You’ve become very good at being seen, haven’t you? You know how to read a room, how to offer just enough of your story to seem open while keeping the deepest thing safely out of view, how to hand the world a competent, admirable version of yourself. And still, underneath the feed and the applause and the performance you have perfected, there is an ache you can no longer explain away, because you are surrounded and you are not known. In this conversation, Ian Simkins joins me to name the quiet distance between the platform and the table, and to expose how much of our exhaustion is simply the cost of maintaining an image our bodies, our nervous systems, and our spirits were never built to sustain.
We talk about the difference between performative vulnerability, which offers a little to hide a lot, and the righteous vulnerability that drags what is hidden into the light in search of healing; about why the Lord does some of His most transforming work not on a stage but at a table where pretense cannot survive; and about the sobering possibility that decades of programs and platforms have discipled many of us straight into the isolation we are now scrambling to cure. Here is the harder invitation. Scripture says of the Lord, “Behold, You desire truth in the inner being” (Psalm 51:6, AMPC), and He will not create a clean heart in a person still committed to curating one. If you have learned to be seen everywhere and known nowhere, this conversation will ask you to sit down, lay the image down, and let yourself be found, because every table, it turns out, is meant to be an altar.
About Ian Simkins
Ian Simkins is the lead pastor of The Bridge Church just outside Nashville, Tennessee, where he lives with his wife, Katie, and their three sons. Shaped for years in ministry in the Chicagoland area before moving his family to Middle Tennessee, he writes and teaches out of the actual life of a local church rather than from theory. His new book, Every Table an Altar: Reclaiming Connection in a World of Division, Distraction, and Loneliness (Zondervan), was born from that community, and it makes the case that the antidote to our disconnection is not another program or platform but the ordinary, sacred practice of gathering at a table.
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Resources Mentioned This Week
- Every Table an Altar: Reclaiming Connection in a World of Division, Distraction, and Loneliness
- Healing What You Can’t Erase: Transform Your Mental, Emotional, and Spiritual Health from the Inside Out
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