How do you know when it’s time to be silent? (I want to acknowledge that we are a people living after 2020-2021. Our experience of solitude and silence may be influenced by factors related to the pandemic: multiple lockdowns, social distancing, loss of consistent communal gathering, etc. Silence may not feel as centering as it…
How were you taught to pray? I wasn’t so much directly instructed on how to as much as I watched how others prayed at church, before meals, and often before class. Spontaneous prayer was a frequent choice and sometimes the Psalms were used. People usually spoke from their heart and used common phrases of gratitude…
Spiritual direction (SD) is a term for something we look for all the time: companionship. In various forms, companionship is essential for physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual flourishing. Isolation in any season of life, such as a period of transition, parenting, grief or illness, or evolving faith, can be painful. Spiritual direction is a formal…
The peak of my conservative, evangelical education included several weeks at a Christian apologetics summer camp while in high school and later as a freshman in college. Those weeks included hiking in Colorado, eating my weight in delicious frozen custard, and learning the conservative evangelical script for hot-button political issues. As the years went on…
There is always somewhere to be, someone to talk to, something to read or do, especially with the expansive grip the internet and smart phones have in many people’s lives. The amount of information we consume each day can be overwhelming. In the busyness of life it’s very easy to find ourselves in disorder. This…