More Courage to Stay (Left Behind):

A Meditation On Avoidance, Spiritual Bypassing, and a Theology of Remaining

The reaction to my last essay, The Courage to Be (Left Behind), made me realize something: most of us know what it feels like to want to disappear. To hope for escape.

Even if you didn’t grow up evangelical, you’ve had that morning where you couldn’t face the alarm clock because you already knew what was waiting for you. Or that night where you put off sleep because you knew tomorrow would come for you anyway. Who hasn’t longed for a savior—or at least a helicopter—to swoop in and airlift them out of a mess?

The rapture is just one religious version of a universal human fantasy:
Get me out of here.

Ernest Becker called it a “heroic immortality project,” our attempt to dodge the unbearable truth that life is fragile, messy, and terminal. Why wrestle with grief or moral complexity when you can imagine God airlifting you to safety? Sociologists Jon Stone and Catherine Wessinger call this eschatological deferral: if the world’s going up in flames anyway, why polish brass on a sinking ship—or, you know, recycle?

Research shows that strong end-times belief often correlates with lower civic and environmental engagement. In therapy rooms, rapture obsession sometimes masks unprocessed fear or trauma. It’s a cosmic “get out of life free” card, and the cost is depth, presence, and the slow, unglamorous work of actually living.

Psychologists call this avoidance coping—our nervous system’s way of saying,
Nope. Can’t deal.
And it’s more than distraction.
It’s the quiet art of not really living in our own lives.

We lose ourselves in our outrage, and the outrage keeps us from listening. We scroll and rage and type in all caps, but we never hear anything beyond the echo of our own anger. We lose empathy and the ability to dialogue.

Doomscrolling numbs us with the opiate of endless videos—cat clips, political fails, the collapse of civilization—because it’s easier to flee into pixels than face climate anxiety or the slow unraveling of our own relationships.

When that’s not enough, we fantasize about vanishing entirely. Zillow becomes our treasure map to a mythical life in Vermont or Portugal. And when real-life escape isn’t possible, we craft full-blown Lord of the Rings–quality narratives in our heads: new jobs, new loves, new selves, anyone but us, anywhere but here.

We lie to ourselves. We deny what’s in front of us. And if we’re spiritually creative, we over-spiritualize our avoidance. We light a candle and call it prayer. We chant a mantra and call it enlightenment. We do whatever we can to dodge the hard, human work of feeling and living.

Psychologists call this spiritual bypassing—when prayer becomes hiding, meditation becomes numbing, and even writing about contemplation (hi, guilty) becomes a sneaky way to avoid sitting with the silence.

It’s all just running—sometimes fast, sometimes beautiful—but running all the same.

The problem with running is that it never saves us. It just keeps us orbiting the life we’re afraid to land in.

At some point, the phone dies. The Zillow fantasy fades. The candle burns out. And there you are—still you.

This is where the contemplatives, the psychologists, and maybe even Jesus nod in agreement. The way out is in. Real rescue comes from the courage to stay and show up for the life you already have, the wounded world already around you, and the heart you’ve been dodging like a bad phone call.

At the heart of the Christian story (and honestly, at the heart of every deep spiritual tradition) is not a fear-mongering tale of being left behind but a radically different invitation.

It’s incarnational. It whispers:

Stop running.
Your rescue isn’t in the clouds.
Holiness lives here—
in the life you keep trying to escape.
Love waits in the place you least want to stay.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Jesus is a great example of someone who remains. He stays at tables with sinners, in gardens of anguish, and even on the cross. His salvation plan isn’t evacuation. It’s presence.

Zen teachers would agree, though they’d probably just hand you a broom and point you to the leaves in the yard. They call it chop wood, carry water—freedom through presence in the ordinary.

Meister Eckhart would say it with a German flourish: God is found here and now, or not at all.

Howard Thurman would add that in this still, grounded presence, “courage comes to fear, and hope to despair.”

Which brings me back to the question that keeps circling in my chest:

What does it mean to stay?
To practice a theology of remaining?
To have the courage to be left behind—not as punishment, but as a practice of love?

First, let me be crystal clear: Remaining doesn’t mean staying in harm’s way or enduring places that are killing your soul.

Sometimes the first act of staying is leaving—walking out of the job that’s crushing your spirit, ending the relationship that’s unsafe, closing the doomscrolling app that’s eating your peace.

Remaining isn’t about geography.

It’s about attention.

To stay is to stop running from your own life.
To plant your feet in the wounded world and whisper, I will not abandon you.

I think often of Greg Boyle, the Jesuit behind Homeboy Industries, who has spent decades walking alongside gang members and the incarcerated in Los Angeles. His life is a sermon on radical kinship: he doesn’t flee the world’s wounds, he kneels in them. “Here is what we seek,” he writes, “a compassion that can stand in awe at what people have to carry, rather than stand in judgment at how they carry it.” He’s one of my heroes because he stays where most have already walked away.

But a theology of Remaining doesn’t always look like big-city ministries or heroic lives. It can look like the daily faithfulness of Richmond Hill, an urban monastery in the heart of Richmond, Virginia. For decades, its community has prayed three times a day, holding the city’s history of enslavement and segregation in love, practicing the slow work of racial healing without turning away. They remain as a living witness that prayerful presence can heal what avoidance never will.

Or it can look like Kinship Plot, a small community of lived theology, tending neighborhood gardens and relationships as acts of resistance against rootlessness. They stay in the soil and with each other, quietly insisting that love grows best when we don’t run.

But staying isn’t only for monks and ministries. It can be micro.
It can be turning off your phone for an hour.
Showing up for the hard conversation you’ve been avoiding.
Planting something in the dirt.
Practicing the art of loving even when it aches.
And sometimes it means walking away from what is harmful so you can maintain your whole self because remaining is not martyrdom.

Remaining is about sowing kindness, facing our shadows, and refusing to abandon the life that’s actually ours, in ways that are safe and life-giving.

In a world obsessed with escape hatches, maybe the holiest thing we can do is stay—together, awake, and right where we are.

So, will you stay with me?
Stay.
Even when every impulse tells you to flee.
Stay.
Even when your fantasies seem easier than the truth.
Stay.
And, see the world as it is—
wounded and wondrous,
and still capable of love.

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