It seems to me God’s promise was always a place. A liberation born of location.

You can’t talk someone into their liberation. Telling someone to just get free is like telling someone to stop grinding their teeth in the night. It is not kindness. Freedom requires patience with ourselves, as it takes time to feel at peace if all you’ve ever known is insecurity. It’s the process of your soul learning to trust again—trust that it

I say you have to learn how to be with and a part of something in order to know how to be alone. I think it is only out of a deep anchoring in community that one can ever be free to explore the solitary.

I once heard that joy and happiness do different things to the body. Happiness, which works itself out in the sympathetic nervous system, makes you excitable and energetic. It’s important but fleeting, grounded in the immediacy of a moment or the whim of a feeling. Joy is more tranquil. It has to do with the parasympathetic nervous system, and it’s

And it just hit me, she says. These people came from me. And, I was in and outside of myself at the same time. Maybe this is the heart of joy.

When we encounter ourselves on the shore of the unreal, together we implement new habits of self and communal compassion, and patience, and inclusion, so that we can safely travel into what we really think and feel. It requires that we tell the truth—or rather, what we believe to be true in the season of life we are in. Even if our voices are

Once possessed, we must steady ourselves habitually in order to see the way we were meant to. For some, stillness will not suffice. The stillness must mature into an inner quiet—the noise of the exterior world ricocheting off your flesh. To cultivate habits of rest, we must discern what noise has found a way to penetrate our soul. And as we detect

Perhaps you’ve known that person who devours beauty as if it belongs to them. It is a possessive wonder. It eats not to delight but to collect, trade, and boast. It consumes beauty to grow in ego, not in love. It climbs mountains to gain ownership, not to gain freedom.

We don’t just welcome you or accept you; we need you. We are insufficient without you.