When Certainty Collapses: Chasing Francis - Chapter One

 
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There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from holding a life together when it’s quietly falling apart inside. Most of us know it all too well. We smile through the meeting, sign the birthday card, show up for every obligation—all while some deeper scaffolding within us is giving way, plank by plank, where nobody else can see.

Twenty years ago, I knew that exhaustion intimately. I was a pastor who had grown weary of rigid certainty, slick answers, and keeping a religious machine humming at full speed while my soul felt bone-dry. I needed space to ask, without an audience watching: What does it actually mean to follow Jesus when the old formulas stop working?

So, I gave those questions to a character instead.

In my novel Chasing Francis: A Pilgrim’s Tale, we meet Chase Falson—a wildly successful megachurch pastor who stands up one Sunday morning before 3,000 people and speaks four words he never planned to say: "My faith is gone."

Chase isn’t me. But he carried the weight of questions I desperately needed to explore, so I gave him the plane ticket to Italy I so badly wanted for myself. What begins as Chase’s terrifying unraveling becomes a sacred pilgrimage—a journey to Assisi where the ruins of old structures make space for a profound, transformative encounter with St. Francis.

Instead of our usual conversation this week, I want to hand you the story itself. You’ll hear Chapter One, read straight from the newly revised edition.

If you know the Enneagram—and I suspect most of you found Typology because you do—you’ll recognize immediately what happens to Chase. It’s what happens to any of us, regardless of our type, when the false self we’ve built to stay safe finally cracks under its own weight. Real spiritual awakening rarely happens in the safety of easy answers; often, it begins right where our certainty ends. 

So here is the question waiting for you underneath this episode: When the thing you built your identity on stops holding, what do you do with what’s left standing?

I don’t believe that question is a crisis to be feared. I think it might be a sacred invitation.

Come listen to how the story begins for Chase. And if it stirs something in you, find the complete audiobook of Chasing Francis on Audible or wherever you listen.

 

 
 
 
 
Getting Started, Instincts and SubtypesIan Cronenneagram, Getting Started, InstinctsComment