Letter From the Editor
As our writers take on the topic of The Contemplative Life this month, ask yourself how you can be more intentional about your soul care today.
What Is a Contemplative Life?
Contemplation involves being still, or perhaps walking leisurely through nature, turning off the music or the podcast, and spending time focusing on God and his Word and what it means.
Solitude and the Contemplative Life
Our words have power. When we use words, we are in control and control others. But if we stay silent, who has the power? Who has the control? Humans are desperate for control and forget that God is always in control.
Learning to Embrace Contemplative Practices as Connections to Healing
Reading wasn’t even an option. For someone who longs to always be learning and engaging, that felt strange. However, I knew my body and mind needed the quiet. During those first few days, I lay in silence. But God’s whispering voice spoke loudly into it.
Interesting, Strange Details
When we go through life curiously exploring all the spaces God has given us to wander, and we pay attention to the details left for us to notice and find, we can experience the “continual discovery of Christ in new and unexpected places”
The Heart’s Humble Quieting
When our heart posture aligns with his, beautiful moments of relationship arise. But we must first be open and willing to hear from him.
Marking Patterns of Grace with Stones, Medallions, and Keys
I tell the story of my keys hoping to find my way in the challenges that are surely ahead, and also clearing the path for my peers and their families and friends. And really, aren’t we all longing to be “transformed by the renewal of our minds?”
Letter From the Editor
Dear Friends, I don’t really consider myself to have a green thumb. I love plants and keep many around my house—as long as I can keep my cats from chewing on them—and our yard is filled with foliage. But every once in awhile, something dies, and I don’t have a clue why. One such plant…
Flawless Tender Bloom of Reconciliation
The original Plan—perfect but rejected. Sending hope cascading like a slinky toy down a staircase, coiling, tumbling, coiling, tumbling landing in a tangled heap. The same Plan—a different approach set into motion, to reclaim, and restore hope, unfurling it from earth to far beyond the stars. Unfolding, revealing year after year, a tender plant, growing…
Resurrection Days
I was on a hike in a Florida nature preserve when my friend pointed out trees whose limbs were wrapped with brown, shriveled, lifeless leaves. “These are Pleopeltis polypodioides, commonly called resurrection ferns. They can survive up to 100 years without water, and revive after a single exposure to moisture,” he explained. We celebrate Resurrection…
Remember
“Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you” Ephesians 5:14 (NIV). I’ve heard the question “How is Christ’s death and resurrection affecting your everyday life?” And I wonder, Is it? When I think of the phrase “resurrection life” I think of the new struggles I face as a believer. I…
Waiting for God to Work
My brother knocked on my bedroom door at our childhood home. “It’s happening,” he said. I jumped out of bed, threw on a sweatshirt, and ran downstairs to my parents’ room. All my siblings and I had moved away from home years before. But that week, we’d returned to the house with the cedar siding…
This Resurrected Life
Staring at Death’s Face She gazed down the way, searching for his familiar form. Surely he’ll be here, she whispered, willing her words to make it so. “Come quickly,” she’d said. “Your friend is sick.” Two days. It’d been two days since she sent word. Where was he? Didn’t he care? Her pace quickened as…
Hope in the Winter of Waiting
“If you walk along here,” he said, tracing the tip of his pen along the shoreline, “you should be able to see the seals lying out on the sandbar. And here,” the pen stopped, “there’s a little shack people have assembled over the years. We always point it out, but some recent guests told us…