“I hate school,” says my 7-year-old almost every single day.
“Oh really?” I ask with curiosity. “What do you hate about it? Tell me more,” I encourage even as I am continuing to make her food for lunch and pack her things to send her to the very place that she has just told me that she hates. I want her to know that I hear her, that the feelings arising within her are surfacing for a legitimate reason. I want her to feel heard. And I genuinely want to know what she thinks about this institution, because if she ever loses that fire of resistance to being put in a box, I want to be able to remind her that she is always more than what she does.
You Are More Than What You Do
What I want for my children, I want for every single human being on the entire planet–the opportunity for them to flourish in communities that can recognize their gifts and their talents, can encourage their interests, celebrate with them when they shine, and compassionately help them course correct through systems of mutual accountability. Another mark of this community is that it helps its members make the most of their mistakes, restores then when they are harmed or inadvertently cause harm, and always holds in its vision the highest ideals of who its members are in the process of becoming. The question is, can such communities exist?
Whenever my daughter puts up resistance to school, I am grateful. It is not because I don’t value education. It’s just that I am more concerned that my daughter learns how to learn than what to learn and I want to support her in who she wants to be rather then how she is supposed to act. And the fact is that most schools, even the good ones, are generally designed around demonstrating proficiency through testing and the ability to conform to behavioral standards. Being able to do this is then tied to the child being able to get into college, so that they can eventually get a job that will then essentially rate you on your proficiency using certain metrics and your ability to conform to certain behavioral standards. And in exchange for going along to get along all you have to do is suppress your naturally arising impulses to be yourself. Sounds like a fair trade, right?
Well, for a long time people thought so because in exchange for this bargain, there were reasonable expectations for that return on divestment. Meaning, in exchange for divesting from discovering yourself and instead investing in helping a company reach its goals, the husband–because let’s be real–could expect to get a pension that would enable him to spend time with his grandkids in the twilight of his life, because he would have missed out on most of his kids’ lives in an effort to provide for them. And many of us agreed to this system until we didn’t.
But, instead of continuing down a psychological history of how we became an anxious society of people who do not know themselves, what we want out of life, and how to be in relationships with people who show any propensity toward trying to live from their original nature, I want you to put yourself in my daughter’s shoes and look back to the time when you would feel like you didn’t want to go to school. Can you remember it? Can you still connect with that feeling? If you can, I want you to sit with it for about a minute. And then, I want you to try to connect with the moment that you stopped resisting. Can you connect with that feeling? If so, that is when you stopped learning who you could be and started learning how you should act. This is when you began shifting from a human being to a human doing. This is what my daughter is resisting. And this is what I am committed to helping her and others with.
“Resistance Is Futile” Or Is It?
No it is not. Resistance is vital. But, whether they intend to or not, many of our, sometimes well meaning, institutions try to drain all of the resistance out of us. But, if you’ve ever worked out at all, you know that there is no meaningful growth without resistance. So, instead of working to eliminate resistance, like the Borg in Star Trek, we all would be better served if we learned to work with resistance as I am trying to do with my daughter. So, what follows, is some steps I have been curating to help people learn to work with resistance in order to build the relational capacity required to foster the kind of communities that I mentioned above.
Five Steps for Working with Resistance to Build Flourishing Communities
1. Affirm the Resistance as Intelligence, Not Insubordination Begin by validating the resistant impulse—not as defiance, but as an expression of deep, inner wisdom. When a child says, “I don’t want to go to school,” hear it not as rebellion but as revelation. This response could be a clue that something essential to their being is at risk of being lost in the process of institutional assimilation. Affirming resistance as legitimate opens a relational space for curiosity, safety, and mutual respect.
2. Inquire Into the Longing Behind the “No” Every resistance is a “no” that hides a deeper “yes.” Invite the child—or yourself—to articulate what they would rather be doing instead. For example, my daughter is really into the idea of raising chickens. That is her yes right now. We got there by asking open-ended questions like: “What does your heart want to do right now?” or “What do you wish learning felt like?” This step builds trust and moves the conversation from compliance to co-creation, where the goal is not to get back on track but to find the right track. Out of this engagement, she has chosen to spend hours learning about chickens in a way that she may never have were she forced to.
3. Lay a Foundation for Authentic Exploration Create opportunities for the child to engage in the things they’re drawn to—even if they seem tangential to conventional educational goals. This doesn’t mean abandoning structure; it means weaving joy, play, and discovery into the structure. When people experience agency, they also develop responsibility. Let exploration be the soil in which accountability can grow. Continuing with the chicken interest; although where we live has an HOA and we aren’t allowed to have chickens, we have arranged for her to incubate some eggs until they hatch and then have them raised by a local farmer.
4. Cultivate Creativity Through Relational Support Offer consistent encouragement and celebrate effort over outcome. Let the focus be on becoming, not performing. Build systems of accountability rooted in compassion, not compliance—spaces where failure is fertilizer and mistakes are messengers guiding growth. This step helps people, young and old, trust themselves again, which is essential for innovation, connection, and joy. One of the mantras that I have been saying to both of my daughters all of their lives is, “We make mistakes. But, it’s okay. Because we get better everyday.” It is important to me for my children to know that making mistakes is part of learning. Trying to know everything is an unreasonable expectation that schools can’t help but put on us. And unfortunately, pretty much every institution in the modern world has followed suit, despite the fact that most innovations have mistakes as one of the main ingredients. But, if people are not supported with the relational infrastructure to be able to accelerate their becoming through the journey of visioning and re-visioning that is part and parcel of trying new things in trial and error ecosystem their ability to problem solve will be diminished.
5. Anchor the Resistance in Collective Imagination Let your household, classroom, or community be a place that holds a larger vision—where resistance isn’t isolated but honored as part of the human story. Share stories of people who changed the world not by going along, but by staying curious. Let that resistance become a sacred thread that binds people together in the work of building communities that don’t just tolerate difference but are transformed by it. Every institution that I can think of is failing in the imagination department. Do you know how many problems we could create solutions for if we were able to tap into the inexhaustible reservoir of our collective imagination? No, you don’t. Because our imaginations are being systematized to the point that many of us only can imagine updates to old things instead of bringing new things into the world, which is what we are really here to do.
Toward Creative, Relational Infrastructures for Becoming
The truth is, because this world isn’t working with us, many people no longer want to work for it. And it’s not because people are lazy or entitled as some try to say. It’s that something deep within the human soul is stirring, longing not for productivity, but for purpose—not for performance, but for presence. People want to live and work and grow in communities that mirror what I want for my children; spaces where our gifts are recognized, our curiosities are honored, and our mistakes are welcomed as part of our sacred unfolding. This was one of the things I appreciated about being a pastor–that I was able to cultivate these space in a variety of small groups and watch the inner child in folks light up when recognized.
Back when I worked as a recruiter during the 2008 housing crisis, I saw the early signs of a shift happening in the world of work. I spoke with people—smart, capable people—who were devastated not just by the loss of income but by the sudden vacuum of meaning. For many, their jobs had become the sole medium through which they were able to channel their sense of worth. And when that was snatched from them, so did their access to that channel. That experience moved something in me. I realized that if our work is the only place where we feel like we matter, then there had to be a way of reconnecting people to the story of their perpetual becoming.
So I went to seminary—not to become an expert in scripture, but to learn how to accompany people through the sacred work of becoming conscious meaning-makers. I wanted to help people live their lives on purpose rather than as passive participants in systems that rarely see the full truth of who we are. I wanted to help people become who they were before they were told who they should be. But, after over a decade of working in that space, I have had to accept that, despite the invitation of some faith communities, the general experience of far too many people is that these space are just one more place where people receive the messages that they, or someone they are journeying with in the process of their becoming, is not enough.
And now, with massive layoffs, threats of a recession—or even a depression—looming, with retaliatory tariffs and the erosion of international patent agreements threatening job stability and head starts in innovation, it is clearer than ever that we need new relational infrastructures that can function beyond the pass/fail, win/lose, in/out paradigms. We need communities that can serve as accelerators for human development, not just economic development. We need networks that support people in becoming, not just producing. And the fact is that the adults in the room are not equipped to teach us how to do that. The children are.
This is why I am putting in so much work to maximize my capacity to work with resistance—especially the resistance of our children. It’s not just about parenting for me. It’s about shaping a new world. Every time we affirm a child’s resistance, inquire into what they long for, support their authentic exploration, nurture their creativity, and imagine with them a world where they can flourish, we are building the very communities we so desperately need, not just for them, but for ourselves as well.
I don’t know a single person that isn’t longing for this, hungering for this, waiting for this. They just don’t know how to name it. Or, we have been waiting for permission to ask for it and receive it, because decades of being trained out of being able to discern what is best for our “whole person becoming” is hijacking our efforts to make shifts, just like a computer antivirus is programmed to eliminate variation. But, to be who we can become, communities that can work with the resistance that emerges in spaces where there is variation is just what we need. Communities where people are not reduced to what they do. Communities where the soul can breathe. Communities where we can remember how to be human again. Communities where we can learn through play.
Because perhaps what we call resistance is not a problem to fix—but an invitation to heal, to remember, and to reimagine what it means to live in a world worthy of our children’s dreams.
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