In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.

What do you want? That’s the question. It is the first, last, and most fundamental question of Christian discipleship.

We have to unlearn the habits of consumerism in order to learn how to be friends.

Our making bubbles up from our imagination, which is fueled by a Story of what flourishing looks like. We all carry some governing Story in our bones that shapes our work more than we might realize because that Story has taught us what to love (and as we emphasized in chapter 2, you might not love what you think because you might not realize what

“My weight is my love,” he says. “Wherever I am carried, my love is carrying me.” Our orienting loves are like a kind of gravity—carrying us in the direction to which they are weighted.

We are all familiar, of course, with the truism “You are what you eat.” But over the past generation we have learned more and more about the nature of our hungers and how incredibly malleable they are. Scientists and authors like Brian Wansink and Michael Pollan have pointed out how our hungers are learned.

In short, if you are what you love, and love is a habit, then discipleship is a rehabituation of your loves.

seeking instead an immediate encounter with Christ in their neighbor, or even in purely worldly work and technological activity. Engaged in such work, they soon lose the capacity to see any distinction between worldly responsibility and Christian mission. Whoever does not come to know the face of God in contemplation will not recognize it in

And it will mean that we do indeed “follow our hearts” and live “authentically”—but only when, with that transformed character fully operative (like an airline pilot with a lifetime’s experience), the hard work up front bears fruit in spontaneous decisions and actions that reflect what has been formed deep within.