The Quiet Ambition

Escaping Quiet Desperation (Adapted from The Quiet Ambition by Ryan Tinetti)

Hello!

My name is Tanner. I am an author, spoken word poet, and speaker. Every week I share a few hopeful poems, prayers, and reflections. If you enjoy the words I share, I’d love to have you support this ministry at the monthly, annual, or founding member level.

Today’s post is in support of my friend, Ryan Tinetti.
On November 18, 2025, Ryan will release his newest book, The Quiet Ambition (IVP). I had the privilege of reading and endorsing it—and I can’t recommend it enough.

Here’s my endorsement:

“In a world of constant motion and noise, Ryan P. Tinetti offers a refreshing invitation to a different way of living—one that leads not only to a deeper understanding of ourselves but also of God. The Quiet Ambition is a guiding light for those feeling restless and weary from life’s relentless demands, showing a path to true purpose and peace. I wish I had read this book years ago, but as Ryan reminds us, it’s never too late to ‘Make it your ambition to live quietly.’”

Pretty good, huh? 😉

There’s much I admire about Ryan—
his way with words,
his desire to live simply,
his devotion to God,
his kindness,
his quiet ambition.

Ryan reminds me that to make this life matter, I don’t need to chase more, but I can live quietly.

What a wonderful thing it is to trust that we do not need to live something loud to live something beautiful.

This invitation to quiet ambition allows us to walk in God’s presence in the ordinary moments of our daily life. And it is in the ordinary, beautiful moments that we get to experience unending hope and see what it means to live a life that matters beyond words.

I hope you’ll pick up a copy of my friend’s book.

It’s a good one.

Much love,

Tanner

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Adaptation from The Quiet Ambition by Ryan Tinetti

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Escaping Quiet Desperation
Adapted from The Quiet Ambition by Ryan Tinetti. ©2025 by Ryan Tinetti. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press. www.ivpress.com. 

On the Fourth of July, in the year of our Lord 1845, shouting distance from the “shot heard ‘round the world” that birthed the American revolution, as modern industry took hold and the fruits of Enlightenment ambitions thrummed and buzzed all around him, Henry David Thoreau moved into the woods.

In keeping with the nature of the holiday, he was staging a kind of protest. Drawing a line in the sand of existence, if you will (Jeffrey Cramer, Walden: A Fully Annotated Edition [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004], xviii). He had good reason to do so. While his writing often reached to exalted heights, Thoreau’s everyday life had fallen down in the dumps. After graduating from Harvard, he ran through a series of jobs: teacher, surveyor, pencil maker (the family business). Whispers about whether he would make something of himself were not unfounded.

More recently, Thoreau’s name had become a byword in his small Concord community. He’s famous as a naturalist now, but in 1844 a campfire gone horribly wrong turned into a wildfire that destroyed some three hundred acres of the last remaining virgin woodlands surrounding the town. Neighbors taunted him for years afterwards as the “woods-burner” (Cramer, Walden: A Fully Annotated Edition, 91).

Then there was the shadow of Henry’s brother and best friend, John. His first full day taking residence at Walden, July 5th, would have been John’s thirty-first birthday. Three years prior, however, John cut his finger sharpening a razor. Shortly thereafter, a lethal case of lockjaw set in, and in a matter of days John died a painful death cradled in Henry’s arms (Michael Sims, The Adventures of Henry Thoreau [New York: Bloomsbury, 2014], 164).

Thoreau therefore lodged his protest with existence by lodging in the woods. He was embarking on a quest to “live deliberately” and determine whether his life, already at twenty-eight so full of contradictory clues, might mean anything—or, he says, “If it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world” (David Thoreau, Walden, Oxford World Classics [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997], 83).

“Thoreau wanted to make his life matter,” says the great historian David McCullough. “That’s a very big lesson for all of us to keep in mind: to make your life matter. To walk off stage having done something that’s beneficial, encouraging, stimulating, or inspiring” (Ken Burns, producer, “Walden Film,” 17:25 [2017, Walden Woods Project], accessed March 12, 2024, walden.org/walden-film/). In doing so, Thoreau sought to counteract a grave threat. Given some of the trials he had already encountered, it was surely a threat that he sensed lurking at his own door. A keen people-watcher, though, he detected its presence pervading society:

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind (Thoreau, Walden, 9).

Quiet desperation. A bone-chilling phrase, that. Thoreau doesn’t bother to define it, and maybe he doesn’t need to. I’ve come to think of it as the slow seeping of hope. The Latin desperare means literally to be “devoid of hope.” But quiet desperation doesn’t set in with one decisive step, like the damned passing beneath the gates of Dante’s Inferno: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” It’s more like quicksand: you gradually seep into its clutches, inch by unconscious inch, until it’s too late to escape. Or as C. S. Lewis describes “the safest road to Hell’’ in The Screwtape Letters: the quicksand of quiet desperation claims its victims by means of “the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts” (C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters [San Francisco: Harper, 2001], 61).

I believe that quiet desperation sets in when there’s a disconnect between desires and reality, ambitions and actualities. As a pastor, I have occasion to conduct marriage counseling with couples. One thing that I warn them about is what I call the Zone of Frustration. The Zone of Frustration, I say, is the chasm that opens up when there’s a gap between the expectations you have of your spouse and the person that he or she actually is (for better or for worse, you might say). When that chasm grows too great, mere frustration can morph into quiet desperation, and you lose hope for your relationship. This can happen in your relationship with your spouse, but I believe that it can also happen in your relationship to your life—and, indeed, to God. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

In Thoreau’s day, he witnessed quiet desperation in the frantic toil of businessmen and the beleaguered forbearance of housewives. He observed it in people who were passing through their days the way they passed by the countryside in the newfangled railcars. “Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things,” he writes. “They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York” (Thoreau, Walden, 48).

Are things any better in the twenty-first century? To the contrary, it seems that quiet desperation has spread like a river that has overrun its banks. If it was seeping in when Thoreau moved to Walden, now it’s spilling over every plain and plateau. There’s barely a solid place to stand.

In 1 Thessalonians 4:11-12, Saint Paul has encapsulated the shape of everyday hope in these simple postures:

• Live quietly

• Tend your own business

• Work with your hands

• Walk gracefully toward outsiders

To be clear, this isn’t some Prayer of Jabez–esque “secret” squirreled away in the attic of holy writ. (If you aren’t sure what I’m talking about here, you can be grateful you missed part of early 2000s Christian subculture.) It is rather a neat nutshell of biblical teaching and provides a structure for our argument. It’s a summary statement of themes that resound throughout the Scriptures.

The quiet ambition is about finding the largeness in littleness. Or to paraphrase Mother Teresa’s famous dictum, it’s about doing little labors with large love. It is more a matter of calling than climbing, digging deep than going big. Its role models are Eugene Peterson and Wendell Berry, not Joel Osteen and Steve Jobs. This unambitious ambition is a way of being in the world that weds together conviction with contentment, drive with depth. And it can be an antidote to the threat that Thoreau identified, a way to escape the quicksand of quiet desperation by leading quiet lives of hope.

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Bio: Ryan P. Tinetti is a pastor who now serves as a professor of practical theology at Concordia Seminary (Saint Louis). He is the author of Preaching by Heart and writes the regular column “The Preacher’s Toolbox” on 1517.org. Prior to his call to Concordia Seminary, Ryan served for fourteen years in parish ministry. Ryan lives with his wife, Anne, and their four children in St. Louis on the campus of the seminary.

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