Introduction
Outside, the summer air felt soupy and unstable, with the possibility of storms. Inside, clutching a rust-colored throw pillow and tissues, I watched heavy-bottomed raindrops begin to thud onto dirty pebbles and wondered why I had not been collected enough to remember an umbrella. My counselor sat across from me in the antique light of a small lamp, rubbing her hands together like a thoughtful praying mantis. She took her time to respond.
The year’s burdens had been building, and it seemed that all of the “boundary work” we’d been needling away at diligently in her office every two weeks was doing little more than keeping me alive. Which wasn’t nothing. Five failed rounds of fertility treatments had left me with a concussion from drug-induced dizziness, mounting medical bills, and a depleted spirit. I’d recently served on the jury for a horrific double-murder trial that shook my faith in human goodness, preached a child’s funeral for the first time, and watched my dear friend navigate the sudden loss of her mother. At work, a toxic environment was grinding me down, while online, my recently published children’s book was drawing hate mail from people who hadn’t read it. My denomination was undergoing a split, war footage filled every screen, and beneath it all ran the steady current of everyday stresses: pandemic aftermath, parenting worries, empty gas tanks, and piled dishes. That week, crossing the bridge to another meeting, I’d thought, “If I just turned into the water, I wouldn’t have to go to work.” I didn’t want to be harmed, or gone; I just didn’t want to spend another second gulping for breath between blows.
“We’ve been working for months on defensive approaches like drawing boundaries and practicing mindfulness,” I quietly uttered. “But are there any offensive tools you can offer me? Everything feels like it’s dead or dying, corroding or corrupted. It feels like I’m not seeing color, and I can’t remember what it was like for life not to be gray.”
She wasn’t alarmed. It’s always a gift when someone can offer their unruffled reactions to your humanity. She showed no concern, no shock or emergency. She simply looked up, then down, then rubbed her hands together and pondered as I watched the rain, safe in a moment of unrushed vulnerability.
“I’ve been reading a book about awe,” she eventually said, as if I’d asked for a library recommendation and not just exposed my darkest ruminations. “I think you might like it. There is much in there about how we, in our great loss, grief, and stuckness, can discover renewal in awe and wonder. I have a feeling you may find color again in curiosity—that ever-approachable door to the things that take our breath away and remind us why life is worth it.”
She had not suggested that I must labor painstakingly, unsustainably to find the beginnings of relief. She had also not offered me arrival. Rather, she had given me a breadcrumb. It turned out to be enough for the day.
I’ve been turning that breadcrumb over and over in my mind ever since. There was something profound in the suggestion that curiosity—this most accessible of human capacities hidden in plain sight—might be a pathway back to color, back to life. To put more churchy language to it, you could say that I’ve been toying with the idea of curiosity as a means of grace. As the old hymn says, “Come thou fount of every blessing, tune my heart to sing Thy grace.” Shortly following what would turn out to be this critical therapy session, I got a bee in my bonnet that curiosity may help with the tuning. I haven’t been able to let it go.
So, this is a book about curiosity. It’s also a book about grace and resurrection. It’s a record of my exploration into, and musing on, how curiosity might be one of our most approachable and transformative resources in a world that often feels overwhelming. When everything seems to be burning down around us—from our institutions to our certainties to our connections—curiosity offers an unexpected pathway back to color, back to life.
In my lived experience, research, and writing, I’ve found curiosity to be a precious and timely tool for lessening the violence, shame, overwhelm, and isolation of our world and adding to its deeply needed awe, connection, creativity, and hope. I hated and feared less at the end of this journey; what a joy it would be if you could say the same.
What have I found in exploring curiosity that I want to tell you beforehand?
That curiosity is bottomless by nature, and so this book is anything but exhaustive.
That curiosity can be approached curiously—through angles, layers, and breadcrumbs. If nothing else, may it give you a starting place to run with.
That I have experienced curiosity as a gift and a posture, a grace and a practice, a lens and a muscle. My confidence in it as vital for those of us here, now, at this point in history has grown exponentially.
That I hope, maybe most of all, that you’ll leave these pages holding curiosity as an indispensable value for transformation rather than a limited luxury or trait.
That you’ll have held space for how one more question, one more consideration, one more lingering pause or vulnerable opening could be the bridge that moves enemy to friend, hopelessness to healing, and shame to liberation. As Dr. Amy G. Oden says, “Curiosity is a fundamental Christian practice.”
There are many ways to engage with this book, and I’ll offer some suggestions, but mostly I hope you’ll navigate it in whatever setting, company, and pace allows your own curiosity to play most freely and fully. In addition to this introduction, there are twelve chapters followed by four reflection prompts each. We designed it this way so that you and/or a small group of people could break it up evenly over four weeks, six weeks, twelve weeks, or just as many months. The reflection prompts are written to work for communal discussion or personal meditation and journaling. For extra insight, chapter 11 holds a good number of Christmas references and therefore, the book could be used during the season of Advent to supplement a curious Christmas.
I should say I’m no theological specialist nor scientific researcher in the field of curiosity, though I do mix quite a bit of the two with personal stories and a few rabbit-trail ramblings throughout the book. Rather, I am an author, seminarian, and nonprofit professional trying to use writing to make more room, as others have so graciously made room for my continually evolving self over the years. The journey from the worship of certainty to the growing freedom and healing of curiosity hasn’t been linear. I am forever learning about my own privilege, limitations, and compulsions, cyclically, it seems. I have eaten my words and made a lot of mistakes, mimicked fearful leaders, and added to the brokenness. I’ve been shown mercy; I try to write from its lessons. Everything I create now—from sermons to essays to captions—flows from my experience of needing people I never thought I’d need. This has awakened me to all that might exist beyond our current constructs, languages, assumptions, boundaries, and presumed endings. That gives me hope. Mostly, I feel like a hound hunting for grace’s third way, following those breadcrumbs of curiosity wherever they might lead. I hold to the idea that, as my friend Katelyn says, “God can’t only be found in being correct.”
Maybe—and this is the whole point—God (and healing, and well-being, and wholeness, and grace, and resurrection) can also and exponentially be found in being curious.
“Prone to wonder, Lord I feel it.” May we all be increasingly so.
Reprinted with permission from Sacred Curiosity: Wondering Our Way Toward Wholeness by Britney Winn Lee copyright © 2026 Broadleaf Books.
