Barefoot & Preaching is a syndicated monthly column in The Catholic Register.

Steps…and the growth of adult seasons
Steps have featured prominently on my social media feeds in the last week, as back to school pictures get posted. I love the glimpse into the lives of all the kids and teens, eager and annoyed, performing and resisting the annual tradition. I love the schools and the streets, busses and front steps in the background. There are so many stories behind the photos; I can feel the courage and hope that lives under the images.
I miss the routines of my nineteen years of returning to school in the fall. There was comfort for me in knowing that grade ten would come after nine, and third year would follow second. Adulthood offers so many choices, and once I choose a path, it takes some effort to take a different turn. The navigation moves inward. What lies behind us shapes so much of how we will face what lies ahead.
I asked my husband to take my porch picture in the spring when I finished knitting a sweater. The photo represents five years of re-learning a skill my grandma and mom taught me in childhood. The front step is the place I call home, a symbol of the many places and people who have shaped me.
As I walk beside these incredible growing kids, I am increasingly aware of all the steps I have taken and the ones I have stumbled on. It takes courage to recognize patterns and (mis)steps that serve me well and ones that do not. To be and become who I actually am. A lot of uncovering what the comfort of routines and the standard path hid from me.
Richard Wagamese writes in Embers: “I no longer want to be resilient. I don’t want to simply bounce back from things that hurt me or cause me pain….The first step toward genuine healing…was when I came to trust and believe that there was a beyond. Now I reach for beyond every day, in every encounter, in every circumstance. I seek to go where I have never travelled. I wake with the vision of a purposeful day, filled with adventures and teachings. Then I take the first step and try to make it Beyond”(108).
Adulthood invites us into charting a unique path beyond ourselves through many repetitive and familiar seasons. There are fewer road marks and rites of passage. We might be wearing the same clothes or sitting on the same chair on the porch. Our steps wear a familiar path to and from all our usual spots. Making a change usually just shifts us from one well-worn route to another. The adventure happens in the ordinary miracle of seeing the same thing with new eyes.
I do not want to become a “best version” of myself. True growth is not found in the constant flow of external feedback. I want to see myself clearly, to love and be loved as I am, with the hard edges worn off by stepping faithfully toward love.
The carefully chosen first day outfits, faces full of character. Give me more of the snapshots in time that chronicle who we are.
Too many adults resist being captured on the camera, shy away from seeing ourselves reflected back as the world sees us. But here we are, growing and changing, becoming. Each passing year, we have the opportunity to step toward who we are so that we can connect more authentically with each other and the world beyond ourselves.
Who is standing in the front step picture of you today? What adventures lay before you? What wisdom has been won in the last year? Which lessons seem to be pressing on you from beyond where you are right now? What courage will be needed for the next steps? What hope dares to whisper?
As I child, I remember aching to grow up so the world would be clearer and I could do what I wanted. The world is not so much clearer barely this side of forty, but I do have the opportunity to reflect on what I want, who I want to be, and how I want to respond to the beauty and brokenness of the world. It is nothing like I imagined growing up would be, and it is – every step – breathtaking.

Riding waves with grace
Every summer, I wait and hope for our plans to cooperate with the weather and give us a day or two on the lake with (my parents’ beautiful) boat. We need the sunshine to keep us warm enough and the wind to stay mild enough that we can pull the tube behind the boat. The driver and the wind work together to make waves, and the riders delight at the efforts to stay on or fall in. On these rare and perfect days, I might be the biggest kid of all.
Riding waves is one of my favourite ways to play. I love the heat on my face, the wind in my hair, the cool spray of water, the anticipation of the bumps, and the thrill of holding on. I even love falling off. All the world’s worries fall away. Introducing my kids and then enjoying the rides with them is one of the best parts of parenting.
All this joy takes effort for me. I have to remind myself to loosen the muscles in my face and jaw and shoulders. To hold on with a loose and easy grip. To move with the waves instead of resisting them. I speak aloud the reminder that if I am tired, it is okay to let go and let the life jacket hold me up and the boat circle back. The kids delight in retelling the stories of my falling in.
This summer, I am trying to apply the same joy to riding the waves of life. The waves in my life have a lot of variety. Small ripples flow out from missing shoes when we are trying to leave the house. Intense choppy wakes follow teen attitudes and parental missteps, with a fairly quick settling period. Health challenges send a steady but unpredictable pattern of waves that can rock the boat significantly.
My (unrealistic and illogical) expectation for smooth waters often gets in the way of riding these waves with joy and grace. It takes the more effort to face these waves in life, but the skills are transferable. I remember, first, that waves are part of the experience of living, and can even be fun. I have a lot of experience, skills and support that can help me face these waves with grace. Relaxing into the experience works better than worrying and feeding anxieties.
As moments unfold in real-life rough waters, I can loosen my grip and consciously relax my body. I can speak aloud the things that are true. I can anticipate and appreciate the moments of rest between bumps. It is a miracle to marvel at the way the sun hits the water, even as the wind tosses me around and unsettles me.
Perhaps most importantly, I can hold on to letting go as a beautiful thing.
It is okay to be knocked over and in by a wave. I have survived each and every one that life has thrown at me so far. When I face one that threatens to do me in, I love a Creator who has conquered death. I can be assured that there is more life on the other side of any wave. And the falling is always just the opening or middle lines of a story about my rising.
Just like at the beach, there is no authorized panel of judges in my life waiting to give me a score or find me unworthy. There is only the memories and joy, middle aged aches and learning on the other side of the waves. It is not only okay, but in fact the point, to enjoy the ride.
When I lay down and let go into God, I have never met criticism – only tenderness and compassion. My experience of the divine has been constant presence in the crests and the valleys of the waves. From the tube behind the boat to my snowboard, and from parenting to the boardroom, I am learning that it is possible to ride waves with grace and joy.
May the waves be accompanied by sunshine as often as possible. May I look out for the boats and riders that may need me and trust they will watch for me. And may I find reverence, instead of resistance, for the power and gifts of the waves that come my way. Amen.

Claiming rest and re-creation this summer
There are always lots of questions in a house with children, and the most common one in my world right now is “What’s the plan for today, Mom?” During the school year, we fall into a rhythm of learning and activities, but the summer has all this space for questions and finding different things to do. And it sometimes feels like rest and recreation means more pressure for a mom in the summer – rather than less.
I want to start with a caveat that vacation and time off work (in the summer and the rest of the year) is a profound privilege. There are many people in the world who cannot afford to take time off. Too many do not have access to paid vacation leave. Some families have no way to get time off together. And others experience the warping of time by unemployment or chronic illness. So, I come to the conversation mindful of my own context, as well as others’.
Rest is not just essential for well-being, but it is a prophetic act in a capitalist culture. In Sabbath as Resistance, Walter Brueggemann insists “that divine rest on the seventh day of creation has made clear (a) that YHWH is not a workaholic, (b) that YHWH is not anxious about the full functioning of creation, and (c) that the well-being of creation does not depend on endless work.” In moments, days, or seasons set aside for intentional rest, we reject the ideas that work can or should save us, that efficiency is the highest good, and that there is no time for rest.
Cole Arther Riley, in her book This Here Flesh, writes, “Rest is not the reward of our liberation, nor something we lay hold of once we are free. It is the path that delivers us there.” For years, I have been slowly making small changes in living so that I do not need to escape from my life to rest. It is a work in progress, I promise you.
In addition to reading, I am finding some rest in thinking about re-creation. What we will do next? I am trying to be mindful of what re-creates me. In the same way that sleep restores my body, there are ordinary adventures we can choose that feed my soul. Lying in the hammock with two kids and a stack of library books. A pile of pails and an hour at the u-pick farm. A cooler of sandwiches and a day trip to the beach.
This summer, things did not work out for a week or two away, so our rest and recreation is happening between work and daycare. And my spirit jumps at Jesus’ words: “Come to me, all you who are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.” I have picked up too many burdens in the last several months. I am ready to set them down.
Over and over again, I have learned that rest and re-creation cannot be received when my hands are full of burdens, and I am wearing my weariness as a uniform, with perverse pride. I practice leaving work on time, closing the office door and imagining all my work thoughts leaving my head to spend the night on my desk to wait for the morning. Books and knitting needles, shovels and pails, berries and even weeds fill my hands and heart so much more than my stupid phone. I am carving out space to play at the park, sit with a puzzle or game, or experiment in the kitchen without a need to be somewhere next.
So few people make sure that I receive rest, that my weary heart is re-created. I give away my time and space for rest so cheaply – in a world that will happily take whatever I have to give. Receiving these gifts that God wants to give me means being really honest about what re-creates me rather than drains me. There are so many wonderful ways to spend our time, but only some will give me rest and re-creation.
When we rest ourselves and support others to do likewise, we follow a God of rest. Our re-creation can happen when we show up with presence for sunshine and rain, for tea on the deck, for bonfires and music. May we receive the rest God promises.

The essential and human labour of love and belonging
Art by Alanah Morningstar @morning.star.designs
June has been swirling its way through the world with an unbridled intensity in my world. Band concerts and ball games, kindergarten orientation and musicals, appointments that must be completed before school gives way to summer holidays. National Indigenous Peoples’ Day is offering more opportunities for building relationships, Pride flags are flying, and Juneteeth celebrations African-American emancipation from slavery. My people have been full of emotion, and the headlines and memes seem to suggest that we are not alone. My diagnosis is that there is a collective ache for love and belonging, and that, for many, love and belonging feel tenuous, elusive, scarce.
The world seems strung out and exhausted from the effort of living the last few years. We have been stretched to the edges of ourselves, prone to tantrums and impatience and isolation as coping mechanisms. Collective burnout is both understandable and full of risk and actual harm.
A beautiful friend of mine shared a recording of herself singing “Crowded Table” by The Highwomen. It has been my soundtrack for the month. The chorus names what the God of my understanding whispers to me: “I want a house with a crowded table and a place by the fire for everyone.” And as I try to live this out, it becomes clearer and clearer that love and belonging are not hippy ideals but deeply challenging work.
Full days interrupt the rhythms of sleep and food, and the kids need more of me while there is less time. Inflation is pressing on everyone, and the food banks are calling for more. People have embraced a mentality in the world and on social media that everyone is entitled to my opinion, as distinct from each being entitled to one’s own opinion. All sides of the political spectrum participate in their own versions of cancel culture, entrenching self-righteousness that carelessly writes off the humanity of others. It is dangerous and terrifying and exhausting. I want the world to be softer and kinder, please.
The second verse of the song goes on to say, “If we want a garden, we’re gonna have to sow the seeds.” Every time I sing it, I want to follow this line with a well-placed curse word. Can’t someone else do the work?
The labour of love and belonging takes all the focus and intensity of child-birth. I have to set aside my other priorities and lists. Focus on the human being inside me and in front of me. I have to breathe through waves of irritation and pain. I must make space for others who are different from me, not only in the world, but also inside my body and spirit. Care as much about their suffering and needs as my own. I have to listen at a level that can bring about new life – because it is the only thing that ever will.
A softer and kinder world is only possible if I will take my broken heart and refuse to let it harden. It is a lie that gentleness is weak; vying for power over others with control, violence, and abuse are the weapons of the spiritually weak. If I want a crowded table and a place for everyone, then I have to be radically committed to power that is shared, to honouring boundaries and needs, to the time it takes to listen deeply, and to speaking with thoughtfulness, truth, and compassion.
In a month that aims to bring awareness and possibility in the realms of reconciliation, sexuality, and emancipation, this is not primarily about principles but about people. When love and belonging are scarce, people get desperate. If my love and belonging are built on the exclusion, restriction, silencing or damnation of other people, then there is a miscarriage of community.
I am less interested in your opinions and mine than I am in how much we care about mutual suffering, hope, and commitment to a world of love and belonging. Our words and social media shares and bumper stickers are only worth as much as our lives are consumed with the labour of living them out.
There is not a single being on the earth that my God does not love beyond measure. What makes me think I am called to anything less?

Joy as a way of being in the world
I love the first walk out with the kids when the snow melts. Pressing on thin ice till it breaks. Wading into puddles. Dropping snow into running water to see how long it takes to break through. I love the way that spring breaks through the winter, and we feel renewed by fresh air. Mostly, I love how easy it is to taste joy on that first spring walk.
My smallest kids constantly remind me that the experience of joy is usually closer than I think it is. Atti beats me again at Crazy 8s and does a victory dance. We bake cookies and Charlize licks the spoon with a satisfying sigh. A ridiculous joke breaks through tension and we all find ourselves laughing.
When I last wrote about joy at Easter, I was reflecting on the risk that it brings because good things end. Pre-emptive avoidance of disappointment is part of why I think people grow out of childhood joy. As our memories get longer, I think we also just stop being amazed by things we have seen before. But this year, I am thinking about how we equate joy and wonder and awe with immaturity. Our longing to grow up and be taken seriously slowly erodes our spontaneous experience of joy.
As we started out on the path, I called out to the kids and then stopped myself. I was going to tell them to stop, to be careful not to get their clothes dirty. And then I reminded myself we have a washing machine. We waded into puddles, tempting the water to flow over the tops of our boots. Snowballs exploded on backs. Socks got wet.
I overestimated the energy we would have when I set our destination, and not everyone was happy about the length of the walk. There was whining. Blisters made their first appearance. We sat down on a bench for a rest and I wrapped my own socks around little feet.
Several years ago, a therapist I was seeing challenged me to change my focus because “what we focus on is magnified.” It takes effort for me to focus on the smiles, the curiosity, and the creativity that give way to really feeling joy. And discipline to trust that the joy can remain even when the whining starts.
After years of grief, I still give myself explicit permission to feel joy because it is not a betrayal of the loss. In the same way, joy is still possible when things are less than perfect. A day with a few puddles in it can still be a beautiful day. Difficult seasons and years still have so many gifts in them. The vast majority of the minutes in my life are actually extraordinarily nice. And the climate in my own head seems to be the biggest factor in whether or not I can appreciate how good things actually are.
There are fifty days in the Easter season in my (Roman Catholic) tradition. It is the longest season of the year outside of ordinary time, given the least spiritual attention. I cannot speak for others, but I need a lot more practice with joy than repentance. I am keenly aware of how often I fall short, and sadly inattentive to how often I miss out on a miracle because I am busy worrying, warning, or fixating on something I can’t change.
My joy increases when I stay in the moment, let wonder co-exist with discomfort or anxiety, and practice gratitude. Joy grows when there is space for rest and play. When I see it and delight in it, joy is magnified. It is infectious when I allow the silly to break through the serious. It will not be controlled, does not come in a package, and cannot be saved.
Joy is a way of being in the world where I focus on what is good in the moment right now and recognize I have done nothing to earn it. Joy just is, and I can dwell in it, if I let myself. I have gotten in the habit of limiting my joy because it might be messy or inconvenient. I would like to break that habit. Today can be a best day ever, and tomorrow too.

Fall into Grace
Photo: Leah Perrault
Several weeks ago, Eliot brought home a note for his school ski trip and asked if I would like to come as a chaperone. I know these requests could stop coming and I love being out on the hill, so I planned to go. I have been a snowboarder since my teens, which was surprising even two and a half decades before I could be called middle-aged. I went to be with he and his friends, and I went (without smaller children in tow) to test out if it is time for me to trade my snowboard in for skis. It is getting dangerous to risk a fall.
The day was wonderful. The kids were full of happy energy on the bus. The weather was perfect with sun and warmer temperatures but no ice forming. Eliot’s friends had lessons opposite his, so I got to hang out one on one with him for more than half the day. And between helping kids find lost gear and get up from their own wipe-outs, I went up and down the ski hill thinking about how not to fall.
Snowboarding is strange because it relies on sideways momentum rather than forward and back. Where we are used to distributing weight and movement between two feet, snowboarding holds the two feet together. The whole body has to move – or fall – together. The last few winters, I could feel my fear of falling increasing alongside my age.
I can also feel my awareness of risk increasing as I get older. The boundless energy and bold confidence of my twenties has given way to practical conservation of resources and more measured risk assessment. This is both healthy and a loss. I sat quietly, alone on the chair lift, feeling the strength in my legs, anticipating the deep powder on the next run. I love the sidelong back and forth of the snowboard beneath my feet and my whole body following in each turn.
I felt the wind blow across my face as the lift neared the top, whispering something I forgot: I know how to fall. If it happens, I know how to get low to minimize injury. I ride with open hands that close instinctively to fists to protect my wrists. My basic workouts are strengthening my body, and I am attentive to fatigue. Before I take off, I choose runs with intention and can go very slowly in sections that are too icy or steep. I allow myself to slow to a controlled fall to avoid one that is more dangerous.
With delight, I discovered that I am not too old to snowboard – yet.
When I got home, I arrived home to a sick child who couldn’t sleep. She and I have been struggling to connect and more often than not, I do not know immediately how to help her. I made a choice to fall into bed beside her, and to fall into the rhythm of the prayers of my ancestors, fingers for beads, prayers for lullabies.
My prayer life is a constant haphazard collection of habits picked up here and there: prayers triggered bells and sirens and dish soap, silent contemplation in between mom and work duties, fragments of poetry and written prayers wedged in the pages of all my books, and others written into my mind and heart. I used to beat myself up for not being more consistent, more formatted, more anything than what I am, but I learned that there is no wrong way to pray.
These days, my most frequent prayers with words fall into grace:
Help.
I’m sorry.
I do not understand.
I do not know.
Show me.
Thank you.
For years, I have known that the prayers of my parents, my aunts and uncles, my grandparents and elders have carried me in a particularly powerful way. I think I am starting to understand why. They know how to fall into grace, and thrust me into God’s hands.
Someday, I will retire my snowboard when the risks or reality of a fall remove the joy it brings. I will give her a worthy retirement then. For now, though, I am grateful for the way she floats me over the snow, reminding me that I can let myself fall –into snow and into grace.

A God who sets us free…
When I first encountered twelve step spirituality in a room of anonymous strangers[1], I was introduced to “the God of our own understanding”. The concept felt foreign to me, and a little bit dangerous. What would all these people do to God with their own understanding, I worried. Week after week, I showed up and found myself a little less broken than I was when I arrived, a little more connected to God, in different ways than I had been taught in church. My faith world collided with my recovery, and I fell deeply into the arms of the God of my understanding, a God who sets us free.
For me, post-partum depression settled into a deeper situational depression when I tried to take responsibility for everything that I perceived was wrong with my church, who was also my employer. I found the twelve-step support group at the (strong) suggestion of a therapist I was having trouble hearing.
As I freely chose to work through the steps with a sponsor, the first one was hard, but also obvious: We admitted that we were powerless – that our lives had become unmanageable. Nothing other than feeling completely unable to help myself in any other way would have compelled me to walk up the stairs to my first meeting.
The second and third steps were the hardest for me of all twelve. The second reads: Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. I believed in God, so surely I already believed this? My church teaches that Jesus saves us, but I had been busy trying to be Jesus. No wonder I felt broken.
The third step changed everything: We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God – as we understood Him. I have followed God my whole life, tried to follow. But somewhere along the way I gave over my own understanding. I became afraid that the God I met in my childhood was too merciful, too easy going, too free. I got tripped up thinking that knowing lots of stuff about God would mean that my will and my life would go the way I wanted it to. And that landed me under my desk on the phone with mental health services to see if they would check me in.
In all the most significant moments of encounter with a Divine Power I have called God, that God astonishes me with overwhelming love and sets me free. When I have wrestled with temptation, the God of my understanding has allowed me to make a choice, never restricting me from any possible option. When I have failed, the God of my understanding allows me to experience the consequences of my actions with compassion and without punishment. When I have asked for guidance, the God of my understanding speaks to me in ways that I can hear and offers me direction that finds a place of integrity in the deepest part of my soul – even when it is deeply challenging.
Both in communities of faith and in twelve step groups, I have found glimpses of this God who sets us free. I love to get to a place with people where it is possible to ask the question: “Tell me about the God of your understanding.” The God of my understanding is not afraid of our freedom but delights in it.
When my religious or spiritual practices, beliefs, or communities begin to feel like a prison, I take a walk in creation and ask the God of my understanding to set me (and us) free. It has been my consistent experience as well as the deepest part of the faith I have inherited and love that there is more love, more grace, and more space in God than any of us can imagine. And I am struck with wonder that I do not need to be afraid of God, or myself. May it be so.
[1] Honoring the spirit of twelve step and anonymity, I will not disclose here either the group I belong to or the stories of the people within those rooms.

Finding Tenderness in the Fog
Photo Credit: Julie Graham
There’s a strange tenderness in harsh prairie winters. In the midst of deep fog, the temperature swings slowly, visibility declines, ice and frost coat the roads and the windows, and the hoar frost wraps the power lines and the trees. We can easily get lost in fog, and our movement through it is reduced to wandering one miniscule and tentative step at a time, our senses attuned to the tiniest and most immediate signals of our place in space and time.
This winter, too many people I love are wandering through fog. Drowning in grief. Wading through employment uncertainty. Breaking under the weight of illness or caregiving. I am in an ordinary season after years of loss and grief and I am finding myself reflecting on what carried me through: tenderness at the breaking.
It hasn’t come naturally to me to seek out and trust in the world’s capacity for tenderness. In the fall into depression, I put extraordinary effort into hiding my despair, pushing to perform externally while my insides crumbled under the weight of hormones and (my) impossible expectations. Grief introduced me to the depth of the pit inside my own body, and my greatest longing was to collapse into death while denying myself all relief and comfort.
This is the thing about profound human pain, simultaneously physical and emotional and spiritual: I begin to identify with and feel attached to the fog, frozen by the fear that what comes next will be even worse than what is now. Twelve step spirituality and mentors have whispered to me in the fog, as many times as I needed to hear it: you will not move until the pain of staying here exceeds the pain of changing. It is a whisper of tenderness and compassion through my tears.
The winter world is frozen, lulling nature into hibernation, existence that is cold and stripped naked. The temperature swings and water droplets get suspended in the air instead of forming snow or ice. And as the water molecules dance around bare extended branches, they turn immediately into ice crystals. The tree is wrapped in a breathtaking and fragile cloak of hoarfrosted tenderness.
When I reach the edges of myself, no longer able to keep wandering in the fog or pretending I am okay, my frozen edges become reluctant conductors for tentative tenderness. My body starts to preserve energy for the vital organs. I stop having the energy to be afraid of judgement or failure, and, more importantly, to push tenderness and compassion away. The walls I put up to keep myself safe have kept out both the danger and the help. I need to fall apart before I can be tenderly put back together for a world that looks and is different after the fog.
Being wrapped in tenderness, like hoar frost, is cold and unfamiliar, mystical and fragile. People say wrong things alongside the ones I have most needed to hear. I receive things I do not want, like counselling, rest, or assistance with bathing or eating or thinking. My hands release the death grip on the coping mechanisms which have allowed me to survive, like denial and staying busy and the trappings of my curated mask of “perfection”. It is as desirable as a very long ice hug.
And, the falling into freezing has taught me that I can go there willingly long before I am out in the ice storm, lighting my emergency candle and praying I do not fall asleep before someone finds me dead. When I sense cold winter temperatures coming, and the forecast is calling for fog, I can embrace the coming fog and learn to reach for tenderness with grace.
The world can be cold, and not everyone will like me, agree with me, or respond with tenderness, it is true. But it is my experience that an extraordinary number of human beings (when their molecules have chance to trace the frozen and desperate limbs of their neighbours) have the capacity to crystalize into tenderness. When I admit my need, expose my pain, ask for grace and mercy, tenderness has a strange way of emerging in unexpected ways. Nature and strangers, songs on the radio or lines in a book, a phone call or a memory or a dream. Imperfection, pain, and failure crack me open enough to receive.
And then, I am surprised that God weaves this tenderness into my world so that it eventually wells up droplets within my frozen self. That the tenderness can line the inside of me as well as the outside, a grace that others cannot see or take away. May it flow through me and then out of me to the frozen edges of those lost in the fog today. Amen.

Receiving the Gift may be the hardest work of all…
Jesus arrives and we receive the One we have awaited. The seasons and feast days of church calendars exist not only to change the colours and routines of faith life, but also change the way we live our whole lives. We learn to practice waiting – in joyful hope – for Jesus to arrive. And this practice waiting and receiving is meant to help us get better at waiting and receiving in the rest of our lives too.
For more than 15 years now, I have been baking with children’s “help.” I am pretty terrible at playing imagination games, but I have embraced the inevitable egg crashing to the floor. The dusting of flour across shirts and floors is a reminder to me that they are learning. Their enthusiasm for licking the spoon, watching the rising through the oven door, and eating our results is a great reminder of what joyful waiting should be.
At the same time, embracing baking with kids has also taught me to expect chaos. Fights over whose turn it is, Measurements less than precise. Double or triple batches to compensate for mistakes. We talk lots about how things do not always turn out the way we expect, and how to be gentle with ourselves and our results.
Decorating goes much the same way. Weighing at least six different opinions, we choose the spots that will hold our special things. We share in the work of vaccuming and dusting to make the space ready. Boxes come up from the basement and in from the garage. Stools to place the ornaments at just the right height on the tree.
The dog yelps because someone didn’t see her when they stepped off the tree. We didn’t get the right candy for the Advent calendar. Two kids constantly move the nativity characters back to their preferred arrangement. No one likes my favourite Christmas album, but they humour me. We talk about the gifts that will be under the tree, and how you may not be receiving everything – or anything – from your list.
When the kids were all still very small, I directed and executed most of this work. As a result, things were mostly the way I liked them. I knew that I was trying to teach them, but I did could not anticipate how they would learn.
This year, with the youngest four, they could do easily more than half of the work without me. I have been waiting for them to grow, to help, to lead, and now they can. It’s a new kind of hard to allow them to put things where they want them, to hear and receive their opinions, to let them develop their own ways.
Charlize did 90 per cent of the homemade Oreo cookies we make every year. She can read the recipe, measure the ingredients, use the mixer. When she doesn’t know, she asks for help. I am to give very minimal instruction because she knows. I did not recognize when I began to teach my children that they would learn their own ways, both a challenge and a gift for me.
Especially when the gift we long for is a person, receiving the gift changes everything. We practice preparing because we are waiting for a new life, with a Divine Other, whose presence will disrupt and unsettle us in the process of offering peace and joy.
So much of my ability to receive (others as) gifts depends on my willingness to be displaced – from my comfort, my self-righteousness, my resistance to interdependence. Many people are walking through very challenging seasons of life right now – job changes, ill health, financial stress, overwhelming grief. Everything happens. God does not cause our pain but will not waste it. This is the work of Advent and Christmas: to receive Jesus in what is, and in what is coming.
May we open our hearts to the cracks in our lives that will let God’s light in. May we receive the gifts that are offered this Christmas, even if they aren’t the ones we wanted. And may we remember that grace can come in every package.

Allowing time to be ready to move
Photo credit: Pearl Unger
The birds took their time this fall, lingering on the prairies longer than usual. We got more sunshine and warm days than we usually do in Saskatchewan, with autumn stretching nearly two months before the blizzards knocked us squarely into winter. Most of us aren’t ready anyway (How is anyone truly ready for six or more months of winter?). And the birds did their practice flights and then took off, if late.
The four seasons come and go, early and late, without regard to my preference or my readiness. Spiritual seasons are both harder to recognize and easier to ignore – at least for a time.
After my knitting injury this summer, my physio recommended that I take up more regular strength exercise as a preventative strategy for avoiding injury while aging. I still have one more year before my forties, so I am taking the suggestion under consideration. I know she is right. I have managed to lace up my shoes, spend some time on my mat, chase the kids a handful of times. It stops very short of a consistent habit. I have finally stopped believing I will be more valuable if my pants are a smaller size. And I do not know how to exercise without punishing myself. I am not ready.
My parenting feels more lost than found. I want to be more consistent. I see my kids pushing me to the next level. They need me to grow into the next version of myself, mastering adolescent and teen strategies. I am grieving their smallness and my own introduction to baby and toddler parenting. I am not ready to be in the car dropping them everywhere, knowing less about the moments that make up their days, being further from the centre of their collective worlds. They are spreading their wings for necessary migrations and my parenting does not keep up. I know that parenting is something you learn as you go. Still, I am not ready.
My speaking and writing is shifting. I can feel it moving in my veins. It spills out of me and I do not expect what it says. The Spirit whispers to write it anyway. I am afraid of what it means, how it will change me. It is uncomfortable and awkward. I want to do what God tells me to do, go where I am needed, write the words entrusted to me. Tomorrow, maybe? I am not ready today.
Over the last decade, I have made slow and real progress at breaking down my addiction to perfection. I have embraced gentleness, allowed things to shift in me in their own time, invited the grace of being carried. It is still so hard for me to allow myself the time it takes to become ready.
Autumn is a season of transition, a letting go of the things I needed before to make space for what will come next. Very often, I am like my lilac bush still green and bowed in half by the weight of the first wet snow. It needs to be ridiculously and unsustainably heavy before I will consent to drop the summer leaves. I want all the practice flights possible, even if it means flying an extra few days in the cold before I catch up to the comfort of the new that waits for me.
I choose to trust that there is necessary work being done in me while I am getting ready. So much of my resistance is subconscious, chipping away at walls that have been protecting me. I will give myself the grace of growing over a lifetime, receive the love of a God who waits for me to be ready, even while sending me physiotherapists and children and mentors who speak the truth I need to hear.
May I love the me that is not ready. May I hold her with the same tenderness I offer to others who feel exposed and afraid. And may I wait patiently for the readiness to emerge. When the urge strikes to respond differently to the kids, or stretch out beside the weights, may I do just this next right thing without beating myself up for not doing it every time, perfectly, for the rest of my life. May I choose as many practice flights as I need. Amen.

Presence: the art of being where I am
Presence has been swirling around me, chasing me in the fall wind, working its way through my hair. I taste it in time with friends, in singing in a choir, and in the longing to run away from what is hard. We have all been surviving for so long. And there are new hills to climb as we rise out of the critical and isolating phases of a pandemic to enter into reimagining and rebuilding.
On the other side of grief, of leaving the broken, of destruction is recovering, healing, and growing something new. And one of the practices that carries through both seasons is presence. Just plain showing up for what is and who I am today is both difficult and courageous.
In the hardest seasons of my life, I had to learn to show up for my difficult emotions. I had learned to repress anger, rationalize fear, repel sadness. But there was no way out but through. I learned to name what I was feeling, talk it through with therapists, family, and friend. I practiced showing up to let others carry me, especially when that was uncomfortable, undesirable, and hard.
Things are so much better now than they were on those worst days. Still, life brings unexpected cold fronts and exciting, if overwhelming opportunities to grow. Presence means showing up for this too. It is almost harder to be fully present to joy and laughter. To seize the moment for play and relaxation. To set down whatever preoccupies me and really be here in my life.
We live in a world that offers us distraction, escape, and avoidance in every imaginable form: smart phones, food, exercise, books, tv, work, hobbies, stuff. The challenge is to use these things to find and live life rather than avoid it.
I move so quickly between seeing the world for what it is and being totally lost in my own head. This week, I found myself in awe of the fall colours so many times, drawn into the miracle of the people I love, captivated by how good potatoes can be. And in the next moments, I have been completely at a loss for how to move forward through a complex situation, completely annoyed by someone else’s actions, and feeling desperate and afraid. I know what I need to do and how important it is to be gentle and kind to myself and still I struggle with both.
When I find myself pulled in many directions, lost everywhere but here, I find it helpful to sink deeply into three movements:
- Breathe and notice. Feel the air go into my lungs, and push it back out. See the details of my surroundings. Look at the people. Drink in colour, smells, sounds. I am here, right now.
- Feel. Look for and name any emotions that are present. Pay attention to where they sit in your body, whether they are heavy or light, pleasant or irritating, inviting or demanding. Express them however it is possible and safe to do so. And then, let them go.
- Ask. What is the next loving thing you can do to be fully here right now? Don’t overthink it – see a way forward in this moment and live into it with courage. Cry, create, connect – there isn’t a road map. Trust yourself. You won’t always know if it is the right thing. That’s okay. When you see another way, you can choose again if you need to.
Called back to myself, I often remember my grandpa, whistling in the far yard while he worked or sitting in his wheelchair in old age waiting for a cribbage game when we came to visit. He taught me to watch birds outside the window and cheer at a ball game. The things that mean the world are often surprisingly simple. Call or text the person. Listen with empathy. Say how you feel. Set the boundary with love. Act with kindness.
Our world needs us here. Present and showing up with courage, for ourselves and each other. Whether you are wading through loss and heartache or rising into a new thing, your presence draws in the Breath that is life. May it being you back to yourself so that you can be yourself for the world.

Living in the joy of the beautiful mess
Photo Credit: Charlize Perrault
Mess is a theme in my life, and therefore also in my barefoot preaching. I think I return to the theme because mess challenges me so deeply. While I grew, I found relief in order, comfort in control, rest in simplicity. And I wandered into a world with a tendency toward disorder, a resistance to control, and more complexity than I could have imagined. I tried and failed to eliminate the mess, and I crawled out of rock bottom (more than once) to make peace with the reality of mess.
This summer, I am reflecting on the different types of messes, finding myself lost in the beautiful mess. It differs from the destructive mess that threatens to pull me under, that demands a radical and weary surrender to change. It is not the same as the cluttered mess that inspires a garage sale or a shift toward minimalism. The beautiful mess is the collision of human intention and natural wonder and longing for things to be different and exactly as they are, all at once.
A beautiful mess is easier to describe than define. So, I offer a summer of litany of the beautiful mess, in the hope that it inspires your own.
A poppy growing defiantly in the rocks and weeds where landscaping fabric was carefully laid beneath to prevent all the plants from sprouting. A child pouring water on it from a plastic watering can that has long since lost the sprinkle spout – in my sock drawer.
*
One hundred and nineteen people in an anniversary photo. I arrived late, scurrying my last two kids in just in time, after a time change and many reminders to be on time. The frame holding so much joy, and all the perfect imperfections of each smiling (and growling) mystery. The image unable to capture the sounds of the voices, the stories carried by so many lifetimes colliding for the occasion.
*
Tears and fear where I want to be stoic and confident. Receiving a hug, a kind word, laughter. Resisting the falling apart only to discover that my weakness makes my humanity accessible. Finding connection at the bottom, instead of the top.
*
Fifty seven photos of the same white flower, growing in clover and grass. Four in focus. No space left on my cell phone. Grinning toothless selfie.
*
A text from a friend describing the hour of quiet she was gifted for the mere cost of fort building. Found items from the garage. All the blankets freed from the fresh laundry basket. Nails and hammers everywhere. Fresh mud. Laughter. And a bathtub with warm, running water and an abundance of soap. Kids old enough to clean up, as well as build.
*
The same old argument, resurfacing with new words. Eyes to recognize the pattern. Hearts to see the hope that this time it might end differently. Grace for stepping out of the dance that leads to destruction. Gentleness in the words. Softening into what we all need instead of who is right.
*
A problem. Stated factually and aggressively. A myriad of ways to respond and people to share in the carrying. Disagreements voiced, tensions held, differences surfacing. Questions holding more power than answers. Perspectives shifting. Problem giving way to possibility.
*
Trees growing up through a deck. Prairie grass reclaiming a garden. Gophers moving into wooden cabinets a century old. Life taken over by life. Remnants abandoned to an archaeological dig for some century that isn’t this one.
*
A beautiful mess is a privilege. The resources you need to love in it are right in the mess itself. Its imperfection is an invitation rather than a threat. It whispers to stay awhile a marvel at the mystery of what you would have missed if you had caused or created it, tried to control it, or found a cure for it. You couldn’t if you tried.
A beautiful mess is the gift of receiving what life does when I live in it. I arrive with my intentions and creativity, welcome the others and their stuff, say yes to the improvisations. A beautiful mess is built on the trust that what could be is better than what I would have done on my own.
Here’s to the beautiful messes. May there be more of them. And may I have the grace to love them.

Writing the story of a life
Writing, for me, is both a part of how I make my living and how I make sense of my living. My summer reading has coincidentally connected around a theme that, in the end, a life is just a collection of stories. What does it mean to write the story of my own life, a scene and a day at a time?
I often tease my kids that you don’t see many characters in books or tv shows soaking up screen time. It makes for pretty boring plots. At the same time, I would not want to read about or watch a chronicle of an eight-hour work day, let alone a minute by minute account of a career. Every good storyteller has to sift through the words that get included, as well as the ones that don’t.
In writing the story of my life, however, I live through a lot of moments that won’t make the cut in the highlights or the bloopers. Our world is currently obsessed with capturing the moments and sharing them, but there is so much (and maybe more) value in the things that happen between photographs and bonfires. When we tell the story looking back, we will identify the parts that mattered most, interpret the meaning, and make sense of what happened. I long for that kind of clarity in the living of it.
The summer has offered three messy movements that I don’t have meaning for yet.
First, I started off the long weekend by finishing making a long-awaited Gryffindor quidditch sweater for one of my kids. And when I got home, I discovered that I had injured myself knitting with many hours of repetitive movement in the combined ten hours of drive time. (My fourteen-year-old thinks this is the funniest extreme sporting wound ever acquired.)
I am shocked, as always with relatively minor injuries, just how much I take for granted when my body is working the way it should. And, the most important part of the story is the several times a day of physio stretches I need to do to ensure I can continue to enjoy knitting and playing the guitar and doing yard work.
The rest required by my hand surfaced a second movement of healing for me. I recognized how frequently I fill my life up to avoid feeling what surfaces when I am quiet and still. I long to be understood and affirmed, to have people happy with me, to know what to do in all situations. When I am misunderstood, confused, and have disappointed people, I struggle. I don’t even let myself feel it most of the time, let alone take a photo of it to tell the story. After five years of intense grief and healing work, there is a movement towards more ordinary growth. Seeing a coach and practicing new habits will help in ways I cannot yet know.
Finally, my oldest child has been away at school for the year. It is so good to have her home, playing with her siblings, making us watch ridiculous TV, and updating our vocabulary. We have arrived at the years I longed for: sleeping in and going on adventures without diaper bags, hilarious conversations and eye rolling. And for the first time as a parent, I feel nostalgic and a little sad. The kids are growing up, fast, just like everyone says.
Making the most of it includes epic road trips and one million reminders to pick up your socks and unload the dishwasher, again. I wish I could know which conversations will scar them for life and which ones they will remember when I am gone. I long to be able to be the mom they need and I know I can only do my best. It’s a miracle that the story of my life gets to include so many mundane movements, messy mistakes and do-overs, evenings at the park and walks around the block that are completely unremarkable. I write the story of my life by showing up for today, making a few more steps towards being and becoming the person I was created to be. The plot moves forward when I love the best I can and try again tomorrow, to find a way from this moment into the next one with grace.

Seeing grace and sifting through clutter
Saturday morning in early June. Sunshine streaming through lilac bushes. Birds singing from underneath leaves that seem to have grown overnight. And tables full of things we hope other people will like well enough to take home when we open up the garage door. There are stories attached to the stuff. The kids keep changing their minds and sneaking things back in the house. The seeing and the sifting happen simultaneously.
Despite moving just a year ago, there are enough things gathered to have a decent little garage sale. I’ve been sifting through boxes and closets, removing things that we no longer use and just don’t fit in our new world. It amazes me how our memories are held not just in our bodies but also in our things.
I hold the smallest lifejackets, checking that they are actually too small for the smallest kids even though I have known the answer for three seasons already. I can hear the laughter on the boat, see the scrunched up baby-face that hated the lifejacket, feel the spray of water on my face when I held a sleeping niece wearing it. There isn’t room to hold on to it if we need to store the bigger sizes we need now.
Books that tucked us in. Tupperware too big and too small. The first costumes our kids wore to the grocery store. Picture frames and a house phone. A casserole dish and a lid without a pot. Ponies with the hair brushed out. Wall art and the last swing set. Sifting and not seeing.
I wore the same dress for a hundred days this winter, a challenge to interrupt fast fashion and experiment with wool. It taught me that I need so much less than I think I do (and also that very few people notice or care what I am wearing). I am learning to do more mending and buy second hand. I am seeing the contents of my life with a longer view.
The kids have been begging for a garage sale for years. I have been resisting. We still needed so many of the things we had. And, maybe more honestly, garage sales are a lot of work. It is easier to close the closet door than sort through the contents. Easier to hold on to the things than let them go with the memories they hold.
It doesn’t seem fair that there is just too much life to remember all the moments.
Sitting in the sun on a cooler full of cookies and puffed wheat squares. Knees knocking against the kid-sized table. A hand-written sign for the lemonade stand. Seeing and not seeing.
The four-year-old surprised us with the most stamina for sales. I do not feel nostalgic for the sleepless years, but I love four-year-olds. The honesty without a filter. The sponge brains that repeat everything they are learning. The confidence of knowing everything and finally having the words to say it all. He sat on the driveway welcoming people and offering them lemonade for most of the day.
He spilled it. He tried to pay people instead of taking their loonies. He danced when someone said yes. “Mom,” he said, about two hours in, “This is the best day ever. Can we have another garage sale yesterday?”
It was a perfect day. Extended family and laughter. Cousins buying jewels from the next sale down with their pocket change. Neighbours wandering through to look and to buy. Trading like-new Tupperware for ten bucks and a home-made tea roll. Kids learning to talk to strangers. Letting go of our past life to make room for the present and the future.
In all the sifting, I am seeing the moments that make up my life. Seeing and cherishing the people that we were and the people we are becoming. Seeing past the colours and shapes transmitted by my eyes, and seeing the grace of living. Let me live here.
I love the miracle that God created a world where atoms and molecules combine into matter that matters. Nature and fiber and textures that cradle us into life and carry us through.
There are times for acquiring and roaming far away, and times for coming home and sifting through. Days pass, one after another, in this space between a pandemic and whatever follows after. I want my stuff to help me see what matters.

Trusting what is to take us where we need to go
Photo Credit: Marc Perrault
Trust wasn’t the lesson I was expecting when my partner planned a surprise anniversary weekend away. Seventeen years later, we returned to the Cypress Hills where we stayed as newlyweds. The lodgepole pines appear not to have changed as much as we have.
I have confessed my allergy to nature before. The condo style room in the park in early May is a better fit than we knew all those years ago. It is still cold enough that my skin doesn’t itch from the heat and there aren’t enough fires or leaves to make my nose and lungs revolt. Marc had plenty of beauty to capture with the camera, though the clouds sadly covered the stars. There was great scenery for knitting and playing board games.
And there were trails for hiking. This isn’t a first choice of activity for either of us, but the park was quiet, still melting away the final patches of snow and silently awaiting the summer crowds. I was trusting that something different would be good.
At the entrance to our most challenging trail choice, I laughed out loud at the warning to watch for cougars. “It would be a great irony,” I said, smiling at Marc, “if I died in a wildlife attack on a hiking trail.” He agreed. I can definitely count on my fingers the number of trails I’ve attempted in my life, and most have only had the danger of my tripping over my own feet.
I became breathless on the climbs and focused on my footing on the declines. Seventeen years has given way to comfortable silences and conversation that stops and starts through two decades of memories. The lodgepole pines towered above us, shrinking the significance of our years together.
I stared up at the trees, a green canopy meters above us, with only old dead remnants of the branches near the ground. The younger trees, green and spindly, stretching up to compete for the sunlight. Hard pinecones forming on the undersides of the older trees, dropping to the ground to wait for a fire to break them open.
The forest floor is a mess. Dropped pine needles, interrupted with deer droppings. Broken branches and fallen trees from the windstorm days before, layered on the trunks from seasons past. Grass and leaves and tiny flowers breaking though wherever enough light and water allows.
“What are you thinking about?” Marc asked in one of the long flat sections. “About how the trees grow up and discard the parts of themselves they don’t need anymore,” I breathed. “About how messy growth is. And how I simultaneously am embarrassed by my younger self and grieve when she goes. I like how the trees grow and make me more patient with my own growth.”
I am in the awkward stages of early middle age, still having so much yet to do and knowing in ways my younger self couldn’t how much effort and perseverance and suffering it takes to build with love. Now, I am ready to let go of the mirror’s distortions as I care more about who I become and who I love well than how I look while I do it.
And it is the forest, rather than a single tree that leads to the trusting. Together, the trees make shade. The wind blows through them to make the gentle creak of their swaying, a constant whisper that assures us we are not alone. Together, they rise and fall. They drop the seeds of their growth so more trees will follow them. The next generation of forest will rise out of this one, exactly as it is, in all its glorious imperfection.
Near the end, I was surprised by a tree suspended vertically, its broken trunk hanging just above my knees. It fell nearly forty feet, suspended in the branches of a younger tree beneath it. “There you are,” I whispered to my sister, the maid of honour who left us just before year twelve. Creation carries the living and the dead, the dreams already realized and the ones to big to see just yet.
This place we are in right now is exactly the place from which we will become what we will be. If the dream is to be realized, it will rise out of what is now. The only thing to do is to be brave enough to take the next step, and the next one. Sometimes the path is clear, and sometimes we will forge our own.
The years pass so quickly and the moments matter so much. May we let go of the branches that no longer serve us. May we be nourishment to the creatures that rely on us for food, for love, for play. May our brokenness and our strength offer hope and healing where it is needed. May we never stop trusting that what is now will be the path to where we need to go. Amen.

Resurrection practice in the wake of surviving suffering
Photo Credit: Becky Stevenson
When I think about the long list of things I need to practice, resurrection has never made the list. But I have been returning to the theme year after year in my writing. In 2017, I wrote about not being ready to rise. The next year, I was baking buns and reflecting on relaxing into the rising work of God. And then, the danger of daring to embrace joy. Apparently, I need more practice than I thought.
My (Catholic) faith tradition is really well-known for nailing Lent (pun wittily composed). And with our reputation for ashes and penance and giving up stuff, we have also received a collective inheritance of Catholic guilt and a tendency toward solemnity. Ashes and repentance are only one part of the Paschal story that is the heart of our faith: they are meant to lead us into resurrection.
We’ve all been walking through an exceptionally extended pandemic lent in the liturgy of our lives. This long season has asked us to enter into a sacrificial suffering, a humility of spirit for the sake of those most at risk. And in the process, we have practiced being especially discerning, sacrificial, and solemn about life. Because we become through our behaviour, the season of surviving the suffering has changed us.
For many, as the world opens up, the things we used to take for granted feel like miracles. Gatherings of more than small groups. Seeing smiles. Reaching out to touch or hug a friend. And at the same time, these things feel risky, and still are. For those receiving cancer treatments or living with autoimmune conditions, isolation has become even more necessary now.
We have been practicing caution for so long, joy can feel out of reach. It is time to practice resurrection.
Christians on the Roman calendar celebrate Easter for fifty days. Note that this is 10 days longer than Lent and the Christmas season barely hits the double digits. Most of us can hardly handle a celebration that lasts longer than seventy-two hours before we crave the rest of ordinary time. We rush home from whatever plans we have scribbled on the calendar and retreat into sweat pants and laundry and a good tv binge to recover from indulging in our over-the-top celebrations.
But what would it look like to practice rising, to live into resurrection in our every-day lives in a way that we can sustain? Is this not what the joy of the resurrection invites?
The restrict-and-binge cycle is not a healthy or holy way. There is a time for sacrifice and a time for abundance, a time for repentance and a time for celebration. And we can practice both as they are needed, moving in and out of one and the other, hour by hour and day by day.
Even while we hold our own and the world’s pain, we can practice resurrection. We can take a walk and delight in the signs of spring. Count the buds forming on trees, the flowers breaking through cold earth. We can set our prayers for the suffering in the arms of God for an hour and let ourselves laugh till our sides ache.
Salvation is something that God gives to us by working it out in us. In order to receive the gift, we have to cooperate with it. It isn’t enough that Jesus died for me if I insist on earning salvation by being a grouchy martyr; I have to receive the gift, opening it up and letting it change me.
God invites me to delight in joy, to receive it and wonder at it, to choose it over and over again. Will I practice setting down my misery, no matter how valid, to giggle with my toddler before bed? Can I practice seeing the miracle of the person in front of me even while they fold the towels differently that I do? Am I willing to delight in the absolute perfection of my favourite song on the lips of my teenager coming from her messy room?
What if the world knew the followers of Jesus as the joyful ones? Jesus’ resurrection is not just a day, but is actually our present and our future. May we spread the Easter candy and good news over all the days instead of just a select few. May we practice rising with the same tenacity as our repentance. And may the resurrection we practice bring new life out of the ashes of the last two years.

A prayer for hope in the wreckage
Photo Credit: Sarah Tosh Manafo
As the world feels like it might give way into dust, I’m clinging to a promise of hope. I can still feel the faint dry spot on my forehead where it was marked with ashes. We haven’t been promised permanence, and that pisses me off. The profanity feels necessary. And still. The eternal Word promised to be with us always. Hope is falling, even here.
Too many times I have heard that everything happens for a reason; I am increasingly convinced it is a lie from the pit of hell designed to let the violent and abusive off the hook. But a quieter truth whispers hope when I am afraid: God wastes nothing.
Droplets of water, grains of sand, collections of air blown by the wind. This is the stuff that God has used to form the most majestic parts of creation. Why would humanity be any different?
From my earliest memories, I can recall staring up at the sky in wonder at how small a speck of creation I occupy. In a vast universe, I am nearly nothing and yet my heart proclaims my existence with each muscled beat. God is so deeply invested in all of it, without being controlling of any of it.
All this life is so full of meaning and so fleeting at the same time.
We wade through the wreckage of the pandemic we have been living in. We watch as a beautiful people are threatened with weapons and rubble. We do the next right thing, but it doesn’t seem like enough.
Since God grieves with the ones who mourn, shares in their sorrow, echoes in the rallying cries of peace and justice, I know deeper than I have known anything in my life that God does not cause destruction. I’m counting grains of sand, strollers and canned good, notes of the Ukrainian anthem sung by my neighbours. I am counting the tears of refugees, the bodies of the dying, the impossible number of dreams left behind. I am gathering up the wreckage to offer it back to the One who will make it all new.
Here we are, Maker of Heaven and Antelope Canyon. Here are the pieces, Prince of Peace and Pripyat (a city abandoned after the Chernoble explosion). Right here is our desire and our destruction, God of the lowly and the least. Take all that we have and all that we are. Everything that we have made and all that we have broken.
Waste none of it. Make the very wreckage a sign of our hope.
May no flower petals fall without becoming something more beautiful. May no life be lived without witness or memory. May every breath give way to a wind of change. Take the sacrifices, the courage, the losses, and work your resurrection.
This is the God who brought the Israelites out of slavery and exile. This Presence was with Daniel in a lion’s den, Esther in a castle, Jonah in the belly of a whale.
Be with us now.
We are exhausted and unsure, and we are not alone. All of the majesty and misery of earth is passing away and a miracle. Give us the strength to love for this moment and the next one. Keep us counting the cost, measuring the weight, bearing one another’s burdens.
Soften the hearts of all of humanity that we might believe that hope is enough when we cannot be certain. And when we see someone losing hope, let us hope for them, carrying them along until they can take another step. When it is my turn, remind me that I will need you to hope for me.
Hold our fears, cradle our confusion, stay the uncertainty. Show us the cracks that will let in light. Lead us to the people who will offer what we need and receive what you have given us to give away. Sustain us past the point that all seems lost.
Detach us from the painful expectation of permanence. Receive everything we offer. Make the wreckage into something worthy of the pain.
May our collective sorrow and radical acts of love be gathered up in You, source of our Hope.
Amen.

Flowing grace: Responding to the call with gentleness
Photo Credit: Darryl Millette
It is a January deep freeze in Saskatchewan and my three-year-old buries himself in his blanket in the morning and says, “It’s cold and I’m tired. I’m not getting out of bed.” He just says what the rest of us are feeling. Navigating out of holiday mode and back into real life in a winter new year is a stretch. I have literally nothing left for resolution. It is a good thing that grace is God’s way.
Resolution talk still lingers in the frigid air. Diet ads find their way into my feed despite considerable efforts to exclude them. Omicron is snowing over our collective longing to be rid of the pandemic. I need discipline and hope more than ever. If past performance is any reliable indicator, I am most likely to rely on grand plans that exhaust and deplete me as well as my people. When I am defeated or give up, I resort to the opposite: don’t bother trying and then you can’t fail. There has been a lot of resigned lack of effort in surviving the pandemic.
After a major trauma, it has been my experience that human capacity for intentional progress on goals is diminished. My therapists reminded me constantly that healing is rarely linear, and though we participate in it, we respond to life in healing ways rather than direct our own healing. I dislike this. And still, I have found it to be true. Healing is a flow of grace that comes from beyond me.
The pandemic has felt so similar to the intense grieving that followed my sister’s death: unanticipated, unpredictable, and unending. There has been so much to let go of, to endure, to struggle through. And two years in, our family is still learning how to live here. (Even with three years to practice before).
I’m feeling the new year urges to new life. The hope that comes from celebrating the birth, once again, of a divinity that comes to where I am, no matter how resigned. There have been persistent invitations pressing at my heart now for awhile: to move, to risk, to become. It feels dangerous after all this surviving to respond to an invitation to living more deeply.
After all of the losses, I know that I cannot handle firm resolutions and reliance on my (stubborn) will. Neither has had lasting success before the trauma anyway. The unexpected upside of being so plowed under is that I can see with hindsight the way that grace carries me through.
Grace might be the one thread that holds me fast to faith. A constant sparkle in frosty air that disappears to my peripheral vision as soon as I try to focus on it. Love that shows up even, and maybe especially, when I least deserve it. Pain that gives way to something good.
It is cold. I am tired. And I am getting out of bed, turning on the Christmas tree lights and moving because God keeps whispering that I need to. I will not make it there every day, but it is enough that I do so gently when I can. I am tracking less time on screens and more time outside. There is a path of grace between planning to fix everything that is “wrong” with me and declaring myself a lost cause.
Here, in the break between snow storms, there is a lot of clarity under the rainbow sundogs that frame the sun whenever it appears. Grace doesn’t measure me – it moves me. Slowly, I am finding a deeper sense of myself that is not falling short but falling into a rhythm of life.
When all the things I “should” do start to overwhelm me, I listen to the sound of the hoar frost. Grace shows up when the whispered invitation meets my capacity to respond, however small and slow. Resolve is giving way to gentleness. Maybe this is what I love so much about my elders?
May this year bring me closer to the movement of the one who sends the snow. May I see the beauty in the fresh snow and the invitations God whispers. And may I remember that a gentle response is a profound participation in grace.
Steps…and the growth of adult seasons
Steps have featured prominently on my social media feeds in the last week, as back to school pictures get posted. I love the glimpse into the lives of all the kids and teens, eager and annoyed, performing and resisting the annual tradition.
Riding waves with grace
Every summer, I wait and hope for our plans to cooperate with the weather and give us a day or two on the lake with (my parents’ beautiful)boat. We need the sunshine to keep us warm enough and the wind to stay mild enough that we can pull the tube behind the boat. The driver and the wind work together to make waves, and the riders delight at the efforts to stay on or fall in. On these rare and perfect days, I might be the biggest kid of all.
Claiming rest and re-creation this summer
There are always lots of questions in a house with children, and the most common one in my world right now is “What’s the plan for today, Mom?” During the school year, we fall into a rhythm of learning and activities, but the summer has all this space for questions and finding different things to do. And it sometimes feels like rest and recreation means more pressure for a mom in the summer – rather than less.
The essential and human labour of love and belonging
I am less interested in your opinions and mine than I am in how much we care about mutual suffering, hope, and commitment to a world of love and belonging.
Joy as a way of being in the world
Joy is a way of being in the world where I focus on what is good in the moment right now and recognize I have done nothing to earn it. Joy just is, and I can dwell in it, if I let myself.
Fall into Grace
I felt the wind blow across my face as the lift neared the top, whispering something I forgot: I know how to fall.
A God who sets us free…
Both in communities of faith and in twelve step groups, I have found glimpses of this God who sets us free. I love to get to a place with people where it is possible to ask the question: “Tell me about the God of your understanding.” The God of my understanding is not afraid of our freedom but delights in it.
Finding Tenderness in the Fog
This is the thing about profound human pain, simultaneously physical and emotional and spiritual: I begin to identify with and feel attached to the fog, frozen by the fear that what comes next will be even worse than what is now. Twelve step spirituality and mentors have whispered to me in the fog, as many times as I needed to hear it: you will not move until the pain of staying here exceeds the pain of changing. It is a whisper of tenderness and compassion through my tears.
Receiving the Gift may be the hardest work of all…
Especially when the gift we long for is a person, receiving the gift changes everything.
Allowing time to be ready to move
I have made slow and real progress at breaking down addiction to perfection. It is so hard to allow myself the time it takes to become ready.
Presence: the art of being where I am
On the other side of grief, of leaving the broken, of destruction is recovering, healing, and growing something new. And one of the practices that carries through both seasons is presence. Just plain showing up for what is and who I am today is both difficult and courageous.
Living in the joy of the beautiful mess
A beautiful mess is a privilege. The resources you need to love in it are right in the mess itself. Its imperfection is an invitation rather than a threat.
Writing the story of a life
In writing the story of my life, however, I live through a lot of moments that won’t make the cut in the highlights or the bloopers. Our world is currently obsessed with capturing the moments and sharing them, but there is so much (and maybe more) value in the things that happen between photographs and bonfires.
Seeing grace and sifting through clutter
In all the sifting, I am seeing the moments that make up my life.
Trusting what is to take us where we need to go
The forest floor is a mess. Dropped pine needles, interrupted with deer droppings. Broken branches and fallen trees from the windstorm days before, layered on the trunks from seasons past. Grass and leaves and tiny flowers breaking though wherever enough light and water allows.
Resurrection practice in the wake of surviving suffering
Even while we hold our own and the world’s pain, we can practice resurrection. We can take a walk and delight in the signs of spring. We can count the buds forming on trees, the flowers breaking through cold earth. We can set our prayers for the suffering in the arms of God for an hour and let ourselves laugh till our sides ache.
A prayer for hope in the wreckage
As the world feels like it might give way into dust, I’m clinging to a promise of hope. I can still feel the faint dry spot on my forehead where it was marked with ashes.
Flowing grace: Responding to the call with gentleness
After a major trauma, it has been my experience that human capacity for intentional progress on goals is diminished. My therapists reminded me constantly that healing is rarely linear, and though we participate in it, we respond to life in healing ways rather than direct our own healing. I dislike this. And still, I have found it to be true. Healing is a flow of grace that comes from beyond me.
On Being Barefoot…
Before the burning bush, God asks Moses to take off his sandals, to notice and reverence that he walks on holy land. This holy land continues to burn before me, before us, signaling God’s presence before we arrived rather than because we did. This life we are living was holy before we existed in it. This land and creation we call home is the first book of revelation, God’s love letter to us, bearing witness to the Creator of it all.Our lives and the moments that make them up are the stuff of sainthood, our invitations to participate in Divine life to be swallowed up and fulfilled by God. At the grocery store, in the false solitude of our cars and commutes, in our laundry rooms, and over text messages. My shoes run the risk of “protecting” me from the sacredness of this naked moment. And how I love shoes, and how my sensitive toes resist the prickles of grass and the mess of sand. But barefoot is how my spirituality works, daring to live an embodied and earthy love of Jesus who took on flesh. I’m wandering through this life, yearning to let go of my shoes, to walk reverently and with deep attention to what passes under my feet and to what isn’t yet my path. Barefoot is how I write, how I speak, how I work. Experience shored up against an insatiable thirst for knowledge; direct honesty honed by sensitivity; and vulnerability chained to a commitment to competency. And an unapologetically barefoot tendency to speak it as I feel it, which leads me to…
…and Preaching
I’m a preacher without a pulpit, with words that burn until they are spoken ~ aloud or on a page.
My ministry is one of colliding words and ideas, reaching out to find a connection with God’s amazing people.
The world seems to me to be spilling over with grace and we seem to be people who, all too quickly forget that all of this is pure gift.
When I’m driving, eating, visiting, resting, cleaning, working, playing, and almost everything else, I’m frequently stunned by the pure miracle of what simply is.
It’s not all promised joy and ease, but it is all presenced and remembered by the One who gives it. And I can’t stop talking about it, proclaiming it, preaching this good news that we have not been forgotten or forsaken in any moment of this life.
For reasons I don’t quite understand, my words seem to be given to encourage and inspire. In a world where women and girls are still too-often silenced or secondary, I’m barefoot and preaching because my soul won’t rest any other way. If my words can be a gift to you, then that is a gift for me.