Articles on Prayer
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Nurturing Spiritual Directors as Contemplative Leaders
On November 11, 2022, the Shalem Board approved Vision 2025: Our Ongoing Hope. The Vision offers six guiding principles for attending wholly to one’s spiritual practice while traveling through what might seem like the barren wilderness of ordinary life. As Director of Shalem’s Nurturing the Call: Spiritual Guidance Program, I find that the fifth guiding…
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Solitude’s Gift of Grace
Too often these days, I am overwhelmed with sadness and anger and a sense of not being enough. I think many of us struggle with this. It’s easy to feel this when we live in a world where so much is broken. Suffering and injustice surround us, and we feel powerless to change it. Communication…
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Befriending Good Friday Darkness
While staying alone at a friend’s woodland cabin one Good Friday night, I turned off the lights and stepped outside for a walk. My eyes needed a few minutes to adjust until silhouettes of bushes, trees, and clumps of weeds emerged from the blackness. Darkness changes even the familiar, and while I knew where the…
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Lenten Spiritual Direction with My Self
Almost every day, rising from sleepI so casually hop online, and I am startled awake again, alarmed.Ukraine. Iran. Myanmar. Tyre. Ethan. Madison. Xana. Kaylee. The Clancy children. Just the recent headlines.Their names and faces are countless, really.Abuse. Torture. War. Trauma. Sex-trafficking. Homicide. Betrayals of every stripe.It dawns on me- I’m in an actual horror movie.…
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Rooted in God
While I was growing up in a small town in Southwest Minnesota, my most trusted confidant was… a tree. There must have been something about this young tree that drew me in. I remember a few notches at eye level that reminded me of eyes and a mouth, but, above all, I remember I was…