Let Your Life Speak

On living loudly, offline.

The Quakers have an old saying, “Let your life speak.”

It’s this idea that our lives should speak for themselves, louder than our words. I think it’s easy to talk and talk and talk, but what are we actually doing? What are we shifting and changing? How are we loving out loud?

What are our lives made up of when we zoom out at the end of each day?

I call this good evidence. It’s what I want to find at the end of a longer day– proof that I embodied the day with presence, peace, curiosity, wisdom, and love. If this sounds lofty, that’s because it absolutely is. It’s something I’m constantly aspiring towards. I’m convinced I have an older, much wiser nun living inside me—in a one-bedroom apartment—whispering reminders not to curse or clap back throughout the day.

I think it’s tempting to leave more of the evidence online—a trail of saves, comments, snaps, and reposts—while our offline lives can go neglected. It’s not necessarily intentional; there’s just a slow drift away from the external and towards the internal. For most of us, hiding behind a screen, or simply cultivating the habit of scrolling mindlessly in the pockets of our days, is just… well… easier.

But if you’re asking me, I want my life to speak. I want it to leave paper trails. I want there to be tangible, good evidence that I lived and laughed, showed up and fought, dug down deep, believed in things bigger than my body, and left it all out on the field.

So that’s the call for today. Simple but not easy:

Let your life speak. Let the good evidence stack up.

That’s the blessing I would speak over you in a crowded room:

May your life speak.

With notebooks and photographs. With worn Bibles and frayed jeans. With candles burned down to the wick and books highlighted, underlined, and dog-eared emphatically.

May your life speak. With ticket stubs and trinkets of all the places you went, and saw, and lived.

With dinner plates piled in the sink. Empty glasses on the dining room table. Tires worn from all your explorations and adventures– late-night trips to the diner and roadtrips to see your people.

With cookbooks and family recipes. With pages splattered with sauces spilling over from the stove. With a calendar marked full of dinner dates and recitals, gatherings, and birthdays to celebrate.

With laugh lines. With love letters. With coffee mugs drained down and then refilled because the conversation kept moving, because the joy kept coming, because spontaneous prayer erupted around the table.

May your life speak. With good art. With hobbies that have no end goal other than enjoyment. With new creations. With holy mess.

On the note of holy mess: our daughter has an art table that used to drive me nuts because it was constantly covered with books, stickers, paint, markers, beads, and pipe cleaners. The sad, beige, minimalist mom within me didn’t know what to do. But the old nun in the one-bedroom apartment shushed the beige mom and said, “Stop it– she’s creating like mad. Don’t you see it? She’s making. Where you see a mess, she sees little masterpieces. She’s letting her life speak. Let her.”

And so I let her. May her little life speak with puzzles on the dining room table. With bruises from climbing higher than she thought she could. With projects. With forts in the living room and dandelions blown dry on the back porch from one too many wishes.

May your like speak. In calloused hands, worn from a life of building and carrying and taking care. In trails of words that mean something: “I’m sorry.” And “I’m trying.” And “I’ll be there.” And “I’m coming.”

With worn shoes. And the wear of the dining room table– from family dinners, and quiet times, and the abundant life that spontaneously combusted there in those seats.

May your life speak. In meal trains and Tupperware. In flowers, “just because.” In gardens you grow, and till, and harvest from. In fingertip-smudged mirrors and paint-stained clothes.

May your life hold all the good evidence that you came, and saw, and dared, and dreamed, and lived, and hoped, and prayed, and held, and reckoned.

May your life speak, and speak, and speak.