Unforced Rhythms of Grace

At the beginning of the year I embraced Intuitive Eating.  Some of you have asked what this is.  To really understand you can check out the website of the original Intuitive Eating creators Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch.  For me this was about making peace with food.  It is also about accepting my body and that I don't need to look a certain way to be healthy. The first principle of intuitive eating is to reject diet mentality.  In order to do that, I decided to step away from the gym for a while.  I also gave myself permission to eat whatever my body was asking for.  In the beginning, I did really well with intuitive eating.  I found my body was asking for a wide variety of food and I was feeling pretty good. In the month since I returned from my vacation I have travelled for work and been sick more than once.  I have found that instead of figuring out what my body wanted, I would just eat so that I was no longer hungry.  The thin...

On a social media platform one of the people I follow asked about whether we considered ourselves resilient and if we didn't, what got in the way.  I stopped and thought for a moment.  The answer is complicated because my view of resilience has changed without me noticing. In my early life I had more than my share of trauma.  People always said I was strong because I would keep on functioning at some level.  In a way, that is a form of resilience, the ability to keep on going in spite of what happened.  I honor that part of me.  The thing is, that keeping a stiff upper lip cost me in many ways.  So that even though I continued to function, I would be really struggling on the inside.  I didn't take the time to process what happened, so those events would creep up on me when I least expected it. Recently I have found that when something happens, I have the capacity to deal with it.  I find space to allow myself to process.  I reach out...

Note: I received access to an extended excerpt of this book as part of the HarperOne as a member of the launch team.   In the year 2000 I did the Jesus prayer thing and started figuring out next steps.  One of the first things I did was purchase the TouchPoint bible at the church I was attending at the time.  It is written in the New Living Translation (NLT).  The NLT is a very readable version of the bible although it is not known for being the most accurate translation. I have purchased a number of bibles in other translations since then but, that TouchPoint bible remains my favourite.  At the time I loved it because it had bible promises for every issue I could think of.  Look up anger at the Helpfinder and it gives you a bunch of questions to think about and several verses like: "Stop your anger!...Do not envy others -- it only leads to harm."  Psalm 37:8, NLT I think I like it now because it is old and familiar...  and it is the ...

When I tell people that I have been exploring faith questions and that has lead me to leave the church community I was going to, the automatic question is something like 'so are you questioning your belief in God?'  They want to understand what I mean.  At the beginning I wasn't even sure what I meant.  I momentarily experimented with the idea of not believing in God.  I remember the moment in my car.  I was waiting for the light to change at the corner of St. Anne's and Bishop Grandin.  The experiment didn't last the light cycle.  Before the light turned green, I was back to believing in God.  I couldn't imagine life without believing in something bigger than me.  I believe that a higher something has some positive impact on the world. My big sticking point was the concept of sin.  I have found that by trying to avoid sin, I just made myself miserable.  The things I was doing that I labelled as sin were really just coping mecha...