I've got questions, too, which is why I am so grateful for Erin Moon's bold, beautiful, and pastoral book

Thank you, Erin, for keeping hope alive.

A display at Schuler’s in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It was an honor to have my book next to Erin’s. It was an honor to hear her speak.

Last March I had the privilege of attending a book event for

Erin H Moon

. It was a raw time for me. Launching Becoming the Pastor’s Wife was a very different experience then launching The Making of Biblical Womanhood. The only similarity is that both were times of crisis for our country - albeit crises with different causes. In April 2021, when The Making of Biblical Womanhood launched, we were still reeling from the Covid pandemic and trying to figure out how to live. Covid certainly became a political crisis, but the roots of it were in disease. In March 2025, when Becoming the Pastor’s Wife launched, we were reeling from the ramifications of Donald Trump’s elections and the daily whiplash from the news. This was a political and social crisis of our own making - especially the making of my white evangelical world. The horror of what was happening, the inhumanity of what was happening, and the complicity of my red Texas world, made it hard to breathe. I still find it hard to breathe some days. To further complicate things,I also was in the middle of recovering from an extensive foot/ankle surgery that had taken more out of me than I had expected. Thankfully, I was walking (in a boot). But it hurt and swelled all day long.

By the time I got to Erin’s talk, I was emotionally and physically spent.

Then Erin started talking.

The beauty of her faith, her unflinching refusal to normalize what was happening around us, the freshness of her laughter revitalized me. And I wasn’t alone. As I looked around the room, I saw so many people exhaling. Like me, they had been holding their breaths for longer than they could remember. Now, listening to Erin, they were breathing again.

Erin doesn’t claim to have the answers; she doesn’t demand you agree with her; she doesn’t demand we agree with each other. What she does is give you permission to ask; to ask hard questions; to wrestle with the hard parts of our Christian faith; and to understand that the God she believes in - the God I believe in - can handle it.

My vantage point listening to Erin speak at Schuler Books.

I am honored to share an excerpt from her U.S.A. Today bestseller, I’ve Got Questions: The Spiritual Practice of Having it Out With God.

Content taken from I’ve Got Questions by Erin Moon ©2025. Used by permission of Baker Books.

Dear Erin,
I hope this isn’t presumptuous, but why the eff are we even doing this anymore?
Regards,
Liv

I do appreciate an email that gets right to the point.

Because I am a Person with a Faith Podcast, sometimes I get Internet Frangers (these are strangers who become friends) who are in the midst of also trying to figure out why this whole faith thing is so hard, and since it is, is it even worth it? And they inevitably ask some form of this question: Why on earth are we still trying to do this? Why are we still trying to be Christians?

"Hope is a reckless investment: the stakes are high and if things go south, you’re in a bad place. And it is beyond easy to sink into the feather bed of hopelessness. To disconnect my heart and my spirit and my body from this flaming garbage truck of a world, to unhitch myself from the risk of faith at all and put my energy into protecting myself and my people from the truth of the matter: no one is coming to save you, and you can only trust yourself.

But then.

But then, but then, but then.

We can sink as far as we want, but the flaming garbage truck is never the end of the story. As much as the ache of the world is true, there is also resuscitating hope putting its breath in the lungs of truth and watching them inflate. And I think when Christians talk about hope, we tend to think they mean the pearly- gates- New- Jerusalem- future kind. But Jesus didn’t say “abundant life when you get to heaven” or “abundant next life.” Just “abundant life.” Here. Now. And no one will be honest about the fact that telling the truth and walking in active hope is damn near impossible.

Because as a global faith, particularly in Western cultures, we’ve stopped telling the truth. The truth about what Jesus said, about who we are, about how we are supposed to take care of people, about what we’re supposed to stand for, about what we’re supposed to love. We’ve ignored, gaslit, rejected, or buried the truth and asked everyone to just be hopeful in a fantasy ungrounded in reality. Or we’ve decided to stay sitting upright at the cold table of judgment, criticizing anyone who dares to imagine a different way.

I get trapped in these patterns when I forget the actual bonkers nature of what we’re saying we believe in here with Jesus. Like he told the crowd in John 8, he’s saying he’s offering a life without death, and besides that, a way of living that speaks to the humanity of every single person. When I really remember this is not about budget meetings or interpretations of Scripture, when I go back to pre- empire, weird Jesus who said strange things like “drink my blood and eat my flesh” and wanted us to love our enemies, I cannot shake it. Maybe you can, Liv. I’m not the one who can decide that for you.

I would love more than anything to extract myself from what feels like a fruitless exercise in longing expectation for love to triumph over hate. It would save me a lot of emotional capital at the very least. But dammit, I cannot shake the way the Gospels systematically blow up the idea that only the put- together and the fully articulate can be with God. How only the well or the rich or the powerful have access to God. I cannot look away from Jesus touching people considered to be unclean, Jesus inviting those that society deemed unfit, Jesus defying space and time and physics to show his love. The story of an expansive God compacting every bit of God’s nature into a fragile, vulnerable infant. How it’s true that love matters when it’s honest, or to quote Paul, “No matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I’m bankrupt without love” (1 Cor. 13:3). How there’s no denying that when you see someone, even yourself, in their belovedness, it can change who they are, how they live, and their purpose in the world. I cannot stop looking at the cracks where the light breaks free.

That’s why the eff I’m even doing this anymore, Liv.

No matter how hard it tries, bleak, despondent truth cannot kill hope. And it does try. You need to know it’s going to try really hard."