Aimee Byrd
12 min read ⭑
“As disillusioned as I was with the church, I still longed to write about where I was finding healing and about the nature of hope. Hope is not sentimental— it bears scars. And I know there is a community for the disillusioned.”
Aimee Byrd was forced — as she describes it — into writing when she found a lack of theological depth in women’s studies in the church. Since then, she’s published seven books (with an eighth in the works), including her latest, The Hope in Our Scars. As an author, speaker, blogger and podcaster, Aimee isn’t afraid to get honest about why knowing the true God matters, aspects of church culture that hinder our growth, and her own battles with spiritual abuse. Join us for a heart-to-heart conversation about her favorite restaurants and brews, her struggles with church disillusionment and her daily journaling habits.
QUESTION #1: ACQUAINT
There’s much more to food than palate and preference. How does a go-to meal at your favorite hometown restaurant reveal the true you behind the web bio?
Frederick, Maryland, has great restaurants. And the little city of Brunswick where we live, located on the southwestern edge of Frederick County, is beginning to reinvigorate its downtown.
On Friday evenings when we don’t have commitments, my husband Matt and I like to stay local. Often, it’s just the two of us, but our friends, parents and young adult “kids” know they have an open invitation to join us. First, we put in our order at the local burger place, Boxcar Burgers. Boxcar started off as a food truck selling burgers made with locally sourced beef next to the popular craft breweries and events in Frederick. Their namesake burger has beets, with lettuce, tomato, cheese and their secret Boxcar sauce. It’s a banger. But Matt “doesn’t eat no beets” on his burgers. While I stick to my usual, Matt mixes it up each week. Maybe it will be the sriracha crispy chicken sandwich for him. And we both get fries, of course.
We pick up the burgers to-go and head to our Smoketown Brewery in the old firehouse just down the street. Brunswick used to be called Smoketown during its busier railroad-town days with the visiting coal trains, so the name is double-fitting. It still has the firehouse vibes and small-town feel. And my favorite IPA: My Best Girl. Matt is going for a lager or a pilsner. Couch Boy is one of his favorites.
This routine opens a space for life to happen, almost like a second kitchen table for us. I’ve had moments where I’ve received wisdom from my daughter, cried with friends, shared belly-rolling laughter, connected with our neighbors or enjoyed a quiet night doing the New York Times Crossword Mini with my husband. It’s all there, in a historic firehouse where Patsy Cline, Roy Orbison and Duke Ellington all once sang.
Liz Guertin; Unsplash
QUESTION #2: REVEAL
We’ve all got quirky proclivities and out-of-the-way interests. So what are yours? What so-called “nonspiritual” activity (or activities) do you love engaging in, which also help you find essential spiritual renewal?
There’s a reason people call encounters with God mountaintop experiences. I am a saunterer. Some call it hiking, but it’s more than that. And my friends and I have made an art of it. Whether it is Weverton Cliffs, Maryland Heights, Annapolis Rock, the Antietam Battlefield or sauntering to the original Washington Monument, there are all kinds of beautiful trails and views within a half-hour drive of my house. And we pack for the whole experience.
As we ascend to our destination, we unpack our lives — tell our secrets. What is the lump in our throat these days? Where are we feeling stuck? By the time we reach our spot, we are whipping out jalapeño pineapple margaritas, stuffed avocados with salmon salad, fruit cups and salted caramel dark chocolates — combining whatever goodies we brought to contribute that day. The other hikers are jealous that they aren’t sauntering like us. One older man hiking with his wife took one look at our spread and said, “Honey, I think we are doing this wrong!” Now we’re giggling and asking what the next cocktail is.
After solving all the world’s problems except our own, we pack up and descend, leaving our secrets between us and the trees and documenting with plenty of selfies and pictures of the beauty surrounding us. Man, do I sense God present with us in all the beauty and friendship. And I think about the intimacy that must have flourished in the pilgrimages to the Temple.
It’s almost surreal to arrive back at a parking lot, say our goodbyes and drive away. It seems like we were in another world for a few hours. And we leave confident that the mountains hold it all.
QUESTION #3: CONFESS
Every superhero has a weakness. Every human, too. We’re just good at faking it. But who are we kidding? We’re broken and in this thing together. So what’s your kryptonite, and how do you hide it?
My kryptonite is my critical self. That judgmental narrator in the back of my mind who’s constantly clamoring about everything. And she’s an avid people-watcher. It’s embarrassing, and I’m so glad no one can hear her voice but me. She jokes about people’s outfit choices, concocts stories about their lives, assumes motives and supposes she knows how to improve the quality of the lives of those around her. I mean, this is someone you would hate to hang around with. I hide her by pretending she isn’t there. Which makes her louder.
And I know why she does this. It’s her own shame that she holds, which is a strange paradox of not being enough or being too much. She projects her own insecurities onto those around her because she can’t bear to see them on herself. And they are so much easier to kill when she sees them on someone else. I’d like just to kill her, but I’ve learned that doesn’t work. I actually need to listen better.
Thankfully, she is not the whole me. Just one of my many selves (by the way, there’s a great book called Our Many Selves by Elizabeth O’Connor that’s helpful here). So I put her in conversation with my gracious self and my curious self. I do the inner work of asking her why she ever felt like she wasn’t enough and how she can also feel like she’s too much. She reminds me of her teenage self during her parents’ divorce, that I need to visit how my mind has been holding these memories, what emotions have been clinging to them and examine how these memories shape me. It’s a looking into my younger face and the faces of those in my memories, asking what needs to be lamented, what needs to be blessed and how I might relook and retell it. Why has a particular memory stuck the way it has? How might all this reexamining shape my sense of self, relationships and faith? And of what I know of the divine face?
QUESTION #4: FIRE UP
Tell us about your toil. How are you investing your professional time right now? What’s your current obsession? And why should it be ours?
My toil has been public, and it was a real turning point for both my spiritual life and my vocation as a writer and speaker. In The Hope in Our Scars, I share a bit of my story of spiritual abuse, trying to make sense of how I ended up being harassed and plotted against by so many leaders in my own denomination. What I first thought to be a small group of radicals were actually important donors, administrators, professors, pastors and so-called friends. There were the vocal ones harassing me online and calling ahead of my speaking engagements to warn churches to protect their families from me, working to ruin my reputation. But the worst part was the enablers of it all and the total ghosting of a whole community. My family left our denomination and our church because we were no longer safe there.
This kind of crisis led me to ask basic questions like “What is real?” and “Where do I belong?” My writing traces this path. It’s a path many others are going through in different ways.
And this kind of experience led me to do some internal work of my own. There were and continue to be moments where I must reevaluate whether my writing is in line with my values. And with what I am learning. It means there is unlearning involved. That can be painful. And costly.
As disillusioned as I was with the church, I still longed to write about where I was finding healing and about the nature of hope. Hope is not sentimental — it bears scars. And I know there is a community for the disillusioned. I am rediscovering the wonder, imagination, beauty and curiosity in the Scriptures that led me back to the church as a young adult in the first place. I had the guts to ask the questions before, and that’s helped me to ask even harder questions about my own expectations, unmet desires, and undeveloped face and to do the work of digging out the truth. I’m practicing this in my writing every week for my Substack, Byrd in Your Box, where I am continuously looking for the poem in the church.
QUESTION #5: BOOST
Cashiers, CEOs, contractors, or customer service reps, we all need grace flowing into us and back out into the world. How does the Holy Spirit invigorate your work? And how do you know it’s God when it happens?
I think I’m an extroverted introvert. My friends might say that I am an extrovert because I am outgoing and social. But I also need large blocks of time alone. So when I think about what energizes my creativity, I believe it is this balance between my reading and writing and my friendships.
I love to read, and lately, I’ve been digging pretty deeply into more contemplative writers — new and old. The best ones bridge the gap between learning about God and actually experiencing him. I feel like these are my people. It’s what I love to write about, and there is so much to discover.
But I also need real, face-to-face friendships. If I’m too long in my books, I get lonely. And antsy. Plus, all these ideas percolating in my mind need testing out in conversation. My sauntering with friends is one way to share my partially formed ideas and see how that inspires them. And they then, in turn, inspire me with their own thoughts. So much of book formation and writing is not done on the page. Sharing stories with friends provides such a rich compost for the creative part of my writing life. As I contemplate this, I’m really thankful for my different types of friends. That alone points to God’s creativity and invites us to wonder as we observe the multifaceted faces in which he reveals himself.
QUESTION #6: inspire
Scripture and tradition beckon us into the rich and varied habits that open our hearts to the presence of God. So let us in. Which spiritual practice is working best for you right now?
Journaling is such a fruitful spiritual practice for me. Bestselling author, poet, songwriter, filmmaker and playwright Julia Cameron takes this discipline very seriously, calling it our morning pages. Her book, The Artist’s Way, prescribes that we write around three pages every morning to inspire creativity. Cameron writes about how we have to get all the little thoughts out to free room for the good stuff. In her book Listening to God, Renita Weems writes about how she journals her prayers. And as she was looking through the years of entries, she thought she’d arrive at some more sophisticated prayers. She calls what’s there instead “stutters before the holy.” I write about it in my upcoming book, Saving Face (2025):
I think of my own journaling in this way: stutters before the holy. I go in and out of conversation with God in them. And I’ve learned to let myself sound stupid. Because sometimes I am, and God already knows it. But I am trying to get to the truth. Trying to get to that conversation already taking place inside, as Weems calls it. And in order to do that, you have to get the other stuff out. Whatever thoughts are tapping me on the shoulder, be it annoyances, fears, to-do lists, unmet desires or stresses. Then there are all the stupid things we ask for to distract us from the fear of the big things we need to ask for. The ones God has created us to launch into. And there are the theological questions we try to solve to deceive ourselves into certainty about him. That maybe even, with this information, we can manage him. Or at least distract us from that ever-looming question about his goodness toward us. We are too busy trying to be it than to behold it. As Weems names it, all the prayers we have to pray until we can pray the prayer we want.
QUESTION #7: FOCUS
Looking backward, considering the full sweep of your unique faith journey and all you encountered along the way, what top three resources stand out to you? What changed the game and changed your heart? What radically altered your life? What changed your reality?
Maybe you’ve noticed that I like to share helpful books, even in answering these questions. So definitely look into the ones I’ve mentioned if they look interesting to you. I’m fascinated by the discoveries of interpersonal neurobiology. Dan Seigel’s book Mindsight is one that I love to return to as it helps me learn more about mindfulness and integration.
Related to that, I’ve been helped by Adam Young’s podcast, The Place We Find Ourselves. He models and teaches how to do the memory and story work that I was alluding to in my kryptonite answer.
My soul needs to read good fiction. Good fiction can capture our own complexities — our own longings and struggles — and invite us to walk into beauty, goodness and truth. One of my favorite stories is C.S. Lewis’ Till We Have Faces, which is a retelling and reshaping of the myth of Cupid and Psyche. In it, we are faced with the hustle of our own lives and our notion of love. What are we striving for, and where can we find meaning? Plus, I am in wonder about how Lewis can first-person narrate so well as a woman. It is certainly an act of love to attempt with such intricacy.
We all have things we cling to to survive (or even thrive) in tough times — times like these! Name one resource you’re savoring and/or finding indispensable in this current season, and tell us what it’s doing for you.
In this current season, I am slowly reading through Frederick Buechner’s sermons in Secrets in the Dark. His sermons stir up wonder and awe, an attunement to the face of God in the ordinary all around us and empathy for myself and others, and they just help me read Scripture better. All of Buechner’s books minister deeply to my soul, and I like digging into a new sermon when I feel caught up in the striving of life.
QUESTION #8: dream
God is continually stirring new things in each of us. So give us the scoop! What’s beginning to stir in you but not yet fully awakened? What can we expect from you in the future?
I never imagined myself as an author until I had a book in my head. That was published 11 years ago, and now I have book numbers seven and eight taking flight! I love the way my writing is pivoting, combining the biblical theology that I love with contemplative writing, memoir and story work.
As excited as I am, I’m also nervous about these two projects to launch into the world. The Hope in Our Scars (May 2024) and Saving Face (Spring/Summer 2025) are more vulnerable books. While I have readers who have followed my whole trajectory in writing, I have plenty of critics and, sadly, haters with loud voices. Having been through the spiritual abuse from that and even having to leave the denomination and church where I thought I belonged, it’s natural to anticipate what may be coming at me with the releases. My family is worshipping at a church now that does seem to offer more freedom in belonging, and yet we are being intentionally slow to put down any roots and become members. We still are not sure if this church is where we will do that. So I don’t have the same sense of “my people” that I had when launching my other books. And I hold the sadness of what a farce that was for me.
Connected to this, the spaces where I’m invited to speak are changing. New invitations and opportunities that I would not have considered or sought arise as many doors in my old spaces have closed. It can be difficult to navigate what spaces are mutually beneficial, but I have been so blessed by the new people I am meeting and connecting with.
In the back of my mind, I keep asking myself, do I want to continue writing when it has been such a hard road for me? Do I want this in my life? I dream about one day opening a modern-day speakeasy. How fun would that be? And there is good, holy work that could happen there, too, in the peopling. There does seem to be this compulsion, though, to keep learning, keep discovering and keep writing.
Have you ever read prayers in the Bible — by David or Daniel or Paul or Jesus — and thought, “I could never pray like that!” Maybe after hearing people at church pray so eloquently, you feel as though prayer requires a certain number of words or a lofty language that just doesn’t roll off your tongue easily.
But there are several places in Scripture where we see not-so-dignified prayers. Take, for example, Nehemiah’s two-second prayer, which he mentally offered to the Lord before speaking to the king. Or the Canaanite woman who stumbled at Jesus’ feet and could hardly utter, “Lord, help me!” (Matthew 15:25).
Perhaps our imperfect words and half-formulated thoughts — our “stutters before the holy” — are enough as we humble our hearts before God in prayer.
Aimee Byrd is an author, speaker, blogger, podcaster and former coffee shop owner. Aimee is the author of several books, including The Hope in Our Scars. Her articles have appeared in First Things, Table Talk, Modern Reformation, By Faith, New Horizons, Ordained Servant, Harvest USA and Credo Magazine, and she has been interviewed and quoted in Christianity Today and The Atlantic.