Category Archives: Spiritual Direction

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New Release: Re-Creating A Life (by Diane Millis)

Re-Creating A Life Learning How To Tell Our Most Life-Giving Story A New Release by Diane Millis The Lord often reveals what is better to the younger (Rule of Benedict 3.3) [caption id="attachment_4602" align="alignright" width="150"] Diane Millis and Jaleah Taylor, used with permission.[/caption] “May I get a picture of the two of us?” a young…

A Tool for Attending to the Inner Dimensions of Leadership

A Tool for Attending to the Inner Dimensions of Leadership The everyday and lasting pressures of ministry can take their toll on Christian leaders—and venting only helps so much. Thankfully, what we can learn from the practice of spiritual direction is that Christian leaders are not alone in their struggles and that there are ways…

The Messy Middle: Where Change Happens

The Messy Middle: Where Change Happens In the Benedictine Center office, we’ve been talking about Brené Brown’s book Rising Strong (Random House, 2015). She makes that point that, if we want to experience real growth and change in our lives, we can’t skip the “messy middle” part of our stories. The first pass at such an observation…

Change IS Possible

Change IS Possible People can’t change. If I had a dollar for every time I have heard these words uttered, I’d have a pretty hefty savings account. It wasn’t until I recently heard my sixteen-year old niece proclaim them that I knew I’d had enough. I responded, “Honey, if I didn’t believe people could change,…

We Dare To Hope (Part 2 of 2)

We Dare to Hope (Part 2 of 2) In part one of this reflection, I wrote that we much believe our collective Christian narrative, and then we need to tell our story. Here let me say a few things about what sharing our Christian hope might look like. Take Opportunities First, we take the opportunities…

We Dare To Hope (Part 1 of 2)

We Dare to Hope (Part 1 of 2) Climate change is turning the earth into a desert….the opioid epidemic is spreading geographically and increasing across demographic groups…income inequality has risen to almost unimaginable levels…violence and threats against racial and religious minorities has escalated dramatically. Those are just a few examples of the brokenness of the…

Transformative Change: Letting God Set the Agenda

CONTENT CREDIT: This article first appeared at www.pivotpointministries.org and is reprinted with permission. Transformative Change Letting God Set the Agenda When it comes to the human condition and a desire to change, we can become easily frustrated: we think that we want to change . . . but we really don’t. Paul expresses this contradiction…

Stability: The Benedictine Value of Locatedness

Stability The Benedictine Value of Locatedness An old saying touts, “Location, location, location” as the key to property value. Benedictine spirituality also values location, but not the way your real estate broker might. A prominent Benedictine principle is stability, or staying put within a particular community rather than continually traveling on to somewhere else. For…

Practice

Practice We all intuitively use the word practice in at least two ways that we don’t even think about anymore. The first is the idea of doing something to improve your performance for a specific task. I had football practice and my daughter has oboe practice. The second way we talk about practice is the…

Cooling Anger and Warming Sadness

Cooling Anger and Warming Sadness When we are intensely angry it becomes hard to see straight. Conversely, the low drag of sadness can leave us with too little energy to pay much attention. So, for the sake of those in the thick of these emotions, we’ll get straight to the point. Recently a circle of people…

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