Mourning the death of a dream

My journey wrestling with vocation, disappointment and the need to lament while at Hutchmoot UK 2026

Hello readers, and welcome new subscribers! Now there is probably nothing less interesting to you than the cat-ate-my-homework reasons for why I haven’t written much in the way of essays on my Substack lately. But I’ve been wrestling with tensions and trying to capture something more personal and private than I typically write. And that’s taken some time for me to process.

I want to be honest: I’ve been tired. Tired of the circus of subscriber-chasing, notesmaxxing, algorithm-second-guessing, wannabe-influencing, content creating.

Not that I’m very good at all that, but it’s the kind of insidious beat that gets inside your head and you find yourself tapping along to its rhythm, all without meaning to.

So I keep needing to be reminded of what my vocation as a thinker and writer is really all about.

Let’s rewind to the beginning of May, when I made my now-annual pilgrimage to Hutchmoot UK, a Christian conference focused around art, creativity and community. It’s a wonderful gathering of creatives and I have many friends in that community.

But with my efforts to find a publisher for the book I’m writing, The Meaning Gap, rattling around in my head, I couldn’t help but arrive at Hutchmoot with a bit of anxiety, a worry that I should be making more content, networking more smartly, leveraging my connections to somehow make my platform that bit more attractive. And that was sucking something of the joy out of my Hutchmoot experience.

The big Friday evening event was the UK debut of the Every Moment Holy Live show, based around the Every Moment Holy books of liturgies – prayers for all occasions, from the joyful everyday to moments of deepest grief and loss.

While I deeply appreciated the books and the liturgies they contained, I’d been a little wary of the idea of Every Moment Holy Live as a show. I was concerned that something written as prayers could be distorted by the act of translation into a performance. But I had a lot of faith in the people involved in it. And that faith proved well-rewarded when I experienced it for myself.

It was a searingly honest and powerful account of grief, loss and hope, with writer Doug McKelvey and illustrator Ned Bustard sharing about the devastating illness and loss of Ned’s wife Leslie in the course of the writing and illustration of book II.

Doug McKelvey sharing his story at Every Moment Holy Live

My last few years have felt like a slow collapse of many of my dreams, through long COVID, burnout, challenges in family life, struggles with work, long-held ambitions being ruled out.

I worked as Publishing Director at IVP Books from 2019 to 2023. It was a senior Christian publishing role and felt like a wonderful fit with my sense of calling to engage culturally and critically with culture for Christ, and to help others to do the same. So when I had to leave because of burnout, exhausted and battered, I was confused about what I was called to next.

I had a long-held dream of at some stage serving as a worker at L’Abri, a Christian intentional community, and as a couple, my wife Beverley and I had felt a pull towards it. After leaving IVP, I had started to consider that more seriously.

But while we were staying at the English L’Abri in Hampshire, I’d had to face up to the reality that the demands of it would just be too much for the stage we were at as a family. Heartbroken after an honest but painful conversation with Beverley recognising that, I went out into the night and prayed ‘A Liturgy for the Death of a Dream’ from Every Moment Holy, laying my grief before God with tears.

The Manor in Greatham, home of the English branch of L’Abri fellowship, at night

So when that liturgy was read at Hutchmoot, all my suppressed grief came rushing in on me.

I was undone. I couldn’t keep the tears back.

A friend saw I was upset and stepped outside with me, talking and comforting as I shared something more of my story than I’d disclosed before, telling the tale behind the raw nerves the evening had touched. I saw now I still needed to mourn the griefs of the past few years, the many trials that I and my family have been through. He sat and listened and prayed with me, and I’m deeply grateful.

I’ve always recognised in theory the need to make room for lament. But now I was learning it in practice, helped by Doug and Ned’s vulnerability, the beauty of the words and images they created, and the performances of the musicians that evening capturing emotion in sound.

Michael Tinker, Sophie Killingley, Jessie Dipper and Jon Lowry performing Every Moment Holy Live

And as I composed myself that evening, I appreciated the easy friendliness of Hutchmoot UK, being able to go up to a table, join a game and a conversation without friction or embarrassment.

But Every Moment Holy Live also put my worries about platform, publication and vocation into a wider perspective. Earlier this year, we’d reconsidered L’Abri in the light of changing family circumstances, but reached the same conclusion. With the dream of being a L’Abri worker out the picture, my dream of being a writer took centre-stage as the locus of my vocation. And along the way, my desire to be published had perhaps become load-bearing beyond what is healthy.

So the other thing that touched me deeply was Doug McKelvey’s account of worrying for a long time that he hadn’t had the impact in life he wanted, that his dreams had been frustrated. It was out of writing liturgies just for those in his life that Every Moment Holy developed – and then that ended up having a life and impact beyond what he could have imagined.

And that’s what really stuck with me from Hutchmoot this year:

Focus on faithfulness.

Focus on craft.

Focus on patience.

Focus on doing my work well and doing good to others through it. And let success come according to God’s standard and in God’s time.

Remembering these let me relax and enjoy Hutchmoot for what it was as community and fellowship, not as a venue for platform-building or occasion for coveting the success of others.

But I was still waiting for news on my book… was this renewed sense of focus the readying I needed before getting a book deal? Or was it preparation for weathering the disappointment of rejection?

Hutchmoot was a milestone, but God still had more to teach me. But that’s another story and this part of it has taken long enough.

For now, let me leave you with Jon Lowry’s version of ‘A Liturgy for the Death of a Dream’ from Every Moment Holy Prayer Songs, the performance of which so affected me that night at Hutchmoot:

“Not my dreams, O Lord,
not my dreams, but yours, be done”

Coming soon: Science fiction as Modern Myth

While at Hutchmoot, I did a talk on Science Fiction as Myth, which I’ll be releasing a special bonus episode of the Imaginative Discipleship podcast. Make sure you’re subscribed to be told when it’s out!