Scrolling Facebook, a devotional-type post with a fire-side-vibe obeyed my thumbs by rotating upward. The author, Levend “Lev” Montgomery, wasn’t a “friend” as we understand that term in our unique cultural moment: often distant from those with whom we share frequent “connections;” but also interiorly reached by strangers at depths only the Lord can know. While an algorithm may have mechanistically sent his writing to my feed, what made me pause and read a perfect stranger’s words?
God only knows.
All I know is that the first devotional I paused to read made me still inside. The way you feel when doing a hundred-foot scuba dive. A wall of water too big to see above makes you feel cocooned like babies must inside the womb. You hear your breath and your thoughts and very little else. The pressure at that depth prevents you from a rapid return to life’s usual atmosphere; the unspeakable beauty prevents you from wanting to. When I was done, I forwarded it to a few people with these words: “I found this guy on Facebook. I have no idea who he is, but I feel God speaking to me through his writing.” This went on for a while. Pause. Read. Still. Curious. Forward.
"Who is this guy," they inevitably asked.
Attempts to figure that out resulted in very little return. He was involved in real estate in Michigan. He had a Substack [a digital writers’ platform where people go to read more serious writers’ work]. When he announced the release of a devotional book - Before the Day - I gladly made a prerelease order. When it landed on my front porch, I couldn’t put it down. The dedication page included family "who lived beside the silence before the words came and shared the hidden years from which this work was born." Which made me even more curious. Surely, this writing wasn’t informed by ease. Certainly, this depth involved the labor of intense pushing through the contractions of life.
Lev appeared [to me at least] as a non-fiction example of Ernest Hemingway’s iceberg theory of fictional character development. Hemingway believed that a reader would correctly assume the deeper details of a character’s life from the limited parts of the story the author chose to reveal only if that author knew, in exacting detail, the story of the made-up characters’ lives. In Hemingway’s words:
“The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.”
Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, Chapter 16, last paragraph.
Hemingway omitted what he knew because he wanted to engage the reader in the act of knowing.
A few things made me risk being seen as a weirdo in my attempt to connect with Lev. First, in a rare vulnerable post, he shed some light on the reason he shared little of his personal life. He’d decided to keep his private life private. Period, full stop. He wanted to frame his words around God’s promises and mankind’s place in the thick of that hope. The details of his personal life might be used to skew the message. Second, his rare vulnerable post became less rare when his neighbor was found dead months after drawing his last breath. Someone dead in his neighborhood and nobody noticed? It rattled his cage. How much of “neighboring” involves the risk of deeper knowing and being known? In so many ways, Lev had moved into the neighborhood of his many readers. He wasn’t a fictional character; he was a real person starting to enter the lives of other real people in meaningful ways.
The third came the way most movements in my personal life come, a nudge from above. The day after terribly disappointing news, I read a Lev Montgomery devotional on Philippians 1:6 aloud to two friends when my tear shut-off valves got stuck. “The incompleteness you feel this morning is not evidence of God's absence. It is evidence of His ongoing presence. He is still working. And He will not stop until the work is done.” [Before the Day: A 90-Day Devotional for Souls Being Quietly Formed, pp 77-80].
And that was it. I needed to say thank you, and not only to God, but to Lev. So, in the ridiculous way that only the Lord can script, I am not writing today from the cell of a woman convicted of stalking, but from the desk of a writer who had the privilege of interviewing a man responding to a nudge to “neighbor” those joining him on his daily writerly faith walk.
Perhaps the best frame for Lev’s personal story is one he introduced in a writing titled The Four Corners of Existence, a room where he wakes daily. Corner one, often thick with echoes, holds the past. He sees Job there refusing his friends’ invitation to see pain as punishment or suffering as an invitation to guilt. The past didn’t destroy Job, it repositioned him in a way he could see God revealing Himself. The God who met Lev in a past that should have broken him is the same God who stands in his corner morning by morning when he wakes. The past isn’t his prison; it’s redemption corner.
The foundation of his past includes four grandparents born one generation away from slavery in South Carolina. Growing families and economic opportunities led both sets of grands to the Bronx in the 1950’s and 60’s. His paternal grands went from farm life in SC to owning a large multi-family boarding house across from a huge public park in South Bronx.
“My grandparents had 12 kids. They lived on the main level of a boarding house. Seniors and veterans lived upstairs. You can't have that many kids and avoid navigating hard stuff. Domestic issues. Addiction. Mental health. Death. It didn't matter how messy it got; my grandparents endured with grace. They understood their biblical responsibility to their children no matter how old they or their kids got. Through strong faith in Christ, and healthy boundaries, they repeatedly forgave and opened their home. They were a picture of grace.” If there is a corner of that boarding house that sends Lev directly to redemption’s corner, it is the front room. “It didn't matter what hell was breaking loose they would find ways to get people into the front room around the piano. They built bridges through music, singing hymns, sharing food, fellowship. We experienced genuine concern and love for one another there."
His mom’s parents had large families too. Ben, one of six sibs, became a union doorman at an upscale apartment in Manhattan. Kate, one of four, worked in a factory for a time and raised their kids. To give an idea of just how large the family was, nearly forty percent of the congregation where Kate worshiped was made up of her blood relatives and others who had migrated from the same area to the Bronx. The family was extremely close.
"Kate was practical in the way she loved. Like an usher pointing to a seat. More bottom line.More matter of fact. She said things like: 'Get organized. You gotta do what you gotta do.'"
Lev’s parents grew up together in the same Bronx neighborhood. At six or seven years old, his mom lost her foot to an infection from a metal spring that pierced through her skin while jumping on a bed. Life as an amputee didn’t define her though. Her love of fashion led her to open a retail clothing business in east Harlem. She transitioned to a 20-year stint as the secretary to several bank executives.
Lev’s dad was mentored in his teens along with other inner-city kids by Jerry L. King who taught them to play basketball while riding… wait for it… unicycles. When the circus invited the kids to travel and perform, King formed The Charles Riders (known today as The King Charles Troupe) and off they went to become the first all-African American act in Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey history.
After years of travel performance, he returned full time to the Bronx and married Lev’s mom. The marriage ended a few short years later in divorce when his dad turned to destructive behaviors to cope with feelings of inadequacy. The movement from the love and admiration of audiences to manual labor made him question his worth.
“Later in life, my dad would drive us past a garbage can close to our randparents' house and say, 'this is where God saved my life.' He'd bought a bottle of whiskey intending to guzzle it. After a swig, he looked at his shaking hand and decided to toss it in the garbage.”
While he lived with his mom and was co-parented by his dad, both sets of grandparents had a major role in raising him while his parents worked.
“I had night terrors as a kid. I was afraid to get out of bed and go to my mom's room because my half-brother's dad was verbally abusive. I was a nervous kid. Full of fear and anxiety. I hid it because I didn't want to put my mom in conflict between two men.”
While he didn’t understand what it meant to have a relationship with God, he remembers a night when he hid a Bible under his pillow and prayed because the fear was so overwhelming.
“It was the night I first had the feeling of the presence of God. I felt a hand on me. Like a presence letting me know I wasn't alone. The fear left.”
While most of his neighborhood friends went to public school, his parents sent him to a smaller Christian school from first to fourth grade. There he experienced order and discipline and some of his own gifts and limitations. He loved reading and writing and penned stories just for fun. But he also had problems with math and didn’t know how to ask for help when he struggled.
"Even though the school was Christian, teaching about what it meant to be loved and formed by God wasn't part of the curriculum. There were Bible tracts about 'going to hell if you don't believe this,' but how God finds and forms you? It wasn't discussed. Much of what I gleaned about faith from my grandparents and mom were more caught than taught."
Fifth grade brought him back to his neighborhood friends in public school, but it also pulled him away from any real sense of order or authority. The school was filled with children from different ethnic backgrounds, and the peer pressure was intense. Classmates pushed him to curse, asked if he was from Africa, hazed him as the new kid, and picked fights. He had his first fistfight in fifth grade and was introduced to destructive behavior such as graffiti. He wasn’t a bad kid, but the lack of order, combined with his longing to belong and the pressure to follow the crowd, began to shape something in him. Junior high, a mile and a half away, filled with prostitutes, drug dealers, pimps, and people living with mental illness.
“We always traveled in groups. There was safety in numbers.”
By high school, his longing for belonging made him want to follow his friends to the school they were attending – one that required strong math skills.
“I ended up at the High School of Graphic Communication Arts instead where we learned desktop publishing, art, photography, story-boarding, printing press, sketching. It drew out my gifts. A play I wrote in high school was actually performed off Broadway. I can look back now and see how God had His hand on that choice.”
High school went well for Lev until about junior year. His subway commute to the Hell’s Kitchen section of NY was rough. Most kids in his school were from a different borough. He not only longed to belong, he felt a growing need for safety. While there were gangs in the school intent on doing harm, there were other groups called crews that formed brotherhoods to watch each other’s backs, listen to music, and hang out. They weren’t saints by any measure, skipping school and getting into mischief; but unlike gangs they weren’t intent on harm.
When his crew faced pressure to merge with larger crews for greater protection, things went out of control quickly. He started to learn about which groups hated others. About street beefs. About ideologies. When the crews in the five boroughs were alerted to a potential rumble with a notoriously hated group, Lev brought a pool cue for protection. He used tape to wrap his loose change to the top. While they were waiting to see what was going to happen, a kid asked if he could have it. The kid ran away with it when half the police force showed up and started arresting kids with weapons. Lev had none. They let him go. As he and others headed home on the subway, the police boarded the train and arrested them. Apparently, someone else used the cue to hit someone.
"I didn't know what I was being arrested for. I spent 48 hours in jail. My parents scraped up enough money for me to go home. A public defender took my case. It took a long time. At the pretrial, the judge called the prosecution's case weak. The trial never happened. Graphics arts school was over. The whole thing was terrifying."
He applied to a special school designed to give troubled kids a second chance. They were looking for kids with a glimmer of hope. Lev had one. He graduated and got into a Division-1 college in Michigan.
“I didn't have the academic foundation to make it there. I needed mentors that were closer than 600 miles away. Someone to guide me. I had no idea how to ask for help.”
And while his stint at the school was short, he holds that transition with a sort of wonder and awe because it was there that he met his future wife Natalie and there where he witnessed reconciliation between his parents:
“They were dropping me off at the school. My dad looked at my mom and said, 'I had nothing to do with this. This is because of you.' I watched him humble himself and celebrate her sacrifices. I watched her let go of bitterness. It must have been so hard for them to get me to that point. I was the first in the family to go to college.”
Lev stayed in Michigan and decided to take personal responsibility for his one ridiculous life. He got jobs where slowly he found mentors and grew in discipline.
"It was a major restaurant chain where I learned what it means to serve people the right way. They invested in me. They taught me that we were ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen. They shaped me into a person who didn't just know how to say hello but also took pride in excellence. For the first time, I was promoted and recognized for my work and leadership.”
Natalie, studying to be a teacher, finally wrote him a letter telling him he needed to step it up if they were going to be able to make it together long term. He thrived at a major retailer in NY but couldn’t stay away from Nat so he humbled himself, started again from scratch in Michigan, and married his love. After his son was born, Lev got his real estate license.
“This is when I met God personally. A mayoral candidate invited me to a community beautification day. I showed up to clean overgrown graves. When I got down on my knees to pull weeds from a grave, I heard the Holy Spirit in an audible voice ask, 'how will YOU be remembered?' In that moment, I knew God was connecting with me personally.”
Lev Montgomery
He felt compelled to go to church but he didn’t want to talk to anybody or be harangued for money. When he started to pine for mentors, he joined a men’s bible study. Leaving service one day, a man walked up to him and said, "you are going to help me bring Pontiac back like Ezekiel." It freaked Lev out. He was a pastor who saw the urban city of Pontiac, Michigan as a valley of dry bones that needed Christ's love. The Pontiac pastor mentored Lev; and Lev served the pastor like an armor bearer would, praying with/for him. Helping with men’s ministry. Taking over as the campus food manager overseeing hundreds of weekly meals. He studied God's Word, learned inductive bible study and took ministry/leadership cohorts. Lev moved when the pastor moved to another church and eventually became an ordained elder.
Life changed when he felt convicted about ignoring his writing gift. When he wrote a series that went viral, he set out to create a formation community called The Vanguard full of individuals who want to lead the way in being formed by Scripture. His Substack includes:
Morning Mastery, a daily devotional for the space before life's noise begins.
The Plumb Line, a monthly essay on how a Christian thinks, speaks and acts as a public citizen when the surrounding culture rewards outrage.
The Hearth, a weekly work about family formation for anyone tending a household who wants faith to live in the ordinary rooms of life.
After Hours with God, for the one awake at midnight when defenses are down and fears grow loud.
In all his writing, Lev seems to be issuing a kind of invitation to us. An invitation to command the surface of life to “be low.”
An invitation to return again and again to the One who is forming us below the surface where nobody else can see.
"The work is slow," he cautions.
"And the work is sure," he affirms.
"And it is not ours to complete," he redirects.
"It belongs to God who began it," he rejoices.
Amen? Amen!
OUR OCTOBER MISSION:
If you are receiving Mission Packs in the mail, find the neon green sticker that says "Core Return ______" in your pack. Put it in a spot where you can see it for the next 30 days. Notice where your core viscerally returns again and again for peace, stability, calm, truth, guidance, and hope.
Find one formation tool that will move you to the Lord once daily.
At the end of 30 days, fill in the blank on the sticker. Where do you want your core to go automatically?
