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This from Tsh Oxenrider today:

A few readers found it selfish, and I can see why it seems that way. It sounds like advice to put your needs before the needs of others. And maybe it means that, in some way.

But I read it as this: what makes you come alive is, in fact, what the world needs.

It’s easy to walk through the ins and outs of our weeks and months with a bit of numbing potion rubbed on our bodies—wake up, do this thing, then the other thing, rinse and repeat. Run errands, help with homework, log hours at the office. Day after day.
Now, there’s beauty in the everyday and in the small, so don’t get me wrong—I’ve come to appreciate the liturgy infused in my normal routine. But I often fail to recognize the liturgy itself, and that causes me to go a bit slack-jawed with malaise, too tired or too indifferent to the still, small stirring inside me that brings forth life.

But when I turn off the Spotify, when I stop the mental trails of dinner plans and play dates and work assignments, when I find a little quiet space for my brain and heart to do some dancing… I can sense a tap-tap-tap of life. I can hear God whisper to me ways and reasons He’s breathed into me life. And it involves, quite naturally, those things I can’t stop thinking about.

on love which invites you into rest

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I’ve written enough, I think, on slowing down, on making space for rest, on simplifying and giving room for roots to spread. I can recite this stuff in my sleep. I long for this season to be more about living and breathing this stuff, seeing what the shoes feel like once they’re worn in and how to deal with the blisters on my toes. But that comes with the hard cost of seeing how far short I will inevitably fall.

Because there will be days – so many days – where I fall spectacularly, and find that I really am quite rubbish, on my own, at this simplifying thing. Utterly exhausted after a busy week and another coming up, I ended up 2.30pm, crumpled up by the bus stop in tears and needing the voice of a kind boyfriend coupled with the whisper I had stifled in my heart saying ‘Go home. It’s ok’.

The tears were from

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on making space for the roots

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This Lent, I’m jotting down some of my thoughts in relation to food and simplicity over here. The problem with dipping my toes into an idea like simplicity is that gradually, the current draws me in and I realise just how far I’ve come upstream – how every corner of my life has become prey to the busy-and-crowded. The unsimple.

This became especially apparent this morning as I woke up, tired from a full week, and knowing that a full day lay ahead, and the next day, and the next…. Of course, this is due to choices I have made and when I am out doing this stuff I forget how I wanted to curl up under the duvet and say no to it all just a few hours earlier. It’s only every now and again – normally last thing at night or first thing – that I feel thinly spread.

There’s an anxiety that comes from knowing we are created to have feet firmly touching the earth and yet they’re flying over it as if racing towards some ever-deferred goal. That’s the anxiety I feel on mornings like this. Continue reading →

on vulner-ability

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Vulnerability. Risk taking. Bravery. These words I have held close to my heart, readily dished out as I talked with friends . How I have tried, oh I have tried, to be intentional about living more deeply into these things. Being more of these things.

Fast forward to early evening in Paris. Weak light filters through the windows. We lie eyes closed, stealing glances every few minutes. We’re of course staring at each other through these half-closed eyes until we both catch eyes at the same time and are forced to acknowledge the silence. Continue reading →