From “Listening to Your Life: Daily Meditations with Frederick Buechner” by Frederick Buechner These two paragraphs conclude the introduction to The Sacred Journey: WHAT I PROPOSE TO DO now is to try listening to my life as a whole, or at least to certain key moments of the first half of my life thus far, …
From “Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation” by Parker J. Palmer Behind this understanding of vocation is a truth that the ego does not want to hear because it threatens the ego’s turf: everyone has a life that is different from the “I” of daily consciousness, a life that is trying …
From “The Language of the Soul: Meeting God in the Longings of Our Hearts” by Jeff Crosby All of us carry, I’m convinced, deep-seated longings or yearnings in our heart. It is how we are wired as people, whether we are conscious of it or not. And I’ve come to believe that being attentive to …
From “Discernment: Reading the Signs of Daily Life” by Henri Nouwen with Michael J. Christensen and Rebecca J. Laird Henri was a genius in the art of spiritual spelunking as he explored the cave of the heart. Wearing the headlamp of the Holy Spirit, he reached out for every available tool to break new ground …
From “Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation” by Steven Johnson The Web has explored the adjacent possible of its medium far faster than any other communications technology in history. In early 1994, the Web was a text-only medium, pages of words connected by hyperlinks. But within a few years, the possibility …
From “Listening to Your Life: Daily Meditations with Frederick Buechner” by Frederick Buechner A CRAZY, HOLY GRACE I called it. Crazy because whoever could have predicted it? Who can ever foresee the crazy how and when and where of grace that wells up out of the lostness and pain of the world and of our …
From “Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life” by Richard Rohr It is when we begin to pay attention, and seek integrity precisely in the task within the task that we begin to move from the first to the second half of our own lives. Integrity largely has to do with purifying …
From “Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation” by Parker J. Palmer Vocation, the way I was seeking it, becomes an act of will, a grim determination that one’s life will go this way or that whether it wants to or not. If the self is sin-ridden and will bow to truth …
From “Embracing Your Second Calling: Find Passion and Purpose for the Rest of Your Life” by Dale Hanson Bourke General Claudia Kennedy was the first woman to achieve the rank of three-star general in the U.S. Army. She is attractive, feminine, and rough. She was successful in a man’s world at a time when it …
From “Discernment: Reading the Signs of Daily Life” by Henri Nouwen with Michael J. Christensen and Rebecca J. Laird For Henri, discernment was a daily practice. In fact, it was a moment-to-moment practice, because he found no model, no pattern for what he felt called to do. He stepped into the unknown like a tightrope …