Also, I don’t use an editor, AI or human, to review my posts, so you may bump into a typo here and there. I do my best to catch them all, but I may have missed something. Thank you for your grace. Enjoy!

Our lives transform from the outside in, and from the inside out.

This isn’t a novel idea, but go with me.

Our inner lives are formed by what we do with our bodies and our time. What we eat, where we go, how we move—they all shape our inner reality, the peace we do or do not feel, the energy we do or do not have, and the love we do or do not carry for others, as a few examples. Our outer lives shape our inner worlds.

And vice versa. In the gospel written by St. Luke, we have a record of Jesus saying, “The good person out of the good treasure of his heart produces good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure produces evil, for out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks.”

I understand this to mean, at least in part, that whatever is within us overflows into how we live, the words we speak, and into the care we do or do not give to those around us.

Our inner lives and outer worlds are inextricably linked, and as we change one, we certainly influence the other.

I’m coming upon the anniversary of my being received into the Orthodox Church, and it has me thinking a lot about this inner-outer life dynamic. To become Orthodox is a whole life reorientation, from the outside-in and from the inside-out. Every aspect of what it means to be a person is baptized into the death of Christ, and resurrected into His life, that is, the liturgical, sacramental, and ascetic life of the Church. The liturgical life features our services of collective prayer, veneration, and worship. The sacramental life features those mysterious ways in which God’s presence is made real in our lives and in the world. The ascetic life speaks to how we limit and restrain ourselves, often bodily, in order to make room for the uncreated energies of God to meet and transform us.

With this anniversary around the corner, I thought I’d take a moment to reflect and share with you three ways my life has changed since becoming Orthodox. This list is far from exhaustive, but they all point to ways the inner life and outer life of faith dance together to bring healing to the body and soul.

Change #1 - On God

“God” is no longer an abstraction. God is a person: Christ.

This is by far the biggest transformation I’ve seen in my life and worldview. Following my deconstruction of evangelical Christianity, and my slow fade into New Age spirituality, “God” stopped being specific and became the very vague, obscure notion of “the divine.” When I would say, “God,” I was referring to an ethereal force, or energy, not to anyone in particular. This meant that I was praying to and interacting with a spiritual entity that I couldn’t possibly know or understand. And conveniently, it also meant that this vague spiritual entity, lacking in defined personhood, had no expectations of me. I didn’t have to actually change anything about my life in relationship with “the divine,” because “the divine” was an abstract force. It was an idea, an essence, that made me feel good (on the surface) and was content to let me devolve into a soul-corroding belief in my own self-deification. That is to say, I became my own god, and “the divine,” being a non-specific, abstract, vague force offered no challenge to my own little kingdom.

The thing that sucks about this is that I’m not God. I’m also not “a god.” I am person. A creature. A human being. And while I believe humans were created to become God-like in due time, it was never meant to happen apart from the One who created us.

I’ve been in a slowly moving Orthodox Bible study, unlearning much of what I once understood the the Bible to even be. Coming into a deeper understanding of what the Bible is and how it was understood by the earliest Christians has been transformative. I come from a sola scriptura background, where the Bible was treated like a god in its own right. Holding the text in that way never made much sense to me. In the Bible study I’m in now, we hold the text less like a strict set of rules dictating a worldview, and more like an unfolding story of a people group finding redemption through their continual encounters with the grace of God, culminating in the person of Christ.

One of the most striking stories I’ve been sitting with is from Genesis. This won’t be new to many of you, but its the story of Adam and Eve and their choice to pursue God-likeness apart from the One who Created them. I’m not an Orthodox scholar, so be gracious with me as I attempt to unpack this.

One of the ways we understand Adam and Eve as persons, in Orthodox tradition, is that being newly created, they had an immaturity about them. They were instructed to not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil not because God was holding out on them, or tempting them, or testing them to make sure they’d choose him with their free will, but rather because he wanted them to wait until they were ready. He wanted them to grow in wisdom and understanding. He wanted them to have the knowledge when they were ready to hold it with depth, perception, and care. He created Adam and Eve, human beings, to become like him, and that process would take time.

Human beings are not static or fixed. It is our nature to evolve, grow, and change. The same was true of Adam and Eve. They needed to grow up first, and the time for them to have that specific fruit from that specific tree would come. Why else would it be in the garden?

When I began to understand this, it made so much sense. God set a boundary with his beloved creation just like any parent who has ever told a child “no” because their kid wasn’t yet old enough, mature enough, or discerning enough to steward that for which they’d asked. It’s good leadership. It’s love.

Adam and Eve’s shortcut, their grabbing for a power that God would have given them in due time, was tragic for a million reasons. Some would even say it was a traumatic event, one that we replay over and over again, even now, every time we decide to reach for our own power, security, or divinity apart from Christ. The tragedy here isn’t a moral failing, per se, but is rather the loss of our own understanding of our true personhood. When we set out to make a god of ourselves, or a god of other created things, we miss out on the richness, vibrancy, and depth for which we were designed. We also end up missing out on the healing and restoration our soul’s long for most.

All this possibility for connection, depth, healing, and even true justice, flows not from an abstract, nameless deity. It flows from God made flesh, dwelling among us, restoring our full personhood and teaching us how to live. We don’t have to fumble through life, leaning on a patchwork spiritual ambiguity in order to be okay. God has been so kind to give us countless, specific insights to who he actually is. We can know God. He has made himself know to us.

I’ve quoted Fr. Turbo Qualls a few times here and there, and I recently heard him say something else that I can’t get out of my head. He said, “People in America, in contemporary America, have already heard about Christ. They’ve already heard about Christianity, but what they haven’t experienced is the promises of Christianity.”

As a person who deconstructed and left behind so much of the evangelical Christianity I grew up with, this quote resonated with me as true. I left the evangelical church because I was longing for a depth and transformation, for both myself and the world, that I just wasn’t able to apprehend in those contexts. I then practiced new age spirituality for a while because magic, though dangerous, extractive, and toxic for the human soul, is real spirituality. But in time, I learned that it was a counterfeit version of the very good, also real, deeper spirituality that God intended for me and for all of us. This good, real, and deeply healing spirituality are the true promises of Christianity. I’m only beginning to enter into the river of this ancient faith and way of life.

If I were to give a TL;DR for this post, it would be this:

God is a person. The person is Christ. He loves us more than we can imagine.

Thank you for reading. This is the end of part one of this series. Part two will get to you when life affords me the space to write it. It will be all about how political identity is no longer central to my worldview. Fun stuff. See you then.

Life has been really beautiful lately.

I’m grateful for this. Late spring has been filled with gorgeous days and a few storms, which by some miraculous grace have created even more gorgeous days. The blue false indigo (baptisia), yarrow, hydrangeas and honeysuckle are in full bloom. The birds have been active and hungry, so I’ve done my best to keep the feeders full.

Alex and I had the anniversary trip of a lifetime, met with warm sun, clear-blue oceans, Mayan ruins and delicious foods on the Yucatán peninsula. I determined while in Mexico that we ought to consider calling it the “Gulf of the Americas,” because that seems more true. But cooperation, collaboration, and shared visions for humanity don’t seem to be on anyone’s foreign policy agenda these days.

My fatigue about our political environment has been tempered by a few gentle boundaries with social media, and that includes Substack. I wish it wasn’t so, but these little screens and apps really do a number on the soul. I’m doing my best to stay engaged by following along with my favorite political news team, , and echoing back to myself the words of one of my mentors: “We’ll respond to what actually happens. Not to conjecture.” Focusing on what’s real and happening, instead of on what’s not yet real and could be happening has given me a modicum of peace.

My spiritual and religious orientations have also firmly shifted Christ-ward, as I was received into the Eastern Orthodox Church on Palm Sunday. It’s still a strange admission on my tongue and I’ve brought countless doubts and questions with me. I’m learning the Christian life is just as much about holding space for our doubts and questions as it is about anything. Certainty, thankfully and perhaps obviously, is not a prerequisite for a life of faith. A willingness to be honest, to learn, to trust, and to change our minds is what’s needed.

In the midst of this welcomed and life-giving transition, the label “Christian” continues to generate stress and sadness in me. articulates this tension remarkably well, and I’ve held her words close as I’ve reflected on my own deep disappointment with how those who call themselves Christians are showing up in the world today. I can’t do much about it, so I pray for the Lord’s mercy, and I echo the words of St. Ephraim: O Lord and King, grant me to see my own transgressions, and not to judge my brother. There’s something empowering and clear-eyed about focusing on what is within the realm of my influence and control, namely my own harmful proclivities and choices. Dwelling with my own failures and shortcomings is more than enough to keep me occupied, even as my concern about the harmful choices of others looms large.

These firm changes in my spiritual life, coupled with the magic of these near-summer days, has me revisiting my purpose and intentions for being here, on Substack, writing to you. I started this journey nearly three years ago. I was on the other side of my deconstruction journey and piecing together a new spiritual life rooted in my body’s wisdom, in the rhythms of the natural world, and in an expansive and creative view of the holy. Writing here on Substack was my way of working through this process in public, giving language to my evolving faith and inviting you to slow down and center the sacred alongside me.

As I look to the future, especially with a new religious orientation, I believe some aspects of my former expression will remain. I still live at Cedar Wilde, a one-acre parcel of land in rural Middle Georgia where my husband and I are making a good and peaceful life. I still love living seasonally, planting flowers, and watching the birds. I’m still a working woman, leading a non-profit and doing my best to embody rhythms of productivity that honor my limits. I’m still interested in politics, culture, and who we are becoming as a society. I’m also still deeply invested in spirituality, contemplation, and soul care. These things are still true. The only real change is that for all my angst and disdain about the label, I’m firmly a Christian now. And an Orthodox one at that.

Writing online to a community of readers has at times felt to me like sending letters into a void. Given the asynchronicity of these exchanges, it’s tough to feel as though we are truly in conversation with one another. But we are in conversation. This is a relationship. We do get to know each other in bits and pieces. I’m sharing these faith updates with you because you are, to some degree, my community. It’s important to me that you know who I really am.

I don’t know for sure how this space will evolve over the coming months. I’m praying about it and discerning what’s next for my creative and spiritual work in general. Here are a few things I do know:

One, I will keep writing because it’s oxygen to me. I don’t know how often I’ll post or when, nor do I have clarity about the topics, but I do know if God wills it, I’ll keep showing up.

Two, I have a book coming out on March 3, 2026, which happens to be the day before my 36th birthday! My book has been titled, A More Beautiful Way to Live: Nine Practices to Unlearn Habits of Anxiety, Fear, and Urgency. It tells the story of my professional burnout and subsequent recovery through practices like slowing down, living seasonally, listening to one’s body and more. I’m incredibly proud of it and can’t wait to share the cover with you soon.

Three, I’m still a spiritual director, but rather than holding space for spiritual lives generally, I’m specifically interested in walking alongside women who are also moving Christ-ward, rebuilding or deepening their faith within the Christian tradition, and are seeking spiritual companionship for their journey. If this sounds like you or if you’re curious about what this could look like, send me an email (hello@bethaneywilkinson.com) and we’ll find a time to chat.

Peace has been among the most elusive pursuits of my lifetime.

Anxiety, hyper-vigilance, and fear have been my norm, as I imagine is the case for many of us. Defining, exploring, and creating A More Beautiful Way has largely been a quest for peace, for rest, and for a sense of control and meaning in world that often feels like it’s spiraling further and further into disarray. There’s so much to be worried about, personally and collectively. I believe there’s a reason Jesus told his beloved friends, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.”

He knew we’d need it, a peace so healing and so complete that it could only come from another world.

Whether your life right now is full of gorgeous days or tumultuous storms, my sincere prayer for you is that you would know the peace Christ gives, and that it would drastically and beautifully reorient everything for your good.

Until next time, your friend,

Bethaney

Context A: Our current political landscape has filled more of my mental and emotional space than I care to admit. My heart has been moving back, forth, and between disdain, disregard, and despair with each new blow to what I once held up as these resilient U.S. institutions. It’s heartbreaking, honestly. I have many more thoughts on this, but they are not ready to be shared yet. I will be writing my slow take on the political situation in the coming weeks. Stay tuned.

Context B: I wrote the following piece many weeks ago. I’ve been holding it close, unsure of if or when to share it. Like many of us, my spiritual journey is always evolving. It feels untrue to plant my flag here or there and to pretend like it will never move, never waver, never change. Our spiritual lives are like the seasons. Only the test of time will grant insight to what’s lasting, to what remains. I’ve chosen to go ahead and share this piece because I want to honor the version of me who wrote it. I’m experimenting with saying what I know to be true right now, trusting you all as readers to hold my humanity as a changing person right alongside me. As usual, I hope this mini-essay meets you with connection and grace. I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

“Write from where you’re at,” my priest said.

“There’s a lot happening where you’re at right now.”

I’d expressed to my priest that being in the process of conversion had disoriented my relationship to writing. He encouraged me to write from where I’m at, right here and right now. So today, that’s my goal. I’m writing to let you into the messy middle of my process. Welcome.

First things first: yes, I have a priest.

Weird, right?

Well, it’s weird to me.

Over the past nine months or so, I’ve been converting to Orthodox Christianity.

The fact that this has been an eight-months-or-so long process was one of the aspects of the tradition that drew me in. Nearly every parishioner I’ve talked to over the past eight-months-or-so has expressed consistently, "Take your time. There’s no rush. You can be a catechumen1 for two years, ten years, or for however long you need.”

I’d never been to a church that actually tried to slow you way down or tried to keep you from joining too quickly.

Selah.

It was the grace and the space I needed.

A surprising change of direction

While my journey into the Orthodox Church was made simple and spacious by the wise and faithful parishioners in my path, my internal process was full of hurdles. Hurdles is the exact right word. There were multiple, persistent barriers I had jump, move, think through, or simply accept in order to move forward. In my experience, understanding the Orthodox tradition from the outside is quite difficult. I was out of my depth so the hurdles loomed large.

I was unfamiliar with the complexity and rituals of the weekly liturgies, seasonal feast days, and services of prayer and preparation. I was disoriented by the role and authority of a priest who I was supposed to call “Father.” I was challenged by the male-only priesthood. I was caught off guard by the few depictions of “blackness” I perceived from iconographic paintings. I was daunted by the fasting regimen. I was challenged again and again with details I found confusing at best and uninviting at worst. It was a doozy, hurdle after hurdle, question after question, resistance after resistance.

And yet…

And. Yet.

There was the experience of my actual heart.

My heart felt at home.

I’m not an apologist or a theologian. I cannot make an academic or even a historical case for my journey into the Orthodox tradition. What I can say, however, is that pretty much everything I ever learned about Christianity, about the Bible, and about what it means be faithful to the path of Christ, all finally made sense when I immersed my life into this particular expression of the faith. It all made sense, and not in a complicated, intellectual, or abstract way. This was an embodied experience of profound knowing. No number of words or rationalizations could do it justice.

Prior to becoming a catechumen, I occasionally tagged along with my husband Alex on his visits to the church. I was curious about what he was learning but I was absolutely not interested in the Orthodox path for myself. I was at least knee-deep into a sort-of New Age, occult-y, Christian-adjacent syncretistic spiritual practice at this point, so the idea of shedding my personally-crafted religion for what I perceived to be a rigid, exclusive, way-too-hierarchical club was the furthest thing from my imagination.

And yet, as I stepped into the doors of the church, surrounded by the iconography of women and men who’d gone before me in the faith, and met by the incredible love and care of the parishioners in attendance, my heart kept cracking wide open.

It was like sunlight breaking through the clouds after a morning rain.

Empty, on my knees

I didn’t realize it at first, but while I was writing and sharing online about creating a nourishing spiritual life, I’d grown empty on the inside. It’s strange to write about soul-emptiness because it’s tough to describe. You have to be willing to truly face the emptiness within yourself before it will let you see it for what it is. In our modern lives, we are good at hiding and filling ourselves with waters that don’t quite quench our thirst. I’m great at this kind of self-deception. I will work, achieve, give talks, create content, volunteer, and give my everything to simply avoid the void inside. When the “good works” stop working, I tend to move towards the less savory vices of shopping and drinking too much. It’s all a distraction from the real, especially when the real is painful.

I was in pain.

One afternoon last summer, I found myself alone on my office floor weeping. I was undone. I couldn’t lie or hide it from myself any more. Despite all of the “good” things unfolding in my world, I knew without a shadow of a doubt that I had deep inner needs that no number of affirmations, tarot card pulls, worship songs, breathwork sessions, or astrological readings could fill. So I did what my parents and my ancestors taught me to do: I went to God. I prayed.

God, I’m so empty. Please meet me. Please fill me. Please.

I cried, I prayed, I felt the weight of my need. When I was done, I got up and went back to my life.

I believe God hears our prayers. I believe God is intimately acquainted with our desperation, our longings, and our needs. I believe God waits for our consent to move, to act, to liberate, and to heal on our behalf. I believe God is there, close by, with an ever-present gaze on our stories, ready and willing to meet our surrender with his Yes.

Our work is to cultivate enough humility, and even trust, to ask for help. But I know, I truly and seriously know, these are not easy things.

It would take months for the kind of healing I was longing for to unfold. Once the process began, I knew it was an answer to the prayers I’d spoken through tears on that one afternoon. I didn’t know this answered prayer would eventually call me to cut ties with my tarot practice. I didn’t know know this answered prayer would call me to stop asking the stars to tell me who I am. I didn’t know this answered prayer would require that I pause offering spiritual direction. I didn’t know this answered prayer would disrupt every relationship in my life in which hiding or lying had become a habit. I didn’t know the cost, and I certainly didn’t know of the hurdles I’d be asked to jump, move, think through, or accept in my process of change. And yet, if given the choice, I’d pray the same prayers all over again. To be met by God in our lowest places is worth the cost every time.

On conversion

Conversion is a liminal space, meaning it’s in between, neither here nor there, not this and not quite that. It’s a transition. It’s like taking off one pair of glasses because they don’t fit anymore and putting on new glasses, but your eyes haven’t yet adjusted to the clarity your new glasses offer. Either way, your vision is a bit blurry.

I took off my Protestant evangelical glasses many years ago. I suppose it was my so-called deconstruction. Those glasses were not only ill-fitting, but they were harmful and made it impossible for me to see with any real substance, connection, or reverence for the holy.

In the years that followed, I picked up what I can only call a set of New Age glasses which were masquerading as ancient, “indigenous” wisdom. “Masquerade” is the operative word here. The philosophies and practices I’d given myself over to were insightful to an extent, but they were ultimately partial, and perhaps even false. Over time, these lenses started to feel eerily similar to the waters that had captivated Narcissus’2 attention. My worldview became fixated on “me doing me,” on “cutting off anything that didn’t serve me,” and on all sorts of other self-aggrandizing and self-deifying affirmations. While these are popular perspectives in our time, my weariness and soul-deep hunger exposed these stories for what they were: half-truths. It’s impossible to see God, to see your neighbor, or to even rightly see yourself when you’re blinded by what I would now describe as a sort-of self-exalting delusion.

Now, I’m holding up these new glasses and while I can’t see everything, I’ve seen enough to know this path is worth walking.

I’ve seen my heart come alive, even as my intellect has labored to catch-up with what my soul knows to be true.
I’ve seen my sense of personhood restored with a much needed firmness established within my innermost frame, affording me gifts of peace and steadiness through life’s storms.
I’ve encountered the truth that Christianity has deep and lasting roots in Africa which affirms my longing for a faith expression rooted in the traditions of my ancestors.
I’ve come to understand how the Church’s sacraments—baptism, chrismation, communion, ordination, confession, healing, and marriage—all offer remedies to many of the societal aches plaguing us personally and collectively.
I’ve been met by the Theotokos, the Mother of God, who is teaching me what it means to be a wholehearted, truly empowered woman. I’m being discipled by her and by the innumerable women saints who are revered, honored, celebrated, uplifted, and remembered in holy Orthodox tradition. My dignity as a human is being established in ways I could have only imagined in my former years. I rejoice in this sacred homecoming and have much more to share about this in the months and years to come.

These are only beginnings. They are fractions of how God has met me and changed my life, again. I’m in awe of God’s rich faithfulness towards me. I’m in awe of the ways God meets us when we are sincere, honest, and humble enough to ask.

Welcoming the mystery

Depending on who you are, how you found my blog, and at what point our paths crossed, this post may be surprising. It may seem like it’s a plot twist or like it’s out of left field. Yes, maybe. I’m still surprised by it all sometimes. But as I’ve written about here on A More Beautiful Way, the Divine is often working in mystery, in the hidden places, under the soil, and within the deeper root systems of our lives. The Divine is waiting to delight and surprise us, if we have eyes to see and ears to hear.

I would say among our biggest struggles as modern people trying to find our way in the world, especially our way in a faith as counter-cultural as Christianity, is that we really must do the hard work of being willing to say, “I’m wrong,” “I don’t know,” “I’m willing to change my mind,” etc.

A few months before I committed to being a catechumen, I found myself hung up on a verse in First John where the writer speaks of “the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life…” As a young person in evangelical Christianity, I could easily conceive of the “lust of the flesh” and the “lust of the eyes.” But the pride of life was much harder for me to wrap my mind around. I was young and hadn’t come to know anything yet. But as a woman my mid-30s, I’m now well acquainted with the pride of life. It’s the subtle though persistent refusal to believe that I could be wrong about anything. The pride of life, in my own body, sounds like, “I know. I’m right. I will not be moved.” Grappling with this type of orientation is a likely challenge for any of us seeking to not only encounter a more beautiful way, but perhaps the most beautiful way, which is a path of devotion and surrender to Christ.

I will leave this here for now. There is more to be said, but I’ve opened this door in hopes of not only letting you know where I’m at, but to create space for conversation. I would love to hear from you: what’s resonating? What’s creating dissonance? What’s confusing? And perhaps most significantly, what invitations are you sensing within?

Please comment or email me. I can’t wait to hear from you.

With love and anticipation,

Bethaney

Reader Survey Still Open

Thank you to those of you who’ve responded to the survey. If you haven’t had a chance to check it out, it should only take about 5 minutes (if that many.)

You can take the reader survey here.

Links to Stay In the Loop

/ Website
/ Instagram
/ Podcast
/ Archive

Share A More Beautiful Way