About the Everything Happens Initiative

The Everything Happens Initiative is a project dedicated to storytelling, research, and spiritual formation.

Our mission is simple: we seek to bear Christian witness to the fragility of life. Even in the midst of a global pandemic, our culture is inundated with self-help mythologies and quasi-religious “solutions” to the problem of suffering. These individualistic, often anti-institutional, narratives promise an escape from the basic problems of being human: our precarity, our losses, our fear that our lives cannot be “fixed.” This project is devoted to developing language and fostering a digital community around kindness, courage and compassion in a world that loves us more when we are good, better, best.

GROUNDING SPIRITUAL VIRTUES

We seek to render beautiful and intelligible the following virtues distilled into the wider culture through the efforts of this Initiative:

Kindness

Kindness is a love enacted purely for the good of others, preserving their dignity with quiet strength, under the rubric of an unspoken permission to be human and as yet unperfected. We seek to be lavish in our kindness, knowing that it will be mistaken for weakness.

hope

Our hope will be easily confused with optimism and positive thinking, but we remain stubborn in our resolve to be absurdly hopeful. We believe that hope is the sure sense of having tasted the goodness and love of God. We also believe that hope is an anchor dropped into the future, part of an unimaginably beautiful yet unseen future ordained and ushered in through Jesus’s saving work.

courage

Courage is the decision to take heart. Even after a long look at reality, courage prompts us to action or to endurance, holding to the core of a God-given vision or a principle or purpose. Courage protects our soft hearts from encroaching or eroding forces, showing us how to press into God’s purposes even if it isn’t in our self-interest.

HUMILITY

Humility teaches us how to render love into service. It is the gift of learning to hear from God about how we might act for our neighbor’s good. Humility teaches us how to stand at the door and welcome those God has brought. Humility asks us to move against the grain of capitalism’s hyper instrumentalization, commodification, and utilitarianism in favor of what work—fast or slow—God might be up to.