January 17 25 Newsletter | Take the Back Roads

 This newsletter was originally sent on January 17, 2025

Each month, I share new essays, books, and stories from the road.

📬 Want these updates in your inbox? Subscribe here.

An empty road leading into the fading light, where the horizon meets the quiet promise of the journey ahead

Welcome, Friends, 

to News from the Back Roads!


Dear friends,

This week, I’m sharing just one piece of writing: The Illusion of Comfort.

It’s an essay that grew out of a realization I keep returning to, that much of our exhaustion comes from believing life is supposed to settle down into something easy, predictable, or pain-free. When it doesn’t, we assume we’ve failed or taken a wrong turn.

Lately, I’ve been thinking less about comfort and more about movement.

There are seasons when forward progress doesn’t look like growth or achievement. It looks like staying on the road at all. Keeping some small motion when stopping completely would be easier. Choosing continuity over certainty.

This essay isn’t a solution, and it isn’t meant to be. It’s a naming of the terrain—of what it’s like to walk a path that keeps shifting beneath your feet, and to realize that motion itself may be the point.

Some weeks, one honest piece is enough.

Thank you for reading, for walking alongside me, and for staying present on your own moving paths.

With gratitude,


a.d. elliott

Art and Other Odd Adventures

Stories Found Along the Way

The Illusion of Comfort: What the Cross Names

This week’s essay began with a realization I can’t seem to shake: somewhere along the way, we started believing that life was supposed to be comfortable. That discomfort signals failure, weak faith, or divine disfavor. But that belief collapses the moment you look honestly at history, or at the life of Jesus himself.

In The Illusion of Comfort: What the Cross Names, I reflect on why the prosperity gospel rings so hollow, why suffering has always been part of embodied life, and why Jesus’ call to “take up your cross” was never about extraordinary heroics, but about daily endurance in a world that has never been easy. 

The cross, I’m learning, doesn’t explain suffering away; it names it honestly.


→ Read the full reflection on TakeTheBackRoads.com

If any of these stories offered you a moment of reflection or a gentle breath this week, I hope you’ll share them with a fellow traveler — of roads, books, or life.



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