09 Mar

Posted at 15:15h in Faith
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If you find yourself confused, if you feel you are walking in the dark not knowing if the ground in front of you is safe, not knowing where you are headed: welcome. Maybe your faith has started to crack apart. Maybe you have spent a decade or more caring for children and now the pressure has finally eased you do not know who you are. Maybe after two years living through a global pandemic the things you thought you wanted no longer make sense. Maybe you have suffered loss and tragedy and are questioning everything. This is for you. In the last decade I learnt...

28 Feb

Posted at 12:51h in Faith
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This is part two of a post about how my understanding that God is male got in the way of me figuring out what I want. You can just read this post (it will still make sense), or you might like to read part one first. You can read part one here. The idea that God is male is deeply ingrained. Inside the church and outside of it. For a long time this didn't bother me. I didn't even think about it. It was just the way it was and had always been. But in the last decade, as I have woken up...

25 Feb

Posted at 16:25h in Faith
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In my last blog post I wrote about the most dangerous question: What do you want? This week I want to write to you about a belief that has gotten in the way of me asking that question. (And this is a bit convoluted so you’ll have to go with me). The belief: God is a man. Okay, let’s start with the easy stuff. No, of course I dont think God is a man (ie. hu-man), apart from when he appeared in fully human form as Jesus. He is divine, ultimate, above and beyond our comprehension of what ‘man’ or gender is. But despite this...

11 Feb

Posted at 15:35h in Faith, Mental health
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I want to tell you about the most dangerous question. And when I say dangerous I mean; difficult, contested, threatened but ultimately life-giving question. It is a question I have been asking myself for the past couple of years on a regular basis. I am ill-equipped to answer it. The question: What do you want? Or, as I ask myself, What do I want? This question shouldn't be hard. I know for lots of people it isn't. Most (not all admittedly, but most) men dont seem to struggle with this question. And I have numerous female friends who don't have to pause for a second before clearly...

01 Feb

Posted at 12:37h in Uncategorised
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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...

22 Nov

Posted at 14:24h in Faith, Mental health
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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...

15 Sep

Posted at 19:21h in Beauty, Faith, Living well
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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,...