Jennie Lusko doesn’t talk about flourishing like someone selling a cleaner, shinier version of Christian life. She talks about it like someone who knows real faith usually happens in the middle of the mess, not after it gets cleaned up.
“So when I sat down to write this, it was really an accumulation of journal entries over my whole life,” Lusko said of her new devotional, Fresh Mercies Every Day.
She started journaling when she was 8 years old, writing down what she now calls “the stupidest, silliest things.” But over time, the habit became a record of something deeper: God’s faithfulness in ordinary life. Not just the big altar-call moments. Not just the dramatic breakthroughs. The little things. The forgettable things. The days that don’t feel spiritual until you look back and realize God was there.
For a lot of Christians, “flourishing” can sound suspiciously like a nicer word for having your life together. Peaceful home. Clear calling. Strong prayer life. Emotional stability. A calendar that doesn’t look like it was assembled during a hostage situation.
Lusko pushes back on that without lowering the bar. Flourishing, she said, isn’t reserved for people who have somehow hacked Christian maturity. It’s what Jesus offers in real life.
“Jesus says, ‘I came so that you would have life and that you would have it more abundantly,’” Lusko said. “So not just life, which is amazing. That’s great being alive, but an abundant life, a flourishing life, a deep and purposeful, meaningful life.”
The problem, of course, is most people don’t feel wildly abundant. They feel tired. Distracted. Overcommitted. Half-present. They’re trying to follow Jesus while answering emails, keeping friendships alive, managing family stress and wondering why their inner life feels like a phone battery permanently stuck at 12%.
Lusko gets that. She isn’t pretending spiritual formation happens in ideal conditions.
“My life feels messy most of the time, to be perfectly honest,” she said. “I’m not great at scheduling, I’m not great at being super organized with time.”
Her husband, Levi Lusko, is the structured one, she said. She’s learned to live with the tension between the visible schedule and something harder to track: what God may be doing underneath it.
“We’re going to have lunch with someone. We’re going to have our meetings. We’re going to go here. We’re going to do that,” Lusko said. “But then there’s also the invisible schedule that God has weaving into.”
It’s a strange and quietly radical idea in a culture obsessed with optimizing the day. The calendar says meeting, pickup, deadline, appointment. Lusko is asking a better question: What if God is also present in the interruption, the canceled plan, the random phone call, the person you almost rushed past?
“I always just want to be aware of what God has on my schedule,” she said.
For Lusko, that awareness doesn’t require becoming the kind of person who suddenly has a color-coded prayer life. It’s simpler and harder. It means learning to stop treating Jesus like the first box on a spiritual to-do list.
“Instead of thinking Jesus, you’re just number one, thinking of Him as the center of it all,” Lusko said.
There’s a difference. A No. 1 priority can be checked off and left behind. A center changes the shape of everything around it. Lusko said the shift is asking how her time with Jesus affects the way she interacts with her husband, her kids, coworkers and the people who interrupt her plans.
“I just want Jesus to be the center,” she said.
Of course, wanting that and living it are two very different things, which is why Lusko talks so much about remembering. Spiritual drift usually doesn’t begin with some dramatic rejection of God. It starts when people forget what they already know. They forget God’s faithfulness. They forget they’re not alone. They forget Jesus is present in the mundane parts of the day.
“If we don’t fight to remember, we’re just going to easily forget,” Lusko said.
Lusko connects that fight to journaling, communion and the small practices that help Christians pay attention to where God has already been faithful. Journaling, for her, isn’t self-care theater. It’s evidence. It’s a way of looking back and realizing God was present even when the story felt unresolved.
Communion, she said, is one of the clearest pictures of that kind of memory.
“Communion is remembering what Jesus did for us and remembering that His life, His death, His resurrection is what our life is all about,” Lusko said.
Anyone who’s been a Christian for longer than five minutes knows the cycle she’s describing. You start over. You drift. You feel guilty. You make a plan. You forget the plan. You wonder if this is just what your spiritual life is always going to be.
Lusko refuses to let stuckness have the final word.
“It’s never too late to start,” she said. “I think the enemy wants us to feel like we’re stuck, and so we’re always just going to be stuck.”
Her answer isn’t to try harder in the most exhausting sense. It’s to return. Return to Jesus. Return to the truth that God is present. Return to the vine-and-branches reality of John 15, where fruitfulness doesn’t come from self-manufactured spiritual productivity but from abiding.
“Lord, help me just to remember that I’m a branch and that you’re the vine,” Lusko said.
The fight to flourish, then, isn’t really a fight to become impressive. It’s a fight to stay awake to God. It’s noticing His presence when life feels ordinary. It’s paying attention when your plans change. It’s remembering what He’s already carried you through before you decide the current season is the one where He disappears.
Lusko’s vision of flourishing is not a life where everything finally calms down. It’s learning to trust that Jesus is present here, too.
“We can have God’s presence with us in everything,” Lusko said. “We can call out to Him in any moment.”
That may not sound flashy enough for a culture that wants spiritual growth to come with a system, a strategy and a before-and-after photo. But it does sound a lot like real life. And maybe that’s the point. Flourishing isn’t what happens when the mess is gone. It’s what grows when Jesus stays at the center of it.
