40 quietly laps you when you're more bent on running, writing, and preparing for fall break in New York than recalling how old you are. But all of a sudden, you're the age your teenage self remembers your parents. So you begin a list of little learnings you've picked up the past four decades. Fundamentals, you title it.

At first it's a dare. Can you write down 40 life lessons? Then it's a whittling, as you narrow to just 40.

While revising and rearranging, you realize how much you need each reminder to stick to the essentials. Because we tend to overcomplicate what it means to live like Jesus, right where we are. We add in extra criteria until a mission-minded life–including actual friendships with our neighbors–feels out of reach.

So let's stick with simple, shall we?

Links mentioned:

1. Get a FREE, 5-Day Email Course: Turn Your Loneliness into Ripple-Effect Faith in 5 Days.
2. Read the written version of this episode HERE.
3. Neighboring Tip of the Week

I relate to the way the Israelites prayed. When something terrible happens, I want God to take it away. To make life go back to how it was. I expect God's rescue to look like reversal or extraction.

But threaded through this ancient story is a new way to pray.

Links mentioned:

1. Get a FREE, 5-Day Email Course: Turn Your Loneliness into Ripple-Effect Faith in 5 Days.
2. Read the written version of this episode HERE.
3. Neighboring Tip of the Week

When one of those "unfixables" happens–a relationship strain, health complications stacked on top of a financial drain, an irreversible injustice–it can feel like you're in a battle zone. You vs. the world. Like the implications of what you can't do are strapped to your back.

Makes you feel unmoored and helpless. Because you'd change the situation if you could, but it seems there's no easy path forward, no win-win resolution within reach, no reversing the hurt.

I'm thinking of this–thinking of you–as I read Deuteronomy 1.

Links mentioned:

1. Get a FREE, 5-Day Email Course: Turn Your Loneliness into Ripple-Effect Faith in 5 Days.
2. Read the written version of this episode HERE.
3. Neighboring Tip of the Week

If you want to become more resilient to change, disappointment, stress, betrayal, loss, anxiety, long seasons of waiting, or the tender journey of recovery, this gratitude challenge is for you.

Links mentioned:

1. Take the #ResilientGratitude Challenge! Sign up HERE to get the prompts, social share template, and some invites to send your friends. The challenge begins Nov. 1, 2026.
2. "Manassah" song by Anna Golden.
3. Get a FREE, 5-Day Email Course: Turn Your Loneliness into Ripple-Effect Faith in 5 Days.
4. Read the written version of this episode HERE.
5. Neighboring Tip of the Week

I leave leaves on my writing table–small ones that landed soft on my laptop last time I wrote in my front yard. They nestle next to pumpkin pistachio and it's cheery woodwick flame.

Fall.

I'm already ready, and it's not even here.

There's a comforting conjunction of crisp and cozy that enters with autumn. A deliberate extension of the both/ands that offer hope along with the hard.

Links mentioned:

1. Get a FREE, 5-Day Email Course: Turn Your Loneliness into Ripple-Effect Faith in 5 Days.
2. Read the written version of this episode HERE.
3. Neighboring Tip of the Week

Our brains are always telling us what we have to do, as if there's always more we could–should–be doing. We're continually privy to the guilty nagging, the critical comparison, the insistent whisper of not enough, not enough, not enough.

No wonder a missional life gets lumped in with the shoulds. We've been conditioned to stack on extras and deny we're on empty.

We assign a grading scale to our hospitality, our servant-heartedness, our neighborliness. We assess our overwhelm as selfishness. We see our homes as never company-ready, our lives as lacking, our faith as lackluster.

Can we talk about all the pressure we've built up to do more and be more, as if being a good neighbor should exhaust you?

Links mentioned:

1. Get a FREE, 5-Day Email Course: Turn Your Loneliness into Ripple-Effect Faith in 5 Days.
2. Read the written version of this episode HERE.
3. For more encouragement and practical tips for mission-minded introverts, check out this post, "Neighborhood Missional Living When I Am an Introvert."
4. Neighboring Tip of the Week

It's one of those mornings the sunrise peaks as I walk up the hill from my house, trees and power lines and houses towering between me and the sky. I take pictures of the remnants of color gently grazing the horizon when I reach my typical sunrise viewing spot. It's lovely, but not stunning.

I stretch and check my shoelaces, but before I hit the record button on my running app, I turn around. I'm glad I do, because God's glory hovers over an ordinary parking lot, and I almost missed it.

I'd been bent on the angle, trying to situate the sun just so between the trees or over the vanishing point of the white fence. But I'd been too close to see the white streaks and glow of color up a little higher.

From the middle of the parking lot, I catch patched blacktop and a swingset in my camera lens. If I omit the less-aesthetic, I also miss the majesty exploding above it.

Isn't it like that a lot in life? We zero in on moments that feel inordinately spiritual and miss the intersection of the sacred and the mundane?

Links mentioned:

1. Get a FREE, 5-Day Email Course: Turn Your Loneliness into Ripple-Effect Faith in 5 Days.
2. Read the written version of this episode HERE.
3. Neighboring Tip of the Week

Maybe you feel like you're falling into fall too.

Barely ready.

Rarely at your best.

And yet, there's a quiet, undeniable inkling that something is missing.

• Conversations in driveways and over casual dinners.
• Cheery hellos and neighbors helping neighbors.
• Pretense-free, faith-forming honesty.

Perhaps this dream has lain dormant for a while as you fit all the necessaries into your day-to-day. Perhaps you've never laid a finger on this desire for an old-fashioned kind of neighborhood, where kids play in the street and adults converse on porches. But the tumble from summer to autumn has you daydreaming.

Links mentioned:

1. Get a FREE, 5-Day Email Course: Turn Your Loneliness into Ripple-Effect Faith in 5 Days.
2. Read the written version of this episode HERE.
3. Neighboring Tip of the Week
4. For your heart (and if you like, for your wall or dashboard or mirror), here is a manifesto to define the direction.