On Trust, a Word from Flannery O’Connor, and Learning Without the Saddle

A Note From Me

I’ve been thinking about a line in C.S. Lewis’s preface to George MacDonald. It’s a 365 Anthology of Lewis’s favorite quotes from the Scottish novelist and lecturer. He says that MacDonald’s father “forbade his son to touch a saddle until he had learned to ride well without one.”

At first it sounds like a hard-nosed, old-world kind of thing—a test to make the boy tough. But I think it’s something else.

Imagine learning to ride a horse bareback.

There’s no leather seat to steady you, no stirrups to catch your feet. Your body has to stay close to the horse, learning his movements from the inside—every shift, every rhythm, every change of pace. Over time, you begin to move as he moves. The knowing that forms here doesn’t come from control, but from vulnerability and nearness.

I think there’s a parallel here for my own journey of transformation. I keep wanting the supports first—certainty, stability, something to hold me in place. But again and again, God seems to ask me to climb on without them. Not to make the ride harder, but because he is the kind of Father who knows how learning actually happens.

For it’s only when my life feels exposed—when I have to stay close and learn in motion—that something deeper begins to form. Not a propped-up kind of knowledge, but a knowing shaped by vulnerability.

A Voice from the Christian Tradition

“You arrive at enough certainty to be able to make your way, but it is making it in darkness. Don’t expect faith to clear things up for you. It is trust, not certainty...”

—Flannery O’Connor, The Habit of Being

A Question to Carry

Where might God be asking you to ride without a saddle right now?

One stride at a time,

–Jon