered endless ways not to look.
Even healing can become another form of distraction. We can read another book, try another therapy, complete another journal prompt or learn another five-step process.
Some of those things can help. Many have helped me.
But we can read about our patterns forever and still avoid changing them. We can journal about our pain without allowing ourselves to feel it. We can keep gathering tools without ever engaging with what the tools reveal.
And all the while, the algorithms keep feeding us more.
What is all that noise doing to us?
I don’t want to become a person who rejects the modern world. Technology has brought good things into my life. It lets me see videos of my grandson. It helps me run my business. It has helped me create, learn, find answers and stay connected.
I don’t want to confuse discernment with deprivation.
I simply want to choose.
I want to know when I turn something on that I actually want to watch it. When I open an app, I want to ask why I’m there. When I read something, I want to notice what it leaves behind in me.
I want to tell the difference between nourishment and stimulation.
Between quiet and hiding.
Between genuine curiosity and the reflex to fill every empty moment.
Freedom is becoming increasingly discerning about what I allow to influence me.
I’ve spent years learning to recognize the voices I carried inside me that were never really mine.
Perhaps this is simply the next layer.
What gets my attention?
What gets access to my mind?
What gets to shape the way I see myself, other people and the world?
What am I reaching for when I say I am bored?
And when I am alone, am I choosing solitude or withdrawing from life?
I don’t know that the answer will always be the same.
But I know that living consciously is learning to ask the question before I reach for the noise.

Pages From My Journal
Monday, September 14, 2026
Lord, thank you for waking me up this morning to the bright red sliver of light cresting the sky in the end of darkness. For a moment, I was mesmerized by the textures and contrast until it was replaced by an overcast morning sky, which presented its own subtle beauty.
I have a busy day ahead, but this time with you to pause helps me turn inward to peace.
It’s still fairly dark, but I can see the silhouette of a hummingbird against the charcoal sky. She is resting on top of my deck post. As I watch her head scan her surroundings, two more enter the feeder area, and I immediately feel sadness and hope for them.
What must it feel like to migrate thousands of miles? Does she stay close to her flock, or is she a solo traveler on this journey? If there are dangerous obstacles, what will she have to endure?
I want to offer her protection. It really does hurt my heart to think of her unknown journey ahead.
But right now, she has fresh food and a safe space to rest her amazing body. I know she is equipped for the journey, but I wonder: is this her first trip, or is she a pro?
Be safe, little girl.
I’m going to miss you more than you know. My mornings won’t be the same without you, but you remind me of nature’s gift and the change it brings.
I promise to continue to notice until you return.