3 Ways to Reimagine the Good Life
An act of hope in a world that's disillusioned {Plus Q&A and favorites}
Last year, we came up with a new way to capture the work I’m trying to do. We used the words “Reimagining the Good Life.” We renamed this newsletter, and my podcast, and I began speaking about the idea of reimagining the good life, reimagining family life, and reimagining disability.
There’s so much in our world that is disillusioning right now, so much that suggests the work of reimagining will be an exercise in futility. And it’s exactly in that context that we need the work of reimagining.
Reimagining is an act of hope. It is the work of believing that we can envision a good future for ourselves, for our loved ones, for our communities, for our world. It is the work of stepping towards that future.
Last week, I had the chance to speak in a few different places about reimagining. First, I visited Elim Christian Services and Trinity Christian College, outside Chicago. I then flew back to New York and spoke at the Women’s Conference at Christ Church in Greenwich, Connecticut. The audiences ran the gamut—from a group of paraprofessionals who work one-on-one with kids with disabilities to a group of college students to a chapel full of moms and grandmothers. All of them were ready to consider a new way of being in this world.
I spoke for over four hours when you add it all up, so it’s hard to summarize, but I thought you might appreciate some thoughts on how we reimagine the good life, with the Beatitudes (Matthew 5:3-10) as our guide.
It’s one thing to point out the ways the American idea of the good life isn’t working. It’s another to practice a different way.
I offered the women at Christ Church six ways to reimagine the good life. I’m going to share three of them with you here:
3 Ways to Reimagine the Good Life
Receive belovedness.
Our culture tells us we are worthy of the good life if we look good, work hard, and achieve a lot. One way we can reimagine the good life—one way we can live differently—is to know that we are beloved before we’ve done anything right and after we’ve done all sorts of things wrong. (If you’ve been around here for a while, you’ll recognize this refrain as a cornerstone for me, and you can access this PDF guide if you want more thoughts on how to receive belovedness.)
Lament.
The American Good Life tells us to keep the images of beauty, ease, and success front and center. A reimagined good life includes the hard realities of being human, with suffering and hardship and confusion. The practice of lament is the practice of crying out honestly to God when we experience hurt, anger, sorrow, and when nothing makes any sense. It is telling God that this is not okay, while holding on to the slightest glimmer of hope that somehow it might be someday.
Use Your Spiritual Imagination.
If we don’t resist it, the influencers and celebrities and people in powerful positions get to tell us what a good life looks like—whether that’s the good life of materialism with fancy houses and cars and clothes or the good life of moralism with religious piety or keto-diets or kids who get into the best colleges. Our imaginations are shaped and formed by these ideals. But when we instead turn to the good life articulated and embodied by Jesus, we receive a different imagination. We can cultivate that renewed imagination by meditating on passages from the gospel where Jesus shows us what his version of the good life looks like. (For example, in the session I taught recently, we considered Matthew 5:3-10 and Luke 14:1-24. I asked the women to consider who they might invite over for dinner with Jesus’ reimagined way of hospitality.)
Q&A
I loved being able to share my thoughts with all these people, but I also loved the thoughts and questions they shared with me. Here were a few of my favorites:
Question: What do I think about ads, TV shows, and movies that include people with disabilities?
One woman asked me what I think of advertisements that include people with Down syndrome and other visible disabilities. Another man asked me what I think of television shows with disabled characters. They both wondered whether the ads/shows seemed either exploitative or self-congratulatory to the companies producing them.
I was so grateful for these questions because they highlight some important tensions in how disability is portrayed in our culture. I gave a few thoughts in response.
One, we can see these ads/shows as “too little too late” or as “better late than never.” I tend to take the latter view.
Two, while these are certainly glorified representations of disabled lives—whether that’s the ability to verbalize words clearly with characters in Down for Love or the airbrushed images of babies on the walls of Target—so are all the images we see in advertisements and comparable television shows. The images we encounter on a daily basis on billboards and online ads and tv shows communicate who belongs in our everyday lives. I’m glad images of people with disabilities are a part of our collective imagination.
And finally, in the past 20 years it isn’t only advertisements that have portrayed disabled characters. Increasingly we’ve seen these characters in children’s books, novels, movies, and shows. I have to wonder whether a documentary like Crip Camp or a film like CODA or books like A Storm of Strawberries and The Long Call would exist without these advertisements and shows.
Question: What would I say now to a doctor who responded negatively to a prenatal (or postnatal) diagnosis of Down syndrome?
I was asked this question after I explained that a recent study showed that many doctors still exhibit a lot of bias in how they present prenatal diagnoses. The truth is, as I said in Chicago, I would probably feel flustered and get red in the face and still struggle to find words if a doctor spoke to me in biased terms about Penny. BUT that wouldn’t be the end of the story. I would also follow up with a letter that identified the problematic language or experience and suggested a different way forward. (I did that once, in a new ob-gyn office when I was pregnant with Marilee. They had me fill out a form that included a question about whether our family had a history of “mongolism,” which is to say, an outdated and offensive term about Down syndrome.) And, even now, we participate in a program that provides medical students—both doctors and nurses—with an encounter with families experiencing disability. Even when we don’t react the way we want to in the moment, there are other opportunities to respond.
Blessings,
Amy Julia
P.S. Keep scrolling for links to recent favorites!
LIVE Workshop!
Join me in person on May 3 for the Reimagining Family Life with Disability workshop!
Walnut Hill Community Church - Bethel, CT
May 3, 2025, 9 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.
Recent Favorites
Book: Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman
“We… feel that we need to get things done not only to achieve certain ends, or to meet our basic responsibilities to others, but because it’s a cosmic debt we’ve somehow incurred in exchange for being alive.”
It gobsmacks me every time. That we don’t need to earn the right to be alive. We don’t need to prove ourselves worthy of existence. In fact, the very reality of our existence is itself an affirmation. I just finished Oliver Burkeman’s Meditations for Mortals, and I’m grateful for the reminder that accepting our limits as humans opens up so many possibilities for humility, love, and grace.
Podcast Series: The Exodus Way
I’ve been reading through the Book of Exodus during this season of Lent, while also listening to the Bible Project’s recent podcast episodes about the exodus story as a pattern that repeats throughout both the Hebrew Bible and the Christian story. There’s so much I could say here, but the thing that has struck me the most is the way I tend to think of the story of the exodus as a story that moves from slavery to freedom, from oppression to the promised land. I skip the wilderness. I skip the desert, where the Israelites wandered for 40 years. But this time, I’m starting to see the wilderness as a very intentional—and even good—part of God’s plan for the people. It’s the place where they learn how to trust in God’s abundance. It’s the place where they receive the guidance of the Ten Commandments. It’s the place where they get scared and grumble and forget what they believe over and over again. Kind of like me. Most of us live in between the oppression of Pharaoh and the milk and honey of the promised land, and I’m starting to be grateful for life in the wilderness and the glimpses of God’s glory that I get to see here.
Podcast Episode: Parenting in the Age of Social Media and — Help! — A.I.
Many of you have read Jonathan Haidt’s Anxious Generation, or at least you are familiar with his arguments about the problems of a phone-based childhood. I recommend this conversation with Ezra Klein because Klein pushed Haidt on a number of points, including the problems adults have with these devices and also the problem all of us face—not just the kids—when it comes to attention and living a good life:
What about you?
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