Today I was interviewed by my friend Ryan Cook. He filmed our conversation for his blog. In our chat we talk depression, anxiety and faith. I say too much, too quickly. As someone who often talks faster than she thinks this was slightly dangerous...
Today is Ash Wednesday. In churches all over the country people are gathering to repent of their sins. They are kneeling while the vicar or celebrant draws a cross of ashes on their forehead as they prepare for Lent, and after that, Easter. I like this. A stopping point, a place to be reminded. It is only recently I have understood what repentance is really about. Maybe you never mis-used or misunderstood repentance, but for a long time I did. Repentance was part of the conversation about how I was messing it up and was not able to get my shit together. It was another way to...
There was a time in my marriage when, in amongst the normal and the good, a space had started to open up. A distance was widening between us. My plan was to ignore it. If I busied myself with the day to day I assumed (I hoped) we would one day naturally regain our previous ease, our relaxed intimacy. While I waited, I held Matt at arms length. To protect my heart, I hid how I was feeling. Matt tried to talk to me about how things were, but I refused to acknowledge it. I had neither the time nor energy nor courage to...
In the words of Ferris Bueller, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it”. Last night I took out my notebook and wrote a list of all I needed to do today. It was long. Impossibly long. Long enough to fill my time today, and probably tomorrow and the rest of the week too. I have never had a high-powered executive job where I get to wear a power suit a la movies from the 80s set on Wall Street. I am not on three different phone lines at once, delegating like a...
I struggle to articulate the discoveries I have been making about my faith, in part because what I believe cannot easily be squeezed into language. It cannot be condensed and compressed into words, black and white on the page. I am only ever able to scratch the surface, if I am lucky. Even if I had all the time in the world I would still remain unable to articulate the breadth and depth and complexity, the clear and pure simplicity, of the faith I am discovering. This was not always the case. I used to find my faith far more straight forward. For every question there was an...
With regard to my faith I have spent a lot time writing about what isn't. Exploding lies. Debunking myths. That sort of thing. I write about this because it is what I have spent a lot of my time doing in my real life. Unravelling thoughts about my beliefs, chucking out systems that have become constraining. I struggled under the weight of some repressive ideas for a long time. No one forced these mindsets on me. In the way that most things happen it was a mix of my personality, my experiences, my choice, my upbringing, and my pride that combined to intoxicate me with the notion...
It is tempting to want to be a builder; to work with a plan, to know what you are going to produce before you have finished, to be sure about all the details. But better by far to be a gardener; to work with the elements, to be surprised by the things that grow and those that don't, to be malleable and open to change, to have to adapt in order to thrive. Builders have a level of certainty about the outcome. They plan and prepare and Are-Not-Wrong. Rarely does anything happen along the way to change what they are attempting. Sure,...