Shows
The Slow Way101. On Holy PleasureI find that Jesus is always in the business of calling us to his way, a way that will totally ruin our comfort seeking, surface level naval gazing. He demands a bigger, truer pleasure. The kind that wakes up our whole selves — our desires, our bodies, our moral courage, our self-giving love. This is the final The Slow Way Podcast episode. I have delighted in recording these episodes, in sharing my writing with you in this particular way. I know some of you will be disappointed with my decision to close this part of my work down. Me...2024-09-1715 min
The Slow Way100. Celebrating 100 Episodes of The Slow Way Podcast!Celebrating all the stories, all the practices, all my attempts to tell the truth. Here's a link to Micha's new book Blessed Are The Rest of Us: How Limits and Longing Make Us Whole. Find it at Target, Barnes and Noble, Amazon, and Bookshop.org Blessed on Amazon here! It's availble at 40% off the price of other booksellers at BakerBookHouse. Just use the code SLOWWAY at checkout. Learn more about Micha's other podcast The Lucky Few at their website and instagram. Micha will be hosting a weekly virtual book club for paid subscribers this spring, following the release of her new book...2024-07-0211 minThe Slow Way99. Sunshine and Vapor It’s true that the world is beautiful. And it’s also true that the beauty and goodness in the world can dissolve in front of us. Life is unpredictable, like the author of Ecclesiastes says, it’s a “chasing after the wind.” Click here for Robert Siegel's book A Pentecost of Finches. Here's a link to his poem "Aubade." I love the Bible Project. Here's their summary of the book of Ecclesiastes. Find the Lectio Divina scripture passage here. Here's a link to Micha's new book Blessed Are The Rest of Us: How Limits and Longing Make Us Whole. Find it at Targ...2024-06-2516 minThe Slow Way98. Meaning and the Stories That Shape UsHow we make meaning is how we live. And the gift of the spiritual life is that it teaches us to make meaning, to find our story in a bigger story. * I’m looking for stories from YOU about what The Slow Way means to you. Here’s how to help! Record a video or voice memo of you sharing one or more of the following: Where do you listen to The Slow Way? How do you use the Slow Practices? How has The Slow Way mattered in your life? Send your v...2024-06-1817 minThe Slow Way97. On Increasing and Deepening "Our Capacity for God"I’ve been working out how to offer the young people I love a vibrant faith that insists on their own goodness, their own original spark, and I am still fumbling a bit to give them language for encountering God. I believe that the long-way of conversion is a good way. And that Jesus’s invitation to move toward wholeness is the kind of faith I want for the kids I love. I’m not sure if there’s an answer to these questions, but I do believe that for all of us who are reconstructing our faith with...2024-06-1119 min
The Slow Way96. The Practice of Seeing in a Harsh WorldWhen we pray, when we practice holding tight to the vision God has for the world, it makes sense that we might begin to make eye contact as a form of prayer. You are important. You matter. I see you. What is the life of loving our neighbor if it isn’t the overflow of sacred love? Jonathan spent the day waiting to be seen. And my gift was that I had the longing of Holy Spirit in me, allowing me to see him, to take his hand in mine. Isnt' this the spiritual life? Pre...2024-06-0415 min
The Slow Way95. On Being "At Peace and In Place"The work of God is not just slow, it’s remarkable. It’s intricate. It’s miraculous, precisely because it takes so much time. As I wrote last week, we are unlearning the ways of an anxious culture. When I first began this process of unlearning, I hoped it wouldn’t ache to release the anxious ways I had followed all of my life. But it did ache, and it still does. Slowing our work and bodies, and attempting to realign ourselves with the rhythm of the natural world involves real risk. It can hurt. We need mentors for such a t...2024-05-2814 min
The Slow Way94. Contemplative Life—Strange, Mysterious, QueerThose unlearning the ways of an anxious culture are leaning into queerness as a metaphor for approaching the sacred: We are leaning into “possibilities beyond”...We’re learning a new path. Find Jonathan Merritt's children's book My Guncle and Me here. Find Queering Contemplation by Cassidy Hall here. Find the Contemplating Now podcast episode I quoted from with Therese Taylor-Stinson here. The prayer we pray in A Slow Practice can be found in The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton. Here's a link to Micha's new book Blessed Are The Rest of Us: How Limits and Longing Make Us...2024-05-2112 min
The Slow Way93. A Conversation With Chris Hohorst (my husband!)This past week I made it home for good after a wild month of traveling and speaking about my book, just in time to sit down with my toughest reader, my life companion, and my favorite guy around, Chris Hohorst, on his experience of Blessed Are The Rest of Us. We've never done this sort of thing before, and it was a delight. A few more links! Find out more about Suzanne Stabile here. Here's a link to Micha's new book Blessed Are The Rest of Us: How Limits and Longing Make Us Whole. Find it at T...2024-05-1430 minThe Slow Way92. The Blessed Are The Rest of Us book launch conversation, with special guest, Shauna NiequistLast Wednesday night, I had the opportunity to gather with friends, family, and readers in the beautiful General Theological Seminary Chapel of the Good Shepherd, to talk about my new book, Blessed Are the Rest of Us. I was honored to have my friend, the beloved author Shauna Niequist, with me to chat about the process of writing the book, some of the books major themes, and even what I hope the youth group I help lead (who were also present in the room!) can take from this book. So excited to share with you: The Blessed A...2024-04-1647 min
The Slow Way91. An Introduction to Blessed Are The Rest of UsToday my newest book Blessed Are The Rest of Us comes into the world! Today’s episode is going to be a little different. I’m sharing a bit about how I came to write this book and what the big ideas are underneath the story I tell of loving and raising my son, Ace. How did I come to realize that this wasn't just a story about my son, but a story about all of us in Jesus's poem in Matthew 5? How did I begin to recognize that the invitation to explore Ace's vulnerability was actually an in...2024-04-0919 min
The Slow Way90. Easter, Worms, and SoilAs Jeff Chu says, “A robust theology of the compost reminds us that death and the things of death, our sin, our suffering, the ways we hurt each other, the ways we harm ourselves— These things are never the end of God's story.” What a thing: to choose to believe that God can redeem our slow-transforming lives, to believe that the Divine slammed God’s own heart back into a dead body, waking it up, announcing that death and suffering is never the truest narrative. This reflection and practice were also published this week in The Slow Way Letter o...2024-04-0211 min
Hey AmarilloMicha BoyettA conversation with Micha Boyett, Jason's youngest sister and the author of the new book Blessed Are the Rest of Us. Micha is a poet, writer, pastor and podcaster whose work includes advocacy for individuals with Down syndrome. She's the cohost of the popular podcast The Lucky Few and will be preaching in Amarillo at St. Andrew's Episcopal Church on Sunday, May 5. She and host Jason Boyett discuss Micha's upbringing in Amarillo, her son Ace and the family's connection to the Down syndrome community, and how Amarillo continues to inform her life and writing—even though she no longer liv...2024-04-0158 min
The Slow Way89. A Poem For Good FridayIn a moment when his life was fading, when his suffering was at its height, I believe Jesus was responding to our suffering with his own suffering. Acknowledging our grief with his own. Today I'm sharing an orginal poem by me, along with a practice of sacred listening to a bit of the Good Friday story. This reflection and practice were also published this week in The Slow Way Letter on Substack. Learn more about Micha's other podcast The Lucky Few at their website and instagram. Micha will be hosting a weekly virtual book club for paid s...2024-03-2916 min
The Slow Way88. Holy Week, And "The True Nature of Things"This Holy Week, we will be reminded that Jesus's answer to the reality of human pain and suffering was to suffer. It ws to gather all of us up and live out the dream of God. Find Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most here. Learn more about Micha's other podcast The Lucky Few at their website and instagram. Micha will be hosting a weekly virtual book club for paid subscribers this spring, following the release of her new book. If you're interested, become a paid subscriber and support her work! Here's a link to learn more. Thi...2024-03-2613 min
The Slow Way87. Lent, And How Sometimes It's SimpleThis week, I want to remind us that the movement toward wholeness doesn’t have to be that complicated. Sometimes it’s simply allowing ourselves to recognize that we’re loved. Find Savannah Guthrie's book Mostly What God Does here. Here's a link to A Celtic Primer: The Complete Celtic Worship Resource and Collection. Learn more about Micha's other podcast The Lucky Few at their website and instagram. Micha will be hosting a weekly virtual book club for paid subscribers this spring, following the release of her new book. If you're interested, become a paid subscriber and support he...2024-03-1911 min
The Slow Way86. Lent, Vulnerability, and Coming Back to the EssentialWhen we see the world as it really is we get to live in such a way that our vulnerabilities are exposed. Vulnerability is the way we give and receive love. Vulnerability is also the way toward pain. This is not anything new in the world. It’s simply love—sharing our lives, being honest about our pain, and allowing ourselves to be decentered and recentered. We don’t do it so we can be an example. But when we do it with authentic generosity, we can sometimes be an invitation for others. Find Michael Rudzena's recent sermons here, h...2024-03-1212 min
The Slow Way85: Lent, and Living in Turtle TimeWe always have an invitation to learn from the wise ones among us, and the turtles and tortoises of the world may not be sexy, but they carry a knowing that just might settle our souls. When we’re tempted to speed up simply because everything around us says to hurry, let’s remind ourselves that this Lent we’re living in Turtle Time. Slowing ourselves so that we can explore the questions that matter, pursue the life that truly satisfies, use our resources with wisdom and love for the people, land, and creatures among us. Find Sy...2024-03-0514 min
The Slow Way84: Lent, Repentance, and “Practices for an Evolving Faith”Repentance is the acknowledgment of our missteps, and the adjustment of our stance so we are in line with Divine Love. And this, according to Sarah Bessey, requires vulnerability and grief. Can we get serious this week? Serious enough to acknowledge to ourselves, to God, and to one another how we have missed the path of Love? May we carry the weight of God’s transformative kindness, believing Sarah’s words: “There is no place you can go where you will outrun God’s love and longing for your wholeness.” Find Sarah Bessey's new book Field Notes for the...2024-02-2717 min
The Slow Way83. Lent is a Journey InwardWhat makes Lent powerful is its insistence on not celebrating, on demanding a season of restraint. What makes Lent powerful is that it invites us to make a choice toward honesty with God and ourselves, a choice to get solemn about what we discover in our core, and live that restraint on the outside. It's a forty day invitation to move from the edges of our lives to the deep, heavy center of us. Read Jesus's words in Matthew 23 Sarah Bessey's new book Field Notes for the Wilderness releases today! Brian McLaren's book is Faith After D...2024-02-2017 min
The Slow Way82. Dust and Water, a Reflection on Ash WednesdayAsh Wednesday sounds morbid to some, but it exists to tell us the truth, to ask us to come close to the reality of this life: we are always transforming, growing toward wisdom. And it will end. But I love that in the Christian tradition death is understood as a both/and. It is a result of brokenness in the world and it is also a threshold, a transition to fullness of life. As the Apostle Paul wrote, death is still with us, but through Jesus it has lost its sting. Read Life Worth Living: A Guide to Wh...2024-02-1316 min
The Slow Way81: The Practice of Letting GoSurrender is sometimes the work of naming my weaknesses and allowing them to drag me to the love of God, where I am fully known, and fully myself, with or without my abilities, usefulness, or performance.. Find “Lake Coatepeque” on The Brilliance’s newest album Feel It. Read For the Life of the World by Alexander Shmemann Find Psalm 104 here Micha is offering a zoom workshop for her Substack paid subscribers this February 24. Here's a link to learn more about it! If you're interested in participating in the workshop and future online interactive conversations with me, become a paid subs...2024-02-0616 min
The Slow Way80. Epiphany and Our Invitation to EnchantmentPrayer is an act of intention where I don’t deny the micro and macro ache of this life. The hurts that arrive in our lives or the lives of those we love, and the Greater Pain that lives in our societies and systems. And still we choose the thorny, winding path of hope. We choose it with eyes wide open, so we may see when we bump into God. Find Everything Belongs by Richard Rohr. Read Hunting Magic Eels: Recovering an Enchanted Faith in a Skeptical Age by Richard Beck. Read Marilynne Robinson's novel Gilead. Read...2024-01-3013 min
The Slow Way79. The Sacred Lives Beside The Suffering, An Epiphany ReflectionGlory somehow shows up when we suffer, not because suffering is a payment, but because it’s a truth-teller, a revealer. We need winter—for all its ache and ice and clarity—where Love has more space in all the sparseness to reach us. Find Everything Belongs by Richard Rohr Read Psalm 27 here. If you're interested in more on Epiphany a link to Good Shepherd New York's Epiphany Guide. Micha is offering a zoom workshop for her Substack paid subscribers this Febrary 24. Here's a link to learn more about it! If you're interested in participating in the work...2024-01-2312 min
The Slow Way78. Epiphany and Blessing All There Is to BlessThere is no boundary around holiness: all of this world is worthy of God’s holy smudge. In fact, the act of blessing is simply recognizing and marking what is already true. This is the task of Epiphany for us. We show up like the wise men, carrying our gifts. What we’re invited to bring the Christ is almost always what we love. Blessing the people and things around us is just another way of saying that this world matters, that life is more than the edges of things; it’s the white hot center where meaning lives. Blessi...2024-01-1616 min
The Slow Way77. Winter is for RestCan we allow ourselves to cease the relentless pursuit of doing enough, and instead choose to be kind to ourselves and one another—to make warm and generous meals, to sit with people we love under blankets, to dream, and to ask ourselves who we are if we’re not proving ourselves? These are the spiritual practices of Epiphany, to be still long enough to see the revelation for all that is. Find Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times. Here's a link to The Little Book of Hygge: The Danish Way to Live Well. This r...2024-01-0912 min
The Slow Way76. Whole Are The Ones Who WaitThis Christmas, Jesus is making us whole through our longings, our longings for a world of goodness and peace, and also, our longings for things to be put right in our own lives. Find Jonathan Pennington's book The Sermon on the Mount and Human Flourishing here. Read the Beatitudes here. Find Phillippians 2 here. Read Isaiah 30 here. This reflection and practice were also published this week in The Slow Way Newsletter. Find a transcript of this episode here. Find Micha's website and sign up for her weekly newsletter here Find Micha on Instagram Find Micha on Threads. Micha's other (award win...2023-12-2415 min
The Slow Way75. The Story That Goes On Forever“…at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story,” I whispered. It was 2 am. “...which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever.” The work of helping my dad into the next story was holy and heavy with love. And the words I spoke lived in the realest part of me. I think that’s what it means to believe, even when doubt is ever present. Maybe it’s strange to write about death during Advent, a season of waiting for a birth. But birth and death go hand in hand, and I’ve been thin...2023-12-2015 min
The Slow Way74. Practicing the Way of Mary, An Advent of Believing in Believing Mary sings that God’s justice moves us toward liberation for the ones who are discarded by society, allowing a girl like her, pregnant outside of marriage, to overcome the shame and humiliation her culture placed on her, to reverse the rules of who gets discarded, and who gets to matter. I am certain that Jesus’s courageous and wise young mother taught him the power of a God who brings hope to the least of these, that it was her teaching that led him to the heart of the good news he came bringing. Read The Fir...2023-12-1212 min
The Slow Way73. This Advent: Believing in BelievingMystery is the core of my faith these days. Because no matter how many people prop a pine tree in water and twist twinkle lights through it, no matter how many Playmobile nativity sets are opened and play-acted by little ones, the story of baby Jesus is wild. When we allow ourselves to sit with it, to ask all the questions there are to ask, we are left with a choice—to either believe in just how marvelous it would be if the Creator came to us as a babe, or to embrace a season of gifts and cozy an...2023-12-0517 min
The Slow Way72. Stop, Get QuietThis Thanksgiving, can we think about the concept of gratitude beyond lists or feelings? Let's consider gratitude as a practice that begins in our own bodies, in our choice to stop, our choice to quiet our minds. When we learn to stop and get quiet so we can really look, our graittude becomes more than a feeling. It becomes something we carry into our ordinary lives. Find the Ted Talk from Benedictine monk David Stendl-Rast here. Find the video A Grateful Day with Brother David Steindl-Rast here. This reflection and practice were also published this week in The Slow...2023-11-2118 min
The Slow Way71. Compelled By One BreathWe who believe in the one Breath can either spend our lives demanding it show up where we'd like for it to show up, or we can stand in the open air and let it blow when it pleases. Find Brian Doyle's One Long River of Song here. Find my previous Slow Way Letter inspired by Doyle's book of essays. Find more information on PROMPT speech therapy here. This reflection and practice were also published this week in The Slow Way Newsletter. Find a transcript of this episode here. Find Micha's website and sign up for her weekly newsl...2023-11-1417 min
The Slow Way70. Seventy Percent HopeWe rarely get to finish, do we? Seventy percent. Good enough? Love and apologies and trying again. Hoping for grace to soften the edges of the thirty percent. What else can we do? Find Maggie Smith's You Could Make This Place Beautiful here. This reflection and practice were also published this week in The Slow Way Newsletter. Find a transcript of this episode here. Find Micha's website and sign up for her weekly newsletter here Find Micha on Instagram Find Micha on Threads. Micha's other (award winning!) podcast, The Lucky Few, is all about Down syndrome advocacy. She cohosts...2023-11-0714 min
The Slow Way69. This Day The Lord Has MadeBut sometimes prayer is the act of moving things around, recognizing what in our lives needs removing, and what in our lives needs transforming. The intricate system of our inner soil can be rich, or it can be lacking. And it can survive on its own for a while. But eventually, if we neglect it, the weeds spring up, the soil loses nutrients. Our lifeforce slumps. Padraig O'Tuama's new book of prayers, Being Here, is available for preorder. It will release in January. This reflection and practice were also published this week in The Slow Way Newsletter. Find a...2023-10-3114 min
The Slow Way68. Imagining the Saints, Undoing the Knots Find Amber Haines’ and Seth Haines’ new collaborative book, The Deep Down Things here. Ivanka Demchuk's icon of young Mary receiving the angel can be found here. Click here to view Caravaggio's “The Incredulity of St. Thomas.” And see his “Madonna and Child with St. Anne” here. Erin Lane writes extensively about the concept of "mothering" as a verb rather than a noun in her book Someone Other Than A Mother. Read Mary's song of liberation in Luke Chapter 1. If you're interested in learning more about prayer using icons, Henri Nouwen's book Behold the Beauty of the Lord is a great place to st...2023-10-2416 min
The Slow Way67. Our Blessed SmallnessFrom Every Moment Holy by Douglas McKelvey. “We praise you, O Lord, for our limits! limits you have given us for our good and for your glory.” The subtitle of Blessed Are the Rest of Us is “How Limits and Longing Make Us Whole.” I love that word “limits.” Limits speaks to more than weakness, more than failure, more than the ache in us for justice. Our limits in the presence of the divine is part of the core of who we are. Limits, as the prayer says, are for our good. ...2023-10-2316 min
The Slow Way66. On Falling Short of LoveHow do we live, in all our moments, learning to emulate God’s mercy? I can be frustrated with the world’s lack of care, the intrinsic ableism in all of us that allows for casual complaints about kids and their need to get with the program of typical development. But, even in that hurt I am invited to curiosity and care. To be a mercy-emulator, to practice the way of Jesus. To see the dignity and worth of every person I encounter, pausing in my frustration long enough to show interest in the real person, made in th...2023-10-1014 min
The Slow Way65: Ritual, Or Circling Around the FlameRitual is part of our daily lives. Rituals are the ways we honor moments of significance. The special occasions that bring us into community with loved ones throughout the year. The carols we sing at Christmas, the blowing out of birthday candles, the first dance at a wedding, the pallbearers carrying the casket, the blessing of babies in our places of worship. We need rituals to make sense of the world. And we need rituals to make room for the holy in our presence, to recognize that the holy is already among...2023-10-0313 min
The Slow Way64. Being Set Free By Love. Being Set Free To Love. Let me be set free by love, O God. Let me be set free to love. What if that’s the thing? Settling into the reality of our lives, receiving it as it is. And being set free by love—the love of ourselves, the love of this season of our lives, the love of ones we’re charged to care for, and the love of God? Discerning the law of love in our hearts, and being set free by it. Links: Click here to find Celtic Benediction: Morning an...2023-09-2614 min
The Slow Way63: Attention and ImaginationAre we paying close enough attention to look with the eyes of reverence, to make space in our imaginations for an image of God that stretches beyond our small experiences and into the “eternal current” of God at work in the world? Links: Click here to find the article "The Feminine Way to Wisdom" by David Brooks. This reflection and practice were also published this week in The Slow Way Newsletter. Find a transcript of this episode here. Find Micha's website and sign up for her weekly newsletter here Find Micha on Instagram Find Micha on Th...2023-09-1912 min
The Slow Way62: Unfolding Into WholenessWholeness is not asking for an entirely new way. It’s simply asking us to take what’s already there and press out the creases, a little at a time. Links: Find the full poem by Antonio Machado andTranslated by Robert Bly here. Find Radical Acceptance: Embracing your Life with the Heart of a Buddha, by Tara Branch here. Find my instagram posts about the brain treatment Ace and I recieved here and here. This reflection and practice were also published this week in The Slow Way Newsletter. Find a transcript of this episode here. Fin...2023-09-1213 min
The Slow WayREPLAY: On Healing and Beginning AgainToday’s replay is from Episode 18, in which I shared about how, after my dad died, I went months without the debilitating migraines that defined my two years before his death. How, when I recorded that episode, I hoped those months of lightness without pain were a true healing. I had been worried to share that story, because what if I called myself “healed” and then the migraines came back? Listener, they did. In the summer of 2022 they returned with a vengeance and have remained. What do I believe about those sweet month...2023-09-0621 min
The Slow WayREPLAY: On Seeking God (Or Living Out a Whole and Healthy Faith)This replay of Episode 34 from August 2022 considers the language we use when we talk about “seeking God.” What is authentic faith? And what does it mean for it to be a long-term, whole-hearted pursuit that involves the world around us, our stories, and our particular ways of being. Healthy spirituality needs the body. It can never be a mind-trick. It involves the kind of integration required in knowing our habits and motives and weaknesses, and connecting those to our pursuit of the expansive love of the Divine. Links: This reflection and practice were also published in my S...2023-08-2920 min
The Slow Way61: A Blessing For The End of SummerMay the last late light of summer glow spread wide enough to stir your longing for whatever it is your body, your soul, your heart is asking you to notice. May you walk slower this week into the end of the summer so you can listen to the stirring. May you notice the nudge of the Spirit pointing to love even in the close of one story and the opening sentence of another. Links: I announced my new book and cover a few weeks ago on Instagram. So excited to share it with you! This...2023-08-2218 min
The Slow Way60. How The Old Thing Lets Go“Inasmuch as we are dying,” Shannon K. Evans writes in her book Rewilding Motherhood, “we are also creating. Inasmuch as old things are passing away, we are also being made new. We are less of who we were and so much more of who we will be. . . God is all in all.” For something to become new, the old thing must let go—a shadow lengthening, a leaf releasing from the branch, the earth tilting ever so slightly away from the source of light. Links: Here's a link to Shannon K. Evans' book Rewilding Motherhood I a...2023-08-1514 min
The Slow Way59: Hummingbird HeartWe only get two billion heartbeats. We can hummingbird them, or tortoise them. The faster we zoom, the more our souls—our engines—burn. That doesn't always have to be a terrible thing. But it does matter. Links: Here's a link to Marjorie J. Thompson’s Soul Feast: An Invitation to the Christian Spiritual Life And here's a link to One Long River of Song by Brian Doyle. I announced my new book and cover a few weeks agoon Instagram. So excited to share it with you! This reflection and practice were also published this week...2023-08-0818 min
The Slow Way58: Grief, Wisdom, and Circles of WelcomeWhat does it mean to let our grief shape us into elders, choosing wisdom over bitterness? I’m certain the answer is in the circle of welcome: the magic of our fragile hearts holding one another’s fragile hearts, and how, somehow, in this uncertain carrying we honor each other’s experiences, loves, and sufferings. We learn to be vulnerable together, which just might be the hardest thing of all. Links: Here's a link to The Wild Edge of Sorrow And here's a link to One Long River of Song. I announced my new book and...2023-08-0113 min
The Slow Way57. On Extravagant GenerosityMuch of life is a choice to fling or not to fling. Will we be extravagant with the love we’ve been given, or will we hold ourselves back because of fear, the chance that all our flinging might not make a difference, or that we’ll be hurt in the process? “An abundant imagination feeds us courage,” my pastor Michael Rudzena said. “There is more than just one shot. There are seeds showering down all around us.” Links: Here's a link to some of Barbara Brown Taylor's sermon on this passage. And here's a link to my pasto...2023-07-2612 min
The Slow Way56. Friendship in the Shared QuestionsIn his longest recorded sermon, Jesus taught about the importance of the process. “Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.” Asking, I’ve learned, isn’t a one and done process. Just as searching is a thing that keeps on going. We turn the room over until we find one treasure, and then—amazingly?— that treasure leads us to hunt for the next one. A...2023-07-1814 min
The Slow Way55. Water, Mercy, and PlayI have a lot of regrets from my younger years of loving a God who seemed both demanding of sacrifice and somehow, simultaneously, filled with mercy. I didn’t know how to reconcile the two. So I preached a message of both to myself. Struggling with how one might turn one’s heart around without Love in the first place. Not knowing how, when I was most afraid, I leaned into the hollow how-tos, forgoing mercy when it felt too complicated. Sometimes exclusion is easier than the playful mercy of Jesus. Links: I announced my new...2023-07-1117 min
The Slow Way54. "Sin Bravely": Pride Month and the Lens of JesusI haven’t written much about how I became LGBTQ+ affirming almost a decade ago. It was a slow process, one that was born of relationships with dear-to-me queer folks, revelations of the high percentage of LGBTQ+ people who have suffered deeply in the often abusive hand of the Church, and it was the work of Jesus in me, revealing the way of transforming love in a world where we cling to rules, even we see those rules destroying the lives of God’s beloveds. This is about how I’ve come to know Jesus, how I’ve come...2023-06-2723 min
The Slow Way53. The Silencing of Women. The Yes of God.On the Southern Baptist Convention’s vote to expel churches with women pastors, my calling to pastor (and the complicated denial of that call by my community and by me), and why I left the Southern Baptist church when I was twenty two, but still find myself brokenhearted for what could have been. Links: Read about the Southern Baptist Convention's recent vote here. Find Martin Laird's book Into the Silent Land here. This reflection and practice were also published this week in The Slow Way Newsletter. Find a transcript of this episode here. Find Micha's website and si...2023-06-2022 min
The Slow Way52. Unsexy Jesus Will Save UsFor years I’ve told myself that the Jesus I saw mass produced in mega churches, political stages, and trotted out as social capital by the Church-As-Corporation was just a confused version of Jesus. That somewhere along the line leaders had gotten their eyes all fuzzy when they read scripture so they missed some massive portions of teachings from the Son of God who started the whole shebang. But, friends, there was some clarity for me this week as I watched this Hillsong docuseries, which really didn’t say anything new. We have all seen how reckless power, immaturity, and...2023-06-1319 min
The Slow Way51. The Ministry of WaterI’ve thought a lot about the way that water heals us, how we need its power. There’ve been scientific studies that show how even the sight and sound of bodies of water can increase neurochemicals in the brain, increase blood flow, which ultimately leads to relaxation. So maybe the ocean is talking to Ace, or maybe my child is uniquely designed to be more in touch (this is my suspicion) with the ways we humans are naturally oriented by our Creator toward goodness. We long for the beauty and power of water. We long for adventure. We long...2023-06-0616 min
The Slow Way50. The Spirituality of Our UnrestOur desire whispers how the world is not as it should be, even as we move through our daily rhythms of work and dinner-making and dish-washing and Netflix-binging. What will we do with our unrest? Links: This reflection and practice were also published this week in The Slow Way Newsletter. Find a transcript of this episode here. Read The Holy Longing: The Search For Christian Spirituality by Ronald Rolheiser Read Psalm 139 from The Message here Find Micha's website and sign up for her weekly newsletter here Find Micha on Instagram Find Micha on Twitter Micha's...2023-05-3014 min
The Slow Way48. Worm Is KinI am curious lately -- my hands pulling worm after worm out of my compost as I move the new soil from bin to vegetable garden -- about a God who might love the world enough to call plants and worms “kin.” What if we did the same? How do we gain tenderness toward the earth we live in, becoming those most passionate about seeing the earth cared for, nourished and returned to what’s right? Perhaps that starts with our own hearts, with seeing the natural world as God sees it. Today we're asking the question: What if...2023-05-1714 minThe Slow WayAdvent Replay 5: Christ's Mother Reflects, His ChildhoodThis Christmas Eve, despite the challenge we can feel to believe this story of God coming to us through a boy in ancient Palestine, I invite you to imagine it afresh with me. It may not be easy to believe, but the gift of the story is in its humanity. A God who knows what it is to sit with a mother in the quiet. A God who knows the sweet slowness of a sunset. A God who has had to learn some manners. What if we cling to the small deliberate truths of God-with-us actually means. T...2022-12-2414 minThe Slow WayAdvent Replay 4: DarknessIn the midst of her joy, perhaps Mary also knew a certain kind of darkness. Maybe she knew that the particular love she shared with her baby in those nine months would always be different from that time on. And that was all mixed in with the utter relief of holding him, of being on the other side of the suffering. I wonder about Mary’s fragility. How weak and uncertain and terrified she must have felt. And I wonder about you. How weak and uncertain and terrified you feel. I wonder what joy and sa...2022-12-2012 minThe Slow WayAdvent Replay 3: A Story of Sacred FriendshipElizabeth and Mary held each other up, carried each other through their seasons of pregnancy, and their faithfulness to this turbulent moment in one another’s lives set the foundation for the work of their little boys: John the Baptist who would go wild in the woods, eating locusts, preaching repentance, making baptism the sacred marker it is, and clearing a path for the ministry of his cousin, Jesus. John would die a gruesome death, and Jesus would grieve, and teach us how to grieve. John and Jesus loved and served each other well because their mothers set a pa...2022-12-1313 minThe Slow WayAdvent Replay 2: How He EnteredAs we move closer to Christmas, I'm sharing with you a meditation on a poem about Glory. What if “glory”--that word we in the Church tend to overuse and undersell-- What if glory is actually the realest thing about Christmas. What if the angelic song is beyond our comprehension, because all of it a mystery of love, a mystery that changes the world. Sometimes prayer is simply sitting with the mystery. Will you join me? Links: This reflection and practice were also published this week in The Slow Way Newsletter. Find a transcript of this...2022-12-0613 minThe Slow WayAdvent Replay: 1. Mary, A Girl in the StarsThis Advent we’ll be spending time with some of my original poems, considering the story of Christmas in a way that digs down deep into the thing underneath the thing, the story underneath the story. Let’s imagine a Mary we haven’t quite gotten to know. Let’s ask some questions that we may not answer, but which might help us live a little deeper into her story, and in doing so, into our own stories. Will you join me? This reflection and practice were also published this week in The Slow Way Newsletter. Find a transc...2022-11-2912 minThe Slow Way47. Give Back Your Heart to ItselfThanksgiving is a ritual we practice with others. The great thing about ritual is that it comes over and over, whether or not we’re ready for it. So each year we’re given another chance to do more than skirt above the surface of the day. After all, anyone can eat a meal. It takes intention to feast, though. It takes courage to celebrate the good in our lives, especially when the days that led to this one have been painful. So this is my question for you: Where do you find yourself this Thanksgiving? Are you r...2022-11-2220 minThe Slow Way46. Attending to Goodness: Wine, Hospitality, and an Invitation to DelightAs we move toward the holidays, what does it mean to gather with people you love and attend to them? What could it look like to move toward the complicated and sometimes difficult relationships in your life and find gratitude around the table? Wine certainly isn’t the only way to practice slowness and gratitude. But wine can teach us how to savor, how to notice what we enjoy, and how to find delight in the small gifts of this life. It can help us learn to practice joy together. Today’s episode ponders what it might mean...2022-11-1522 minThe Slow Way45. All The Ones We Love, Gathered Up Into the Mind of GodIn one month we’ll mark my dad’s death day. I bought my flight this week and will head to my mom’s house and spend that week with my siblings, nieces and nephews. Winter is not my favorite season, even with the delights of Christmas. As soon as the holidays move through us, we are left with months of ice and darkness. And Little Mikey will have to stay strong to survive the winter. I know trees know what to do with snow, but I can’t help feeling protective, as if in an ideal world I might di...2022-11-0821 minThe Slow Way44. Deepening Into a Discoverable GodThe spiritual life has to begin with a premise that God can be experienced, encountered. Starting from here is harder than it seems. Faith is not an unmovable feature inside us. It is less a mountain, and more an ocean, always moving, sometimes deep, sometimes shallow. Sometimes the places on the shore the water used to reach are now dried up. But the work of the spiritual life is to receive that constant shifting, not as failure of belief, but as part of the process. When we think of faith as practice we move beyond ideas into s...2022-11-0118 minThe Slow Way43. Return to Your Realest SelfThis is the story of so many who have found wealth and power in our world. We feel small. So we climb sycamore trees. We climb ladders. We climb power structures. And we can convince ourselves from way up there that we have somehow saved ourselves. But really, we’re dangling above what’s real. We’re unsafe, lonely, unknown to our people and to ourselves. And Jesus is down at the base of the things we’ve used to save ourselves, saying: “Come down from there and face the reality of who you are.” ...2022-10-2522 minThe Slow Way42. Rest is Communal. Rest Changes The World.When we make space in our days and in our bodies to practice prayer, or silence, or sacred reading, we are actually doing rest. Hersey talks so beautifully about dreaming, but there is something sacred about the kind of sleep she is inviting all of us into. In her vision of rest, dreaming becomes its own kind of prayer practice. We allow ourselves to stop so our brains can be restored, coated in restorative fluid, flushed of toxins. And the presence of the Divine meets us there in that restoration. “To slow down is to allow the portal to op...2022-10-1818 minThe Slow Way41. Never tidy. But Always Sparkling, Always Alive.The life of faith is recognizing that we are each a seed planted, and helping one another stay close to the sustaining water that will help us grow and become the flourishing plant we were always meant to be. Community is believing that we all have something important to give, and that our Source has placed in each of us something valuable. Caring for each other begins with believing that the seed can grow into a tree, and believing that there is enough water available for us and for our neighbor, so we can all thrive. It’s...2022-10-1118 minThe Slow Way40. True All the Way ThroughWhat does it mean to give our lives to more than an idea? What does it mean for faith to coexist with doubt but not be squishy or easily shaken? For us to allow it to settle in the deepest parts of us, so that it lives there sturdy and true, without pretense, without anything false? How do we hold a faith robust enough to reach the parts of us that are hardest to know, most painful to explore? If your life belongs to the Loving Creator, it still belongs, there, where everything else has been lost. ...2022-10-0424 minThe Slow Way39. Naming God, and Abiding in MysteryThere is a blessing to be found in the naming of God. To name God is a grace we have been given, an invitation to connect with the unnamable, unfathomable Divine. What and how we name God is the story we’re telling ourselves and the world. What would you name God? More in this week’s #theslowwaypodcast Links: This reflection and practice were also published this week in The Slow Way Newsletter. Read Macrina Wiederkehr’s, The Flowing Grace of Now Read “Naming Objects Is the Opposite of Thoughtless Consumpti...2022-09-2714 minThe Slow Way38. Reclaiming Blessing and Provoking HopeLately I’ve been reclaiming blessing, not as something we get if we’re lucky or pious enough. But blessing as a gift by which we honor one another. It is taking something ordinary and pronouncing it remarkable, sacred. Barbara Brown Taylor says the act of blessing is not so much the work of conferring holiness as it is the hope-filled task of recognizing and acknowledging the holiness already there. What if we release that other notion of blessing, the one that can make us feel small or unseen by God? What if instead we look for ways...2022-09-2015 minThe Slow Way37. Nurturing the Good that Grows in YouI don’t think sin is a birthright. I don’t think it is original to us at all. Don’t get me wrong, this world is a dumpster fire of hate and violence, greed and arrogance, exclusion and self-harm. Evil is in the air we breathe. But, that’s the thing. It’s in the air, not in us. God made us and called us good. Everything else — the evil, the hatred — is a lie we buy into from our earliest moments. Our egos tell us to be something we were never made to be. Our self-protective coverings insist that we...2022-09-1317 minThe Slow Way36. Co-remembering and Changing SeasonsIt’s almost fall. The wind moves through and we shiver. The boy in the pool who leaned back and moved his arms across the surface, a brief lifespan of gold across the water. He will get his back-to-school hair cut, throw on his backpack, and grow out of his hand-me-down jeans. And the world will shift on its axis, drawing us gently into a cool sunshine, apples in our u-pick bags. There’s no fighting the autumn, friends. It always comes for us. The Psalmist tells us that “all our days pass away . . . Our days may come to...2022-09-0615 minThe Slow WayEP 35: Time is a Gift of LoveWhen we release ourselves from the burden of proving our value by what we make of time, we can learn slowness for the sake of our whole selves – our minds, bodies and souls—and for the sake of those in our world who are most vulnerable. But this is spiritual work. If we want to value the lives of those who will never produce enough to be considered good, we have to first value ourselves outside of what we can do. “When we begin to understand what it means to reside within God’s time, we are opened up t...2022-08-3016 minThe Slow Way34. On Seeking God (Or, Living Out Whole and Healthy Faith)Today we’re considering the language we use when we talk about “seeking God.” How authentic faith must be a long-term, whole-hearted pursuit that involves the world around us, our stories, and our particular ways of being. Healthy spirituality needs the body. It can never be a mind-trick. It involves the kind of integration required in knowing our habits and motives and weaknesses, and connecting those to our pursuit of the expansive love of the Divine. Links: This reflection and practice were also published this week in The Slow Way Newsletter. Read The Sound of Life’s Unspea...2022-08-2320 minThe Slow Way33. On Coming Home To Our BodiesWe’re back! Episode 33 is fresh and new at The Slow Way. As we lean into the end of summer, some of us eking the last few weeks out of the sunshine and late nights on the porch, some already back in the motion of school and schedules, I hope we’ll practice a simple but transformative slow way: Listening to the stomach aches, the tight muscles, the sensations of joy or pleasure, and reminding ourselves that our bodies are actually us. They are not separate from our minds. And they have something to tell us about what’...2022-08-1619 minThe Slow WayReplay: Blessing the Work of our HandsLast month I spent ten days on the campus of a Benedictine monastery, where there is an incredible pottery studio that seeks to embody the Benedictine values of stability, community, and hospitality. And I was re-reminded of this instruction from Saint Benedict. That all the utensils of our lives can be sacred. Our hands are holy, and they are invited by the Life-Peace-Grace-Maker to create meaning out of everything. Here’s a replay of episode 19, “Blessing the Work of our Hands.” Links: This reflection and practice were also published this week in The Slow...2022-08-0217 minThe Slow WayReplay: The Possibility that God is for YouHere’s your reminder that doubt is not the thing that should trouble your soul. Fear is. The blessings of Jesus are particularly there for those who wrestle with their fear, hold it up to the light of Truth, and choose to embrace suffering for the sake of joining the good work of God in the world. Can you imagine with me that in the dark distance a figure is coming. It’s beautiful. And it’s terrifying, because it is somehow the combination of your greatest regrets and failures and fears. It’s the embodiment of your own...2022-07-2617 minThe Slow WayReplay: Your Soul Loves the Danger of Growth Growth is a gangly and uncomfortable season – whether it's the growth of our young teenage bodies, or the growth of our souls. We cannot enter into seasons of growth without instability and volatility. In other words, growth is awkward and uncomfortable. And there’s nothing we can do about that. I have been reading and loving Lisa Colón DeLay’s book, The Wild Land Within. She describes the in-between seasons of growth this way: “God will always call us toward deeper, fuller lives. God beckons us toward more abundant joy and greater relief and solace.” Then she goes on...2022-07-1916 minThe Slow WayReplay: Beloved Community is the Antidote for your ExhaustionWe live in an empire, in a human-made system of the powerful and the powerless, and since the world began unraveling the truth that was born in us, in our original goodness given by God, we learn to slowly believe the lie of the Empire. It tells us that we can earn our place in the system. It tells us how to divide one another, how to assign value. We learn who is attractive, who is smart, who is capable, and we understand that if we want to have value, there are tasks to accomplish. There are people to...2022-07-1216 minThe Slow WayReplay: Telling The Truth To YourselfAs much as it might be difficult to believe, you are not your intellect, your power, your success, your ability to fit in at a party. You are not your ability to be happy, or healthy, or rich. It’s your weaknesses that bring you into the upside down of God’s values. When we let go of control, when we open our hands we are, as Richard Rohr writes,”in a very creative and liminal space where God is most free to act in our lives.” And that is faith: letting go of control, believing that the life...2022-07-0518 minThe Slow Way32. Prayer is a Returning to LoveI've been thinking recently that prayer is a returning to love. And maybe if that’s the case, we can get rid of the upward image we often carry with us about what life is supposed to be. That we are moving up a line on a graph, moving from Point A (birth, at the left-side base of the graph) and ending up at the right hand corner. Complete. Final. Having checked off our big life dreams as we went. Instead, I think, life is like faith: circular, moving round and round, faster and faster, tighter as you get to...2022-06-2816 minThe Slow WayEP 31. Divine Compulsion, Attention, and LoveOne of the greatest gifts I was given in my childhood in the Church was the idea that God wants to speak to me, that God could “lay” something “on our hearts” or “lead” us to a decision. That God cares about the state of our internal consciousness. And not just that, God actually moves within that consciousness to act and guide us if we learn to listen. That idea has shaped my life in ways I can’t begin to name. Sometimes I wonder if that might just be the most important thing I learned in childhood: how to recognize w...2022-06-2112 minThe Slow WayEP 30: Longing and the Truer WorldI have spent my life feeling somewhat outside of normal, experiencing my feelings in a way that felt unacceptable to the culture I was raised in. I cried too much as a kid, spent too much time alone in my room writing in my journal as a teen, or listening to sad, meaningful music as a young twenty-something. I often felt like my sadness didn’t measure up with the story of God I wanted to live into. I was supposed to find joy in the Lord! I was supposed to be fun and cool and especially caring so ot...2022-06-1417 minThe Slow WayEP 29: Contentment and GratitudeToday I’m reflecting on the recent events in our world and wondering what to do next. This is a question I ask myself, and that I asked that day when I got the news about the school shooting. What is the appropriate way to respond? Is there a moment when the suffering around us becomes too much? When we can’t hold it all anymore, and we retreat into our small circles of relationships and focus on the world we can see and touch and experience in the places we live? I believe that as we lear...2022-06-0717 minThe Slow WayReplay: Your Definition of Love is Good and TrueLove is all of it. Love is the force we call God. Love is the feeling. Love is the action between two old friends, and the generosity between you and your waiter at lunch today. And in that broad definition, I think those of us who call ourselves Christian can step toward theology: not the kind that draws lines of who’s in and who’s out, of who gets it and who obviously doesn’t, but to lean toward a theology of God as Love that is moving toward all of us, calling each of us to come close, to exp...2022-05-3116 minThe Slow WayEP 28: The Antidote For Our Breathless Pace is Full-Hearted LamentWhen I started writing my newsletter, I wanted to explore the “breathless pace” of our culture. I wanted to offer an alternative way of living that taps into our soul’s need for rest, meaning, and authentic connection with ourselves, each other, and the world around us. What I didn’t expect is how much my personal journey of grief would help me understand a core truth: that the hectic pace of our culture is actually an overflow of our failure to grieve. There is so much loss in our shared earth, and in our individual lives, and we don’t know how...2022-05-2419 minThe Slow WayEP 27: Finitude & Moving Toward HopeThe more I explore rest, slowness, and the remarkable idea that we can’t hustle enough to overcome our humanity (which is to say, our mortality), the more I feel drawn to a reality underneath these invitations toward slowness: our finitude. I’m talking about our limits, our inability to live a multitude of lives in this one. We are contained here, to the careers we’ve chosen or that have chosen us. To the people we’ve loved, and the small circles of relationship we can truly invest in. And, as much as we might wish otherwise, to the place...2022-05-1716 minThe Slow WayEP 26: Grief & The "Wild Divine"Long before my dad got sick I had left behind (mostly) the notion of God making some divine plan out of our most horrible realities. I didn’t want to be part of a divine will that left babies dead at birth, or that allowed 3-year-olds to get cancer. Not a divine will that determines who gets born into a dangerous family environment, allows children to be abused, or intends for an entire community to be devastated by drought, floods, or war. I don’t want to believe that God had a special will that included one friend dying of canc...2022-05-1019 minThe Slow WayEP 25: Desire & DevotionWhen women are encouraged to find purpose and value wherever their gifts and desires lead them, whether toward traditional mothering or outside of it, the world thrives. When women are released from tired scripts about their purpose, they’re able to make meaning in a way that serves us all. As we move toward Mother’s Day, I hope all of us, men, women, and gender non conforming, mothers and non-mothers, will take the time to ask what desire we are invited to open like a door, and what it might look like to invite God to tran...2022-05-0319 minThe Slow WayEP 24: Easter Life & the Wisdom of Our Own MortalityI’ve spent the past decade pushing back on what I would now call the “toxic positivity” of evangelical Christian culture, pushing from within at first, and now speaking from outside, about the dangers of soul-crushing theology dressed up as personal transformation, and that culture’s tendency to bury the ones who are crushed in the process. What if the way toward Easter life is found in the wisdom of our own mortality, in the real and powerful acknowledgement that we are limited creatures, here for a limited amount of time, and invited to make the world a place that loo...2022-04-2617 min
The Slow WayEP 23: Easter SundayHow do we talk about Easter? The truth is, listener, I have a much easier time talking about the sad days: the Ash Wednesdays, the Good Fridays. I’m a melancholy type all the way through. Celebrating is something I’ve learned to do, but dang. Sometimes it’s hard for me. Today we’re supposed to wake up and remember (believe, even!) that all things are being made new. That the Holy One who was killed by the powers of the empire isn’t defeated. That there is something in this universe more powerful than Death itself. Happy Eas...2022-04-1717 minThe Slow WayEP 22: Good FridayToday is Good Friday, one of the days of the Christian calendar that I’ve always connected most deeply to. Not because I love thinking about crucifixion or because I think I can possibly grasp what happened on the cross. But because it’s a day we’re all allowed to be sad and mad and heartbroken and quiet at church. And if you ask me, we could do with a lot more of those kind of days. I hope you can relate to this special edition of The Slow Way as we head into Easter. Thanks for listening, friend...2022-04-1518 minThe Slow WayEP 21: Earthed JesusWhat comes to mind when you consider your own ballooning faith — the life moments when your faith felt wild and out of your control, and perhaps also alive in a way that feels far off now? What do you do when faith feels like it floated so high you can no longer reach it? What does it look like to settle your faith into the earth, ground yourself in humility, in the recognition that you don’t have to understand everything, don’t have to have every answer, and can actually find your hope in the place of mystery? ...2022-04-1218 min
The Slow WayEP 20: Lord of the Ill-Matched ThreadsSo much of the life of faith is a steady nourishment of ritual. We do the thing over and over, not because every spiritual practice *feels* particularly powerful, or because prayer is a switch we turn on or off in order to get to the presence of God. But because the ritual is like healthy food and exercise and sleep. It demands something of us. It requires us to pursue the long-term good over the short-term comfort. It shapes us slowly and deliberately. And eventually, it builds a structure where we’re tuned to the voice of God. Where we...2022-04-0519 minThe Slow WayEP 19: Blessing the Work of Our HandsWhat if we treated all the utensils of our lives as if they were sacred? What if we blessed the kitchens where we throw together our twenty minute meals, and make the bed we will sleep in as if we were cozying up our space for the divine? What if the computer keys where we tap out messages on Slack are an invitation to love? What if the meeting we lead for our team of colleagues matters, not just to our career, but to the flourishing of the world? There’s a phrase that keeps coming back to me fr...2022-03-2917 minThe Slow WayEP 18: On Healing and Beginning AgainThe last massive migraine I had was in December, a handful of days before my dad died. He had stopped eating on a Thursday and that Friday I bought a flight, finished pre-Christmas tasks, and packed so I could make it to my parents in time to be with him for as long as he needed. That Saturday I was hit with a migraine and, as I was used to at that point, spent the afternoon in bed, medicated, with a heating pad on my neck and a lavender eye mask over my face. The next day I flew t...2022-03-2221 minThe Slow WayEP 17: Stretching Toward LoveI’ve been thinking about light and darkness and waiting. This season of Lent is meant to be a season of darkness, an intentional time outside of feasting, outside of usual comforts. That intentionality is there as a way of pushing ourselves to notice that we are already living in a shadowed world, so used to dimness that we mistake the vague grayscale of our lives for color. Lent is a season to remind ourselves to see our own cracks and those around us as an invitation to more. Without seasons of intentional excavation of the shadows we live in...2022-03-1520 minThe Slow WayEp 16: Becoming More Fully Alive to GodThis week I said something on Instagram about how fasting doesn’t need to equal suffering. What I meant was that there is enough suffering already in our lives. In the past ten years I’ve walked through a lost pregnancy, several terrifying diagnoses of my children, the death of a handful of beloved friends, the split of a church community I adored (caused by leadership decisions I had a hand in). I sat with my dad as he came to terms with his terminal illness and sat with him eleven months later when we ushered him to the end...2022-03-0819 minThe Slow WayEp: 15 On Refusing To Be EnemiesThis past Thursday I was a wreck. Maybe some of you felt that way as well. Russia had invaded Ukraine and the seriousness of a war like this in Europe and what it means for all of us was heavy on me. I ache for my kids and the world they’re inheriting. Sometimes it feels like men grasping for power is still the very thing that just might kill us all. Or as my friend D.L. Mayfield wrote on Twitter last week, “I am so sick of violent men and the wars they start I could scream.” T...2022-03-0122 min