Why We Need Spiritual Friendship On this stormy nor’easter evening, I keep thinking about our current Nautilus class and the classes that have come before. With memories of our inaugural retreat just a few weeks ago, I am struck again by how people who arrived as near strangers can, in a matter of two days, turn to embrace each other as if they’d journeyed together through life’s vicissitudes for years.… Read More »The Friends Who Help Us See
She does not look like I expect. Adorned in white. Her posture strong, her gaze confident. She looks sophisticated, elegant, beautiful. She carries a sense of importance. Hagar does not look like I envision. Owned by somebody else. Her body not freely given. Destitute and alone in the wilderness. She is not what I envision. But perhaps she is closer to who God sees. His posture surprises me. There is an ease… Read More »Changing the Lens: When Work Doesn’t Have to Prove Worth
In sixth grade, home sick with chicken pox, I wrote my first complete computer game. I was twelve, feverish, and I could not stop. The act of building something interactive out of words (computer code) felt like the most alive I had ever been. Like I was reflecting back to my Creator some tiny mote of what had been formed into me. Then I spent the next twenty-five years unlearning… Read More »Step by Step. Not All At Once.
At the start of my GreenHouse journey, I knew my dream would involve life-giving creativity, connectedness, and healing, but I had so many potential callings and creative ideas that I felt overwhelmed by the prospect of choosing one thing to focus on. Beneath that was a deeper question of identity: Who am I? By what dreams, pursuits, or habits can I define myself? How can I consolidate all these parts… Read More »Made to Play
If you asked someone to recall a moment when they felt really, truly alive, they might describe it with words like ecstatic, euphoric, awakening, flow, vision. Like the mundane and commonplace take on new and more animated meaning around them. That is to say, they don’t alter reality or bend the world toward themselves, but rather feel their inner person change and rise up with renewed hope in their current… Read More »Stirring the Imagination
I have learned two main things through this process, first is that ideas do not form and come alive at the speed which I would like, and second that the best way to go through the process of forming and putting a container around an idea is within community. Goldenwood’s intentional slowing down at the beginning of this process was so helpful, it forced me to hit the breaks on… Read More »Unlocking Your Creative Process
For we walk by faith, not by sight,For years I strived to run with all my might.Grasping for control, held tightly by fear,Overthinking every idea—Was that me, or was that God I hear? I reached a point of surrender,A realization: this dream I have, I cannot do alone.Down on my knees I begged God,Bring me the right people—I can’t do this on my own. And in that moment, everything began… Read More »For We Walk By Faith
I am one of the lucky ones. When I was four, I said I wanted to be a veterinarian. I set the goal and then began doing the studies and the activities that would lead to that outcome. I graduated from Cornell University in 2005 with a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine, and it was one of the best days of my life. It’s been 20 years, and I still find… Read More »From Nebulous to Necessary
Cultivating an embodied human life in our harried technocratic age seems to be a sizable challenge, with rapidly increasing proportions. Various cultural commentators are voicing their concerns and questions online and in print, sharing their hopes and apprehensions in the midst of accelerating technological innovations. Many offer life-hack tactics and “best life” strategies for negotiating the potentials, promises, and pitfalls within our hyper-connected social media spheres. From my limited sampling,… Read More »Reviving Patronage
The word fallow comes from the land. In ancient agricultural practice, a field left fallow was not abandoned. It was a resting field, deliberately set aside from production so that the soil could recover what cultivation had depleted. The farmer who fallows the land was participating in an ancient rhythm and wisdom: fruitfulness requires rest, abundance follows emptiness, and the land cannot give what it has not first received. In… Read More »The Imperative of Fallowing
