Something has shifted in childhood, and most parents and educators can feel it even if they struggle to name it.

Real eye contact feels rare now. Not absent, just quietly avoided. We still glance at each other, enough to register a face, not enough to stay. Long enough to be polite. Not long enough to be changed.

Desire is one of the few human experiences not fully domesticated by modern life. It is still alive to sensation, responsive and awake to those moments when time seems to slow.

And in this pause, once the food is eaten, the drinks are finished, the conversations had, what’s real tends to hold its shape. And what was being held together by adrenaline, distraction, or sheer momentum starts to crack. That’s not failure. That is data to use. We tend to treat this moment as a time to set goals for the year to come. Outcomes. Targets. Resolutions. What do I want to achieve in 2026?

I’ve never written about my time in the church until now, and that was deliberate. Not because I was afraid of the story, and not because there was nothing to say, but because I didn’t want to write from inside the emotion of it.