The Life Beneath the Words
On a song, a slow beginning, and one year of A Curious Follower.
Three years ago, before this blog existed, before there was a website or a book or even a sentence I could say out loud to explain what I was doing, I was away with a group of people during what I can only describe as a foundational time. A Curious Follower was still somewhere between a feeling and an idea. I wasn’t even sure yet what ‘it’ would be either.
During that time, a song got under my skin.
“Louder Than Words” from Tick, Tick… Boom! asks urgent, uncomfortable questions about fear and love, safety and freedom, and whether the life we are actually living reveals more than the words we say. It puts a choice on the table – cages or wings? Ask the birds.
I remember leaving that space saying something profound had happened. I also remember not knowing exactly what had happened. Just that something had.
I thought a new chapter was beginning, immediately after the old one had ended. Looking back, I think I was in a rush to begin the next chapter before truly dealing with the end of the one before.
I was still working out what to leave behind and what to carry forward. I was still becoming someone outside certain roles and expectations that had shaped me for years. I was still asking whether the thing I felt so deeply could ever become real enough for other people to recognise – or whether it would stay internal, unspoken, a private conviction that never quite found a body. A blog that was more diary than anything else.
Something deeper was beginning beneath all of that. But I didn’t have a language for it yet. I didn’t really know what was ending or what was beginning.
A Curious Follower is a one-year-old public-facing thing, and I am only now beginning to understand part of what happened on that evening three years ago.
Someone recently noticed I seemed more reflective lately and asked whether it was because I was writing the next book. I think the answer is partly yes – writing makes me notice things I might otherwise leave unnamed, or untouched. But it is also because A Curious Follower is no longer something I am only trying to explain. It is something I am trying to live.
That is a different kind of pressure. And a different kind of invitation.
The song was not asking what I believed. It wasn’t asking what I could write, or what themes I could articulate, or what theology I could bring to a room. Actions speak louder than words – the whole song rests on that. It was asking what I would live.
I believe in words. I really do. Words can comfort and challenge and name and heal and invite. A Curious Follower is mostly words. This blog. The book. The books to come. The reflections I write at the dining table on a Wednesday morning, finding them (selfishly) entirely useful for me. But wondering whether anyone else will find them useful.
But the longer I do this work, the more I feel the weight of something the song was already asking me three years ago: the words are not the whole thing. They are meant to lead somewhere. They are meant to become a life.
Curiosity cannot only be a theme written about from the comfort of my desk. Attentiveness cannot only be a nice word I use in a blog post. Invitation cannot only be something I describe. Vulnerability cannot only be an aesthetic – a tone I adopt when I sit down to write, then set aside when it feels costly. Wonder cannot only be something I write about from a comfortable distance.
These things have to become practices. They have to shape how I pay attention on an ordinary, depressing Tuesday. How I take risks I would rather avoid. How I tell the truth when it would be easier to agree. How I keep showing up when the work feels quiet and I can’t tell if anyone is listening.
That is the harder thing the song was pointing at. Not can you describe this? but can you feel it – can you live it?
One year in, A Curious Follower is still fragile. But it is no longer only in my head.
The blog exists. The book exists. People are reading, even when it feels quiet. And sometimes people mention a post weeks or months later, which is a reminder, if only to me, that silence is not always absence. Reflective spaces are forming. The work is still uncertain in lots of the ways that matter: the finances are not all sorted, the shape of the next year is not fully clear, and there are days when I genuinely do not know whether I am building something or just obsessively pushing a rock up a hill. But it is real. There are real people in it. Real conversations happening because of it. Real moments where something I have written has helped someone notice their own life a little differently.
That is not nothing.
Towards the end of some recent coaching I’ve had, I was asked a question I have kept turning over: if things don’t go as expected – what happens the day after?
My gut answer, which was quiet at first but became more confident, was: I keep going.
I want to be careful what I mean by that, because keeping going does not mean blessing stubbornness and calling it faith. It does not mean blindly forcing the same thing when the shape isn’t working. It does not mean refusing to adapt, or pretending everything is fine when it clearly isn’t, or confusing persistence with pride. It does not mean I push out rest (I’ve heard there’s a book about that…).
It means the deeper call does not disappear overnight if one particular form of it fails. It means returning to what I know is true. Listening. Praying. Writing. Paying attention. Taking the next honest step. If A Curious Follower needed to change shape tomorrow, I would grieve that but then I would find the new shape. Because the thing beneath it – the curiosity, the attentiveness, the desire to help people follow Jesus honestly in ordinary life – that does not depend on any one form surviving.
As A Curious Follower moves into another year, I am not trying to make it bigger by making it busier. I am trying to stay faithful to the work that already seems alive.
Books – continuing to share The Radical Recall to Rest with people who are searching for its invitation, and writing A Curious Follower, the second book, which is asking me to think harder about what curious, honest discipleship actually looks like in practice. Blogs – honest reflections that I hope help people notice God in ordinary life, the kind of writing that earns its place in someone’s inbox.
Spaces – reflective gatherings for people, leaders, teams and communities who want room to pay attention and be honest about where they are.
None of that is new. But I think I am beginning to understand it a little differently.
Maybe some things speak before we are ready to understand them.
Maybe a song can ask a question that takes three years to begin answering. Maybe a moment can feel like the turning of a page and still turn out to be something quieter and slower. Maybe God is not cruel with our hopes, even when the timeline is not the one we imagined.
I don’t want to over-explain any of that. But I do think God often works slowly, patiently, deeply – and that sometimes we only understand certain moments years later, when we have lived enough of the answer to recognise the question.
Calling is not just about what we produce, the action, the fruitfulness. It is also about what is formed in us, the tree trunk, the roots. Faithfulness often looks less like certainty and more like continuing honestly, one step at a time, towards the life we believe God is inviting us to live.
So…before you turn the page – what has moved you before you understood why?
What might be asking to become true in your life? What words, hopes, prayers, songs, conversations or longings have been sitting with you – waiting not just to be understood, but to be lived?
Maybe the question is not only what we believe, or what we say we believe, or what we can articulate with clarity on a good day.
Maybe the deeper question is what our lives are slowly becoming.
I am still asking that. I expect I will be for a while yet.
Josh | A Curious Follower
If these words help you listen to your own life with a little more courage and kindness, I would love you to keep walking with A Curious Follower. You can do that by reading and subscribing here, sharing the blog with someone who might find it useful, picking up a copy of The Radical Recall to Rest, or getting in touch if you are curious about a reflective space for your team or community.
Thank you for being here. One year in, it means more than I know how to say.
Josh Barker writes at acuriousfollower.com. His book The Radical Recall to Rest is available now.