Hi, I'm Leah

The spiritual work of hope is believing that we are not defined by the worst things we do or that happen to us. It is hearing the call to the next right step and taking it.

We sit at the kitchen table, or around a fire, or on the beach and we talk about the world as we see it. And I am delighted to discover that the world does not look exactly the same to all of us. Occasionally, I leave a conversation and realize that the words have changed my world.

The moments of my life are for tending, with care. In what direction am I stretching? To whom and for what?

And so, from my resting place, I am discovering vicarious joy. I drive by bursitis yards full of flowers and I pull over and look for awhile. I can’t tend a yard like that on my best day, but it feels amazing to delight in the care and attention of the strangers who have done all that beautiful work.

More deeply than I have ever known anything in my life, that God has poured never-ending unconditional love over me and the whole world for every moment of my existence. That God cried with me for the one I love. I am certain that the Creator and Author of Never-Ending Love is bigger than suicide.

At all times in history, miracles and new life take time to recognize and integrate. Somehow, we falsely believe that resurrection is a complete departure from the suffering that precedes it. The hope and possibility of something new are emerging from what is with all the power and discomfort of change.

Human want is a function of our creation for the divine, the eternal spark that lives inside our mortality. Contentment comes with receiving right now as gift.

Living in false stori is painful. I feel isolated and confused. I try to force my reality onto others.

In Lent, we practice crying out for mercy.

Like snow falls gently over the ground, and fog wraps its way over the earth, it is a gently held intention that allows us to move peacefully through the season we are in.

What could it mean for hope to have a thrill?

When we say “I believe in you” to someone that we care about, we do not mean to say that we intellectually affirm their existence, or that we know all there is to know about them. To say “I believe in you” is to say something of our connection to another person. We are engaged in a relationship that matters.

In my faith tradition, November is both the last month of the faith year, and the month where we remember and celebrate all souls. We write the names of loved ones lost in a book of remembrance and light candles for them. We pray for and with those who have gone to eternity before us. The practices remind me of Ash Wednesday: “Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.”

I just want to say that it has been my overwhelming experience that God trusts you to live your wild and beautiful life.

Practicing gratitude shifts my perspective. The world does not shift to a perfect place because I am grateful, but the practice allows me to see what is real. That everywhere and always there is both dying and rising happening simultaneously. That joy and suffering co-exist. That people are miraculous and imperfect at the same time.

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.

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.

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 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 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 felt the wind blow across my face as the lift neared the top, whispering something I forgot: I know how to fall.

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.

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.

Especially when the gift we long for is a person, receiving the gift changes everything.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In all the sifting, I am seeing the moments that make up my life.

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.

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.

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.

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 miracle of a liturgical year is that Jesus comes to the world – and each of us specifically – again and again. He asks us to carry him once more into the arms of a weary world. To prepare a place for him. To make space for more love, to extend the circle of hospitality in our hearts, and our homes and our whole world.

Join a cohort of pastors for ten months of learning new skills and best practice in a community of support, with access to practical resources.