I want businesses and government systems and certainly churches to be led more and more often by women. I believe that men and women would both benefit from it in dozens of ways. But if that’s going to happen, I think we have to declare a princess-free zone. No tiaras, no Girls Gone Wild, no pretending we can’t carry things. No fairytales, no waiting around to be rescued, and absolutely no playing dumb.
Sometimes it helps to get outside our problems and stick our fingers into someone else’s problems for a while.
It’s so easy to think that because you can’t do something extraordinary, you can’t do anything at all. It’s easy to decide that if you can’t overhaul your entire life in one fell swoop, then you might as well just do nothing. We started where we could, with what we had. I hope it’s just the beginning for us.
Risotto is one of those dishes you just have to try a few times yourself, to teach yourself the moves and sounds and smells and textures. This is a guide map, but kind of a rough and tattered one.
As a host, you set the tone, and you set it right away. It’s so easy to get carried away with an ambitious menu, and then spend the whole night flinging things around your kitchen and being annoyed with your guests for having the audacity to try to talk with you. Terrible plan. Everyone would rather have a simpler meal and a happier host.
This is hospitality at its core. This is the beat of my heart: to experience grace and nourishment, and to offer it, one in each hand, to every person I meet – grace and nourishment. You can rest. You don’t have to starve.
But it isn’t about perfection, and it isn’t about performance. You’ll miss the richest moments in life – the sacred moments when we feel God’s grace and presence through the actual faces and hands of the people we love – if you’re too scared or too ashamed to open the door.
We live in a world that values us for how fast we go, for how much we accomplish, for how much life we can pack into one day.
I believe in mining through the darkest seasons in our lives and choosing to believe that we’ll find something important every time.
My impulse is always toward work, pushing, guilt, rushing. But what restores me, what allows me to interact well with my family, what allows me to get good writing done, is almost always the opposite. And I’m finding that when I practice things like rest, grace, peace, prayer, self-care and slowness, the work gets done just the same. Well, just the same except less crying and less apologizing to my family. I’ll take it.
Your pain doesn’t define you. Your failures don’t define you. Your createdness defines you. Christ in his goodness defines you”.
Now I know that in the same way I’ve always believed God’s Spirit dwells deeply in this world, it also dwells deeply in me. I’ve known that, cognitively, but my life spoke otherwise. Now I know that the best thing I can offer to this world is not my force or energy, but a well-tended spirit, a wise and brave soul. My.
Stop. Right now. Remake your life from the inside out.
The problem is that the worldview I’ve chosen has melted like butter. I had a plan, and the plan is gone.
And also that God’s will has a lot more to do with inviting us to become more than we previously have been than about getting us to one very specific destination. God’s will, should we choose to engage in it, will generally feel like surgery, rooting out all the darkness and fear we’ve come to live with.
IT’S EASY to long for nothing but good news and carefree days, but a full life includes the broken and dark and difficult parts, too. Thank God for walking with you in the seasons of heartbreak.
Many of us who have found ourselves to be useful in Christian service have found ourselves unable, if we’re honest, to connect with God any other way. We do for him, instead of being with him. We become soldiers, instead of brothers and sisters and daughters and sons. This is dangerous, damaging territory, and I’ve spent too much time there. These.
I don’t make our bed in the morning, standing firm on the adolescent belief that there’s no sense in doing something you’re just going to undo at the end of the day.
That’s why travel is so important, among other reasons: to get far enough away from our everyday lives to see those lives with new clarity. When you’re literally on the other side of the world, when you’re under the silent sea, watching a bright, silent world of fish and coral, when you’re staring up at a sky so bright and dense with stars it makes you gasp, it’s in those moments that you begin to see the fullness of your life, the possibility that still prevails, that always prevails.
When you travel, and when you read, you are not actually alone, but rather surrounded by other worlds entirely, the footsteps and phrases of whole other lives keeping you company as you go.