Those We Follow

Stephen Lamb
Bookish, Vocation
I look forward every year now to the Glen Workshop for much the same reason, knowing that it will heal me in ways I didn’t even know I was broken. Knowing that I become more like the person I want to be after a week there. I know that the whole week will serve as a call to pay attention, that we will be offered continual reminders that maybe, just maybe, beauty will save the world.

RVs, Uniforms, Airplanes, and Rockstars: My Personal Story of Social Justice

Andrea Howat
Justice
My hope is to spend my waking hours working on something I’m connected to — something that is excellent and meets needs beyond myself. I want to work alongside creative people who are making a larger impact on the world around them. I want to help them thrive. My desire is to have the freedom to invest my waking hours exhausting all of my faculties — my strengths, my skills, my passions — on behalf of a cause I'm passionate about. And yes, even a cause that needs me.
Justice and the Pivotal Moment

Justice and the Pivotal Moment

Charlie Peacock
Justice

History is watching. The story of how we are reacting to disease and extreme poverty and hunger is being written. How are you using your imaginative and creative abilities to tell a good story? Art is about making, but it is never better than when it accompanies a life well made. Set your compass toward living a seamless creative life where the full weight of your gifts are offered to the great needs of the world, from the need for beauty to the need for vaccines for the poorest children. This is the just and artful life.

Tangled Up in Green

Tangled Up in Green

Mary Van Denend
Creation Care, Place

Pulling English Ivy is back-breaking work. . . . You are sweaty, thirsty, and exhausted. You use words not part of your common vocabulary. You want to scream. You want to give up. You look back at the sailboat rounding the bend, the stars and stripes flapping in the breeze. WHY are we doing this?

Out of Hiding

Towles Kintz
Bookish, Vocation
I am too early on this journey to say what will come of it — whether or not my artistic insecurities or competitive aspirations will show up again and steal my joy, or if I can reconcile the fact that there will be days when I read nothing of worth, when all I do is play pat-a-cake and write grocery lists, and days when I read well and with purpose, when I write (even if it is just a sentence) something that makes me proud and reminds me who I am.
Letter to a Young Musician

Letter to a Young Musician

Charlie Peacock
Music, Vocation

You've chosen a noble vocation. Or, perhaps music has chosen you? That's even better. An invitation is preferable to a cold call.

At all times and in all ways, you must relentlessly pursue success. That is, as long as success is defined as increased skill and ability, imagination, humility, generosity of spirit, good humor, gratitude, innovation, love, and empathy, and becoming more like Jesus, not less. Your life as a musician is an invitation to become one kind of person in the world and not another, while leaving the world a better place than when you first arrived. It is a unique calling to live a seamless, integrated, creative life before God and the world, cultivating and enjoying the gift of music. Take it seriously . . .

Art House North

Sara Groves
Hospitality, Place, Vocation
A bit heart-numb and recovering from new-artist-itis, I remember the surge of joy I felt at first seeing the Art House — church and gardens — place cultivated.

Our initial conversations there left us feeling challenged and validated at the same time. It was as if something in the air transformed our weary stories of life on the road into stories of the blessing and stewardship of storytelling. I remember walking to the car after our first visit saying, ”I get it, I get it, I get it . . .”

How Simon & Garfunkel Almost Saved My Family

Cameron Dezen Hammon
Music
My parents almost never went out alone together. They smiled giddily as they gave Jane instructions about dinner and bedtime. I paid attention. My father put his hand on my mother’s back as he opened the front door and ushered her out. Something important was happening in this moment, and it had everything to do with two fuzzy looking singers, one strumming a guitar worn high across his chest.

Loving the Doldrums

Rob Hays
Place
Every sports team, professional and amateur alike, goes through peaks and valleys of success and failure, and what my Astros are going through is not unique or even unusual. Even in my childhood memory, I recall the last doldrums of the franchise in the late 80s and early 90s, but those losses and frustrations washed off as easily as grass-stained knees and grubby hands. In adulthood, in the time when you’re supposed to outgrow such things in a fit of sudden maturity, I find myself defending my fandom not only to denizens of other cities, but even to my own neighbors. That’s what happens when you love the worst team in the league.

A Week Changed My Life

Jenni Simmons
Vocation
We drove an hour through clusters of adobe buildings to the college in Santa Fe. As we caught up on our lives over the past five years, I was paying attention to my friend, but also staring slightly slack-jawed at the Sangre de Cristo mountains as we pulled up to campus, fragrant with piñon, sage, juniper, and lavender — some of my favorite smells in the world. Those mountains were painted with hues of brown, gray, pink, orange; others in rich, brick red. The land offered a bleak, stark beauty; it cleansed the palette of my busy mind. Hummingbirds flitted about, and the New Mexico sky and clouds took my breath away.

A Fondue Feast

Heather A. Goodman
Vocation
We create art to communicate, to be known and to make known. Art may begin with self-expression, but it doesn’t stop there. We discover, we respond, and we offer it up to the world. In this, art creates community. It collects the misfits of the world and gives them a home.

At Home in God’s Kingdom

Tala Azar
Hospitality, Justice, Truth
One of the places I felt most welcome in Canada was church. After leaving our first church in Ontario, we attended four different churches over seven years, but I felt at home in all of them in different ways. In all of those churches, worship included singing songs from all over the world, and we often sung in different languages. I heard the story of a world promised to us, where all people have a home and family.
On Songs and Stories: Tokens of Knowledge in Another, Deeper, Rarer Form

On Songs and Stories: Tokens of Knowledge in Another, Deeper, Rarer Form

Steven Garber
Bookish, Truth

Each of these authors tell the truth about the human condition, so their books are “good” in the deepest and truest sense. Not ever moralizing, so that we feel the authors are cheating, insisting on a “Christian” voice that does not belong in the story, or even worse perhaps, a revising of honest faith that does not allow for the breadth and depth of human existence, glories and shames that we are.

The Ball Field

Lindsay Crandall
Place
We went to one game, then another, and suddenly we were back to an old familiar rhythm, the liturgy of the ball field. Take a lawn chair and iced tea (preferably obtained at a gas station on the way to the game), have a chat with one eye on the field, scream wildly at good plays and bad, and take the game personally.

Voices

Eric Peters
Truth
They are with me from the moment I awake: as I brew a pot of coffee, each time I lose patience with my kids, when I see my stubbled face in the mirror, when I peek at my bank account balance, when I scrape my knuckle working on a project, when I am unable to make eye contact with another human in my perceived inferiority, until the moment I finally lay my head on the pillow at day’s end. Sadly, they are loudest when I write, when I seek to string together words and bring something beautiful into the world.
Learning to Cook, and Why it Matters

Learning to Cook, and Why it Matters

Andi Ashworth
Feast, Hospitality

Learning to cook has opened the door to a more flourishing life. Through cooking, I've learned to comfort, celebrate, care for the sick, create traditions, welcome loved ones and strangers, and create environments for relationships to grow. Cooking has a power that goes beyond meeting our basic need for food. Creating good food and welcoming tables speak to the deepest parts of our being. We are created to live artfully in daily life, to need real food to nourish our bodies, to have tables at which to belong, and to have stopping places where we can know and be known.

Rhythm, Time, and the Nine-to-Five

Michelle Gallagher
Vocation
... sometimes working shifts makes you feel as if you are living on another planet far from your neighbors. God has given all people good work to do, and some — nurses, restaurant staff, music teachers, personal trainers, and so on — have been given the gift-burden of odd hours. So let us be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to judge. If you see your neighbor dozing off during the sermon or not attending on a Sunday morning, do not assume they lack faith. They may have just worked a night shift.
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