Mostly What God Does

What if the central truth of spirituality—of all belief—could fit into one simple sentence? In Mostly What God Does: Reflections on Seeking and Finding His Love Everywhere, acclaimed journalist Savannah Guthrie explores that very notion. She contends that, beneath doctrines and dogmas, life with God is rooted in an astonishingly simple revelation: Mostly what God does is love you.

That phrase, borrowed from Eugene Peterson’s The Message translation of Ephesians 5:1–2, becomes the heartbeat of Guthrie’s entire book. Through personal stories, meditations, and theological reflection, she examines what divine love looks like—and how learning to receive and reflect that love can transform daily life. Drawing from her own experiences of loss, motherhood, doubt, and joy, she invites readers into a journey of rediscovering faith, not as fearful obedience but as a steady relationship with a loving God actively present in every human moment.

A Journalist’s Leap into Faith

For Guthrie—best known as co-anchor of NBC’s TODAY show—writing about faith was both audacious and intimidating. This was no investigative report or public interview; it was an public act of vulnerability. In the foreword, she admits her apprehension: Everything has been said about faith, she muses, but I have not said it. With characteristic candor and humor, she positions herself not as an expert but as a fellow traveler—curious, imperfect, and wide-eyed.

She organizes the book into “six not-so-easy pieces”—Love, Presence, Praise, Grace, Hope, and Purpose—her own version of the “essentials of faith.” Each part is a conversation between her personal experiences and Scripture, structured as short reflections meant to be savored slowly. Guthrie even invites readers to linger with blank pages between essays—a playful call for quiet and soul-stillness, mirroring how she and her children share thirty seconds of silence before bedtime. That simplicity—pause, presence, love—is exactly what she believes God asks of us.

Love as the Foundation and Framework

The book’s thesis—that God’s main activity is love—flows from Guthrie’s personal faith evolution. Raised in a devout Baptist home, she once imagined God as an exacting authority waiting for mistakes. Over the years, through heartbreak, divorce, disappointment, and rediscovered faith, that severe image softened into Someone who loves radically, unconditionally, and continually—even when unacknowledged. This recognition, she suggests, is the essence of spiritual maturity: believing past pain and uncertainty that God’s intentions toward us are good.

Her writing captures the gravity and humor of that discovery. She jokes about getting her first tattoo—her late father’s handwritten words All My Love—as an everyday mantra. The phrase, she explains, is not just a sentimental inscription but a theological affirmation. Imagine, she says, God writing to you those same words: “All my love.” What if that were not metaphor but fact?

The Six Movements of a Loved Life

Guthrie structures her reflections around six progressive movements that trace the soul’s journey within divine love:

• Love: the awareness that God’s first, last, and constant action is love, not judgment.
• Presence: learning to sense God’s companionship in each moment and silence.
• Praise: moving from fear into gratitude—discovering that worship heals the soul as much as it honors God.
• Grace: confronting sin and failure not through shame but through mercy and renewal.
• Hope: practicing faith amid suffering, insisting on goodness when the world seems irredeemable.
• Purpose: recognizing that the evidence of divine love is not perfection but participation—sharing God’s love outwardly, in work and relationships.

Each section amplifies a central truth: God’s love is not an abstract doctrine but a lived reality. Her stories—such as struggling to pray through grief, finding God’s “voice” during motherhood, or rediscovering Psalm 23 as her lifelong companion—offer real-world theology in motion. Her reflections are iterative, each piece looping back to the same refrain: love starts, sustains, and perfects all things.

A Modern Faith Memoir

Part memoir, part devotional, part spiritual manifesto, Mostly What God Does is reminiscent of works such as Anne Lamott’s Traveling Mercies or Shauna Niequist’s Present Over Perfect. Like those authors, Guthrie blends personal imperfection and humor with sincere theology. What distinguishes her, however, is her journalist’s sensibility: evidence matters, language matters, questions matter. She treats faith as investigation—not toward proof but toward intimacy.

She also resists tidy conclusions. Instead, she points to what she calls “holy curiosity”: the freedom to question God and to expect God to respond. If belief is giving God the benefit of the doubt in a cynical world, then curiosity is what keeps that belief alive. Each chapter models this curiosity, showing how ordinary moments—a hymn with her children, a painful failure, a prayer said with impatience—can become sites of revelation.

Why This Message Matters Now

In a culture often burned by toxic religiosity or spiritual exhaustion, Guthrie’s gentle theology of love is both balm and correction. She writes for the faith-full and faith-wounded alike, offering a God who delights rather than demands. Her portrait of divine affection stands as a counterweight to judgmentalism, consumer cynicism, and despair—modern maladies she sees in news, politics, and even within herself.

Ultimately, Mostly What God Does returns us to the place where faith begins: wonder that love itself could be the universe’s engine. Faith, she suggests, is not blind optimism but a hard-won decision to see life through love’s lens—again and again. And if we can manage that, even briefly, perhaps we will understand what she means when she writes: “Mostly what God does is love you. Keep company with him and learn a life of love.”

Savannah Guthrie begins her first major section, Love, with a personal story—a tattoo that forever changed how she saw faith. Her arm bears her late father’s handwritten words, All My Love, taken from an old letter. But she soon realized this phrase also summarized the entire Gospel: all my love is what God continually offers humanity.

This first section is Guthrie’s theological foundation. It reframes divine love not as a distant or abstract principle but as something immediate, tender, and actionable. Her purpose is not to preach a soft version of feel-good spirituality but to reclaim the radical truth that love—costly, steady, and forgiving—is God’s chief activity and our greatest calling.

All My Love: God’s Signature and Ours

Guthrie recalls losing her father suddenly at sixteen and spending decades unsure of his handwriting—until her mother found a forgotten letter signed, All my love, Charley. That rediscovery inspired her tattoo, a daily reminder that love is what remains. In prayer and reflection, she came to hear those same words from God: that every circumstance—good or painful, sacred or mundane—can be read as if signed by a divine hand, “All my love.”

This realization crystallized when she encountered Peterson’s The Message, where Ephesians 5:1–2 reads, “Watch what God does, and then you do it … Mostly what God does is love you.” That simple rephrasing struck Guthrie like revelation. It cut through all her theological complexity and childhood guilt. Faith, she realized, is not primarily about rules, rituals, or striving for approval; it’s about trusting that God is good and loving even when life isn’t.

Reclaiming the Child’s Faith—Without the Fear

Growing up in church, Guthrie believed but often feared God—a deity who might punish her lapses or orchestrate painful “lessons.” She alternated between devout study and years-long spiritual distance. Over time, that fear matured. She began to see divine love as persistent even when unseen—present in silence, disappointment, and dry seasons. Instead of guilt over neglecting devotion, she reframed distance as grace: perhaps God was provisioning her with faith during seasons of closeness that would later sustain her through distance.

“To believe God is loving even when he seems absent is the essence of faith.”

That insight transforms guilt into gratitude. It challenges the reader, too: perhaps when you feel far from God, you are still loved—still being prepared, even while wandering.

Beyond Sentiment: Love as Revolution

Guthrie insists that stating “God loves you” is not spiritual fluff; it’s a radical worldview. Believing that God’s first move toward us is not condemnation but compassion alters everything—relationships, self-perception, even politics. It means giving God “the benefit of the doubt in a world that invites cynicism and despair.”

She writes, “Love like that takes root and is a revolution from within.” This echoes the writings of C. S. Lewis and Henri Nouwen, who argued that being loved unconditionally frees us to live courageously. Guthrie’s everyday theology connects lofty doctrine with domestic life: parenting, friendship, marriage, and self-forgiveness become sacred laboratories for learning to love as God does.

From God’s Love to Our Own

Perhaps her most memorable reinterpretation comes in The Bonus Commandment, where she revisits Jesus’s words, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” As a child, she focused on the “neighbor” part, seeing it as an admonition toward humility. But through prayer and meditation, she realized the statement hides a command she had long ignored: Love yourself. True humility, she explains, isn’t humiliation—it’s making room for God’s love to fill and define you. When you see yourself as beloved, you are less likely to lash out, compete, or despair, freeing you to love others generously.

That theme climaxes in “Like a Mother,” where her late-life motherhood reframes her understanding of divine tenderness. Watching her children, she senses how God might see humanity—delighting in our growth, aching through our tantrums, waiting with arms open. “God’s feelings for us have nothing to do with our feelings toward him,” she concludes. That asymmetry—his love undiminished by our rebellion—is where faith finds its anchor.

Guthrie thus establishes love not as theology’s starting point but its totality. Everything else—presence, praise, grace, hope, and purpose—unfolds from it. Her portrait of God is maternal and patient, her invitation simple: “Wrap yourself in it; let it warm you. Then go out into the world, and do it too.”

In Presence, Guthrie turns from belief to experience. If love is what God does, then presence is how he does it. Through reflections on prayer, silence, and attention, she explores how to recognize divine companionship in ordinary moments—from the clamor of New York City to her family’s bedtime routine.

God in the “Now”

Her meditation on the words spoken to Moses—“I AM WHO I AM”—reveals her theology of time. God is not a memory or a prediction; God is the present tense. “He is not in a place,” she writes. “He is in a moment. Every one.” She likens God to a radio signal always broadcasting—our spiritual practices don’t summon him; they simply tune us in. This picture recalls Brother Lawrence’s seventeenth-century classic The Practice of the Presence of God, yet Guthrie translates it into twenty-first-century life, suggesting that attention itself can be prayer.

Hearing God’s Voice

One of the most compelling chapters, “He Speaks Our Language,” confronts the age-old question: how does anyone discern God’s voice amid life’s noise? Guthrie tells of moments when divine messages came not as visions or booming declarations but as disruptive thoughts—foreign to her mind yet filled with peace. In one dark season, she recalls praying desperately for God to rescue her from heartbreak until a quiet inner voice said, “I am rescuing you.” Decades later, she saw those painful times as the very means of rescue. “This moment, this pain,” she writes, “is the path to freedom.”

She compares this to the intimacy between a mother and her newborn. Her daughter recognized Guthrie’s voice before birth—because they had been inseparable. So too, she explains, you recognize God’s tone through relationship, not intellect. The more time spent “doing life with him,” the more easily you distinguish his whisper from other voices—including your own self-doubt.

When You Can’t Pray

Guthrie is refreshingly honest about her limitations in prayer. “I start with good intentions,” she admits, “and end up organizing playdates in my head.” Her humor disarms guilt and reframes prayer not as performance but presence: “Prayer is successful if you simply show up.” Even sighs or tears, she says, qualify—citing Romans 8’s image of the Spirit praying “with groans too deep for words.”

She introduces what she calls “imaginative prayer”—borrowing from writer Shauna Niequist—the act of picturing loved ones at peace or envisioning herself held in divine stillness when words fail. In the chapter “Spooning with God,” she recounts learning to rest literally with God through meditation, wrestling her restless mind until presence replaced performance. “Rest,” she says, “is letting God do the rest.”

Sacred Listening

The second half of this section explores listening—to God, to Scripture, and to others. Guthrie revisits Psalm 23, the “Shepherd’s Psalm” she memorized as a child, tracing how its imagery matured with her. The green pastures and still waters that once seemed decorative now represent profound spiritual rest. Her night ritual of reciting those familiar verses anchors her in God’s nearness—a practical tool for readers who, like her, struggle with nighttime anxiety. “It’s far superior to counting sheep,” she jokes, yet adds reverently: “Counting grace.”

For Guthrie, presence is not mystical escapism but mindful participation in everyday reality. Whether praying names like Mister Rogers did, reflecting on Scripture, or simply taking “thirty seconds of silence,” she sees every act of attention as communion. Presence makes faith practical; love becomes tangible. “God,” she concludes, “is not a place we go. He’s a person who stays.”

If love and presence are how we receive God, praise is how we respond. In Part 3, Guthrie confronts a question many believers hesitate to ask: why does God seem to demand praise? Isn’t that cosmic ego? Her answer reframes worship entirely—it’s not for God’s benefit but ours. Gratitude, she argues, is the most reliable path to inner freedom.

Dressing for Joy

In “Garment of Praise,” she imagines red-carpet interviews reinterpreted through Isaiah’s vision of “a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair.” “Who are you wearing?” the reporters ask. Spiritually, her answer is clear: gratitude. Offering praise, she says, isn’t a heavenly applause line—it’s putting on strength. When you focus on what’s right, you wear joy; when you focus only on lack, you strip yourself bare. She calls it “God’s wardrobe for the weary.”

She tells the story of Joni Eareckson Tada, paralyzed as a teen, who built her life on one verse: “Give thanks in all circumstances.” Joni’s gratitude wasn’t denial of pain—it was the secret of her resilience. Guthrie draws a parallel: praise is “God-light,” the energy that powers faith when facts falter. “Wherever you are,” she writes, “if you want to instantly alter the atmosphere, praise him.”

Turning Our Eyes

In “Turn Your Eyes,” Guthrie confesses her struggle with anxiety—“a mountain to climb daily.” Her turning point came through Psalm 121: “I lift up my eyes to the hills—where does my help come from?” When she first hosted the TODAY show under public scrutiny, that verse was her lifeline. Looking up, literally and spiritually, she found peace. “Perspective,” she says, “is the birthday gift I ask for every year.”

Worship, she realizes, shifts our gaze from fear to faith. Her personal stories—recovering from a retinal injury, relearning to see the world’s beauty—become parables of perception. When you stop staring at problems and “turn your eyes upon Jesus,” life’s noise dims. Gratitude rewires sight.

Unsubscribing from the Inner Critic

In another favorite chapter, “Unsubscribing from Myself,” Guthrie revisits her old journals filled with guilt and self-reproach—the inner spam folder of unworthy thoughts. She reads her younger self’s fear that God would humiliate her for pride, realizing how much shame had masqueraded as humility. Through grace, she unsubscribes from self-condemnation. “I learned to trust God not because the terrible thing never happened,” she writes, “but because it did—and he was there.”

Praise, then, is the practice of remembering God’s fidelity. It’s gratitude as armor, perception as prayer. Guthrie ends this part quoting Psalm 22: “He inhabits the praises of his people.” So if we ever wonder where to find him, she says, “Look in your thankfulness.”

In Grace, Guthrie tackles the hardest truth of faith: that God’s mercy is unearned, unrepayable, and unconditional. Through stories of guilt, forgiveness, and awe, she demonstrates that grace—not shame—is what changes us from the inside out.

The River of Mercy

She begins with her mother’s childhood memory of nearly drowning in the Ohio River, defying her father’s warnings. Fearing punishment, she returned to find him waiting with open arms. “No discussion, no whipping,” Guthrie writes. “She was safe. She was loved. She was forgiven.” That image, she says, is the perfect picture of grace: God running toward us while we are still a long way off.

This teaching crescendos in her retelling of “The Mission,” the film where a penitent warrior drags a burden of armor up a mountain until the people he wounded cut it loose. Guthrie sees herself in that man: redeemed, not by effort or penance, but by mercy’s knife severing the rope. Grace, she concludes, isn’t earned—it’s endured.

Thou Changest Not

In “Thou Changest Not,” drawn from the old hymn “Great Is Thy Faithfulness,” Guthrie contrasts God’s constancy with human instability. “God may not change,” she confesses, “but I changest a lot.” Her humorous phrasing humanizes faith: perfection isn’t possible; persistence is. God’s character, not our performance, is the anchor of salvation. Instead of striving for divine approval, she suggests resting in the reality that “real change happens not through threat but through grace.”

Her honesty about shame resonates. In “Sin and Loathing,” she revisits her adolescence, confessing to a short-lived shoplifting phase. Through that story, she critiques religious cultures heavy on guilt but light on grace. Modern society, she warns, swings between denial of sin (“everything’s fine”) and merciless judgment (“cancel them forever”). Grace, she says, is the only real alternative: the courage to tell the truth about ourselves because we believe we’ll still be loved.

Rest and Mercy

“He Reclined,” a quiet standout, contrasts Guthrie’s past self—tormented by religious fear—with her matured realization that God’s voice never condemns; it restores. Like Jesus reclining at the Last Supper, divine correction comes in peace, never panic. True confession, she writes, is not “cosmic beatdown” but accountability wrapped in reassurance. That posture makes repentance restful, not fearful.

Grace’s fruit is mercy—and Guthrie says mercy is the “fast track to closeness with God.” When we accept forgiveness, we stop dragging our self-imposed burdens and become freer to forgive others. She quotes 2 Timothy: “He saved us not because of anything we have done but because of his own purpose and grace.” The purpose of grace, then, is relationship—nothing more and nothing less.

By the end of this section, Guthrie redefines holiness itself: not moral flawlessness but participation in mercy. “Fear always leaves out one crucial factor,” she writes. “The sweet, saving presence of God himself.” Grace ensures we are never alone, even when we fall short.

Part Five, Hope, confronts Guthrie’s hardest professional and philosophical questions: How do we keep believing when the world feels irredeemable? Working in daily news, she literally wakes up to tragedy—the “Overnight Note” that lists disasters and deaths. Hope, for her, isn’t naïve optimism; it’s defiant trust.

Choosing Hope Over Despair

Faced with relentless bad news, Guthrie admits to wondering whether faith might be “a fever dream.” But her conclusion is both logical and emotional: even if heaven were fiction, she’d still choose belief. “I’d rather be hopeful and wrong,” she writes, “than hopeless and right.” Like Viktor Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning, she argues that hope provides the only livable response to human suffering. Hopelessness amplifies pain; hope transforms it.

When God Doesn’t Stop Evil

In “What About Job?” Guthrie tackles the classic theological problem of suffering. Her conversation with Nelba Márquez-Greene, a mother who lost her child in the Sandy Hook shooting, anchors this reflection. Nelba’s “robust and gutsy” faith—born not from explanation but endurance—inspires Guthrie’s own theology: faith does not erase grief; it coexists with it. “Sometimes the only answer,” she writes, “is God himself.”

Borrowing from N. T. Wright and Tim Keller, she suggests that God allows—not causes—pain, because love cannot exist without freedom. Yet even our tragedy isn’t wasted; like Joseph’s betrayal, it can be “intended for good.” God’s mastery is transformation, not prevention.

God’s Presence in Our Pain

In “An Act of God,” she dismantles clichés like “God doesn’t give us more than we can handle.” Such phrases, though comforting, depict God as manipulative teacher. Instead, she insists: God doesn’t cause pain, but he never lets it be meaningless. Redemption—turning suffering into service or empathy—is always possible. This nuanced hope allows her to maintain belief without denying rage or sorrow.

Finally, in “Send Me Home,” Guthrie shares her admiration for the late pastor Timothy Keller’s peace at death. Quoting his last words—“I can’t wait to see Jesus”—she interprets them as relational rather than religious. Believers don’t meet a stranger after death; they reunite with a friend. Death, then, becomes another form of presence.

Through these stories, Guthrie defines hope as daily decision rather than fixed emotion. It is not brightness but stubborn faith that God is working both within and beyond the mess. “Because of the Lord’s great love,” she concludes, “we are not consumed.” Hope, like mercy, regenerates every morning.

In her final section, Purpose, Guthrie moves from reflection to responsibility. If mostly what God does is love us, then mostly what we can do is share that love. Purpose, she says, isn’t about achievement or fame but participation in divine generosity.

The Fragrance of the Gospel

As a shy teenager, Guthrie dreaded evangelism. She didn’t want to “witness” to classmates—a grammatical and existential horror. Only later did she realize that witnessing isn’t forcing belief but exuding it. Quoting 2 Corinthians, she calls believers “the fragrance of Christ.” You spread faith not through arguments but aroma. “We don’t need bullhorns and bumper stickers,” she quips. “Just the scent of kindness.”

This metaphor becomes a call to presence-based purpose. To be near God is to carry his scent—compassion, curiosity, tenderness—into workplaces, homes, and even studios. She admits that her own platform as journalist doesn’t make her ministry special; it makes it accountable. Wherever you are, she says, your influence begins with attention and ends with love.

Mostly What We (Can) Do

Her essay about the Mercy Ships doctors epitomizes this theology of participation. Watching their work with disfigured patients, she awoke one night haunted by the inequity of suffering: “How can they believe God loves them?” Then she saw the answer—when they feel love through us. “We are God’s plan A,” she writes. “He invites us into his work, not because he needs assistance but because he dignifies us.”

She confesses how difficult compassion can be in modern life. Hurrying past a homeless father one day, she later returned with food, realizing Christ would have sat down, not just dropped off lunch. Love’s calling, therefore, is not efficiency but presence—a recurring theme born anew as mission.

Communion and the Last Word

Her closing reflections, “Communion” and “The Last Word,” weave theology and autobiography together. Serving communion at her church for the first time, she is moved to see a mosaic of humanity come forward: confident, broken, young, old—each receiving grace. That image reframes her life’s work: humanity bound in love is the body of Christ itself. Purpose, then, is communal, not solitary.

In the final chapter, she identifies her calling with one word: share. As Oprah defines her purpose as “to be a sweet inspiration,” Guthrie distills hers more simply: to share God’s love. Every gift—talent, opportunity, platform—is for giving. Her vocational advice sounds spiritual and secular at once: “You cannot write yourself out of your destiny; God won’t let you.”

By closing with wonder, Guthrie circles back to where faith began—with awe. “The paradox of faith,” she quotes, “is that the God who amazes us is also amazed by us… God is taken by you.” Purpose is not grandiosity but gratitude. The last word of her book, fittingly, is the same as God’s first act: love.