The BETWEEN Journal
Owning our story and loving ourselves through that process is the bravest thing that we will ever do.
— Brene Brown
Endings are the first phase of transition.
The second phase is a neutral zone, a [BETWEEN] time of lostness and emptiness before life resumes in an intelligible pattern and direction.
The third phase is that of beginning anew.
The neutral [BETWEEN] zone is a time when the real business of transition takes place. It is a time when an inner reorientation and realignment are occurring, the deep work of transformation.
— William Bridges, Transitions
It is difficult to appreciate the liminal BETWEEN spaces in our lives; we prefer resolution over ambiguity, routine over confusion, completion over process…[We] wrestle with the reality of leaving what we once knew was true while stumbling into the person who God is calling us to be.
What do we do in this liminality that has become all-too-normal now?
We wait.
But we don’t wait alone or simply wallow in the waiting. We wait with the Good Shepherd in order to follow him. BETWEEN the valley of the shadow of death and an overflowing cup, we lie down in green pastures because He is with us. BETWEEN all the evil in the world and dwelling in the house of the Lord, we walk beside quiet waters because His rod and staff are comforting.
Liminal BETWEEN spaces are more than places to pass through, but opportunities to be more fully present with God as he leads us in paths of righteousness.
And ultimately, remember that we wait…not because we’re hoping for the best; instead; we wait in confidence because the Good Shepherd has our best in mind.
- Excerpts from Holy Saturday Devotional by Mike Ahn from the Center for Christianity, Culture, and the Arts at Biola University
The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, know suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.
- Dr. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, Psychiatrist
Projects of personal transformation rarely if ever succeed by accident, drift, or imposition.
— Dallas Willard
The soul craves experiences that offer it the rich depths of God. Silence, solitude, holy leisure, simplicity, prayer, journaling, the Eucharist, rituals that touch the space of mystery, symbols and imagery, the Bible, laughter, delight in the divine Presence, deep encounters with creation, and the merciful coming together of human hearts. All these fuel the soul, producing energy for living the transformed life.
— Sue Monk Kidd
Beauty hovers over all of us, in our darkness and our light, in the withered frailty of life, in the breathless triumph of death. Beauty is in our sleeping and waking, our innocence and tragedy. Beauty is found in small, unseen gestures of love, humming softly in every act of kindness.
— John Sowers, Say All The Unspoken Things
“A mark of lifelong learners is recognizing that they can learn something from everyone they meet.”
— Adam Grant, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know
Ultimately, we don’t heal, transform or create ourselves. We posture ourselves in ways that allow God to heal, transform and create us.
— Sue Monk Kidd
People encounter God under shady oak trees, on riverbanks, at the tops of mountains, and in long stretches of barren wilderness. God shows up in whirlwinds, starry skies, burning bushes, and perfect strangers. When people want to know more about God, the son of God tells them to pay attention to the lilies of the field and the birds of the air, to women kneading bread and workers lining up for their pay.
Whoever wrote this stuff believed that people could learn as much about the ways of God from paying attention to the world as they could from paying attention to Scripture. What is true is what happens, even if what happens is not always right. People can learn as much about the ways of God from business deals gone bad or sparrows falling to the ground as they can from reciting the books of the Bible in order. They can learn as much from a love affair or a wildflower as they can from knowing the Ten Commandments by heart.
This is wonderful news. I do not have to choose between the Sermon on the Mount and the magnolia trees.
— Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar In The World
Nobody escapes being wounded. We are all wounded people, whether physically, emotionally, mentally, or spiritually….When our wounds cease to be a source of shame and become a source of healing, we have become wounded healers.”
- Henri Nouwen
As we see how deeply loved we are by God—in our depths, complexity, totality and sinfulness—we dare to allow God more complete access to the dark parts of our soul that most need transformation. And God precedes us on this journey, waiting to meet us in the depths of our self.
— The Gift of Being Yourself: David G. Benner
"Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire."
- William Butler Yeats
I’ve often said that great love and great suffering are the universal, always available paths of transformation because they are the only things strong enough to take away the ego’s protections and pretensions. Great love and great suffering bring us back to God…And those who suffer often become the greatest lovers.
— Fr. Richard Rohr
The holding together of intimacy and independence is one of the beautiful tensions of strong relationships.
- Poet David Whyte
Harrowing
The plow has savaged this sweet field
Misshapen clods of earth kicked up
Rocks and twisted roots exposed to view
Last year’s growth demolished by the blade.
I have plowed my life this way
Turned over a whole history
Looking for the roots of what went wrong
Until my face is ravaged, furrowed, scared.
Enough. The job is done.
Whatever’s been uprooted, let it be
Seedbed for the growing that’s to come
I plowed to unearth last year’s reasons—
The farmer plows to plant a greening season.
Parker J. Palmer
The hope God offers us is this…he will keep close to us, even in the darkness, in doubt, in fear, and vulnerability. He does not promise to keep bad things from happening. He does not promise that night will not come, or that it will not be terrifying, or that we will be immediately tugged to shore. He promises that we will not be left alone. He will keep watch with us in the night.
— Tish Warren, Prayer In The Dark
Shame cannot survive being spoken.
It cannot survive empathy.
— Brene Brown
“For at its deepest levels life is not a problem but a mystery…At one time or another, each of us confronts an experience so powerful, bewildering, joyous, or terrifying that all our efforts to see it as a “problem” are futile. Each of us is brought to the cliff’s edge. At such moments we can either back away in bitterness or confusion, or leap forward into mystery. And what does mystery ask of us? Only that we be in its presence, that we fully, consciously, hand ourselves over. That is all, that is everything. We can participate in the mystery only by letting go of solutions. This letting go is the first lesson of falling, and the hardest.
— Philip Simmons, Learning to Fall: The Blessings of an Imperfect Life
“When I got face-to-face with it, I discovered something. My problem wasn’t what I thought it was. I discovered it had something beautiful inside.”
— What Do You Do With A Problem? A children’s book by Yobi Yamada
Children must never work for our love, they must rest in it.
— Dr. Gordon Neufeld, Institute of Child Psychology
The Greek word for rest is hesychia, a term that also came to mean praying. Hesychasm was a way of unceasing prayer in which a person descended into the heart and built a nest for herself and God, a place where she rested in the divine Presence, staying there throughout her day, throughout her pain, conflict and struggle.
— Sue Monk Kidd, When The Heart Waits: Spiritual Direction for Life’s Sacred Questions
“In…spiritual transformation, the self that embarks on the journey is not the self that arrives. The self that begins the spiritual journey is the self of our own creation, the self we thought ourselves to be. This is the self that dies on the journey.
The self that arrives is the self that was loved into existence by Divine Love.”
— David G. Benner, The Gift of Being Yourself: The Sacred Call of Self-Discovery
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."
– Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
"What is REAL?" asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. "Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?"
"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."
"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.
"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."
"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"
"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."
"I suppose you are real?" said the Rabbit. And then he wished he had not said it, for he thought the Skin Horse might be sensitive. But the Skin Horse only smiled.
"The Boy's Uncle made me Real," he said. "That was a great many years ago; but once you are Real you can't become unreal again.
It lasts for always.
The Velveteen Rabbit, Margery Williams Bianco
“O God, grant that I may understand that it is You who are painfully parting the fibers of my being in order to penetrate to the very marrow of my substance.”
— Teilhard de Chardin, Jesuit Priest
Human life doesn’t offer us the clarity we are looking for…It is not easy to live faithfully in a world full of ambiguities. We have to learn to make wise choices without needing to be entirely sure.
— Henri Nouwen
“It was when he tried to talk about 'the boat' that his words began to falter and tears welled up in his eyes...Finally, watching Joe struggle for composure over and over, I realized that 'the boat' was something more than just the shell or its crew. To Joe, it encompassed but transcended both - it was something mysterious and almost beyond definition. It was a shared experience - a singular thing that had unfolded in a golden sliver of time long gone, when nine good-hearted young men strove together, pulled together as one, gave everything they had for one another, bound together forever by pride and respect and love. Joe was crying, at least in part, for the loss of that vanished moment but much more, I think, for the sheer beauty of it.”
― Daniel James Brown, The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics
We experience hope when:
We have the ability to set realistic goals (I know where I want to go.)
We are able to figure out how to achieve those goals, including the ability to stay flexible and develop alternative pathways.
(I know how to get there, I’m persistent, and I can tolerate disappointment and try new paths again and again.)
We have agency—we believe in ourselves (I can do this!)
C.R. Snyder, quoted in Atlas Of The Heart by Brene Brown
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” ―Theodore Roosevelt
My mom taught us never to look away from people’s pain.
The lesson was simple: Don’t look away. Don’t look down. Don’t pretend not to see hurt. Look people in the eye. Even when their pain is overwhelming.
And when you are in pain, find the people who can look you in the eye.
We need to know we are not alone, especially when we are hurting.
This lesson is one of the greatest gifts of my life.
— Brene Brown
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium.
Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
- Wendell Berry
The Space Between
Free fall
Feet off the ground
A clean white page
Fresh snow, no sound
Here as we wait
From dark to dawn
New paths before us
The old is gone
Unplug the lights
Take down the tree
The less we have
The less we need
From Christmas night
To New Year’s Eve
We bless the space that’s in between
December ends
Make way for dreams
Wait for the light
To raise the spring
Embrace it all
From hope to doubt
Like ocean waves
Washin’ in and out
Two worlds apart
Come close again
Where do you stop?
Where do I begin?
Each year we learn
More what it means
To bless the space that’s in between
We bless the space that’s in between
We bless the seeds
Under the snow
We bless the patience, take it slow
We bless the limits,
Bless the tears
We bless the failures
That brought us here
I wipe the frost
The glass is cold
Our dreams beneath
The falling snow
Be Thou my vision, Until I see
And bless the space
That’s in between
From Christmas night
To New Year’s Eve
We bless the space that’s in between
– song by Sandra McCracken, featuring Josh Garrels
Think again of falling as a figure of speech. We fall on our faces, we fall for a joke, we fall for someone, we fall in love. In each of these falls, what do we fall away from? We fall from ego, we fall from our carefully constructed identities, our reputations, our precious selves. We fall from ambition, we fall from grasping, we fall, at least temporarily, from reason. And what do we fall into? We fall into passion, into terror, into unreasoning joy. We fall into humility, into compassion, into emptiness, into forces larger than ourselves, into oneness with others we realize are likewise falling. We fall, at last, into the presence of the sacred, into godliness, into mystery, into our better, diviner natures.
— Philip Simmons, Learning to Fall: The Blessings of an Imperfect Life
A Call to Worship
A love that never ceases,
A creativity that designed the universe,
A hope that cannot be quenched,
A pursuit of reconciliation no matter the cost.
These are the things that are of God.
Then let us worship God with all our heart, strength and mind.
Cherokee Rose
We searched all night
Through the spider lily and cherokee rose
Those flowers of death and flowers of hope
On the same dirt that they grow
And you pointed out
The sword of Perseus up in the north
And I sang of Carina's southernly course
And how they aim for us both
It was silent at midnight
Except for our steps
Out of time
You knew I's ahead then
I knew I was
Just a beat behind
And then we heard
The low groan
Across the hill
Where the tide
Holds sway
Even still
As dawn approached
We leaned on the other like they were a crutch
Stumbling down through coyote brush
As the coast came into view
The sound of the waves
Was thunder and violence, it rang in my head
But I didn't feel frightened, no I felt instead
A little nearer to you
The first hit of sun came
Right as our feet
Hit the sand
We stepped to the water
I held like a vise
To your hand
And so we stood
In the churning
Of the sea
And we were ready
For whatever
We'd receive
This is one of the miracles of love:
it gives a power of seeing through its own enchantments
and yet not being disenchanted.
-C.S. Lewis
And that is the wonder of all wonders, that God loves the lowly…God is not ashamed of the lowliness of human beings. God marches right in. He chooses people as his instruments and performs his wonders where one would least expect them. God is near to lowliness, he loves the lost, the neglected, the unseemly, the excluded, the weak and broken.
— God Is In The Manger, Dietrich Bonhoeffer
What if there’s a third way?…It was as if here was yet another invitation to find a sure-footed way on some undiscovered path—to find AND where there I have previously imagined only EITHER and OR. Here was an invitation to ‘lean not on my own understanding’ and find wisdom in the way of paradox. I went to a counselor looking for tidy answers about a broken relationship. I wanted those answers, as I often do, to rid me of the anguish of self-doubt. It’s the easing of guilt that often fuels my desire for a more black-and-white world. What I found instead…was a proposition requiring greater patience and prayer: that God, infinitely creative in his own nature, was suggesting infinitely more creative possibilities that I have previously considered. I began to learn that it is God who walks through the walls we frame around an idea or a problem. God who breaks the bonds of EITHERS and ORS. I began to understand that when I asked for one word answers from God, when I wanted faith to read like instructions from IKEA, I was likely asking the wrong kinds of questions.
— Surprised By Paradox, Jen Pollock Michel
Look closely at the present you are constructing;
it should look like the future you are dreaming.
— Alice Walker
Crisis, change, all the myriad of upheavals that blister the spirit and leave us groping—they aren’t voices simply of pain but also of creativity. And if we would only listen we might hear such times beckoning us to a season of waiting to the place of fertile emptiness.
— When The Heart Waits, Sue Monk Kidd
The grass is greener where you water it.
-Unknown
Mysteries, Yes
Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous
to be understood.
How grass can be nourishing in the
mouths of the lambs.
How rivers and stones are forever
in allegiance with gravity
while we ourselves dream of rising.
How two hands touch and the bonds will
never be broken.
How people come, from delight or the
scars of damage,
to the comfort of a poem.
Let me keep my distance, always, from those
who think they have the answers.
Let me keep company always with those who say
“Look!” and laugh in astonishment,
and bow their heads.
— Mary Oliver
“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.
“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times.
But that is not for them to decide.
All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
“Be curious, not judgmental.”
— Coach Ted Lasso
We seem to have focused so much on exuberant beginnings and victorious endings that we’ve forgotten about the slow, sometimes tortuous, unraveling of God’s grace that takes place in the middle [BETWEEN] places.
Sue Monk Kidd, When the Heart Waits
Drawing Near
It is difficult to see it from here,
I know,
but trust me when I say
this blessing is inscribed
on the horizon.
Is written on
that far point
you can hardly see.
Is etched into
a landscape
whose contours you cannot know
from here.
All you know
is that it calls you,
draws you,
pulls you toward
what you have perceived
only in pieces,
in fragments that came to you
in dreaming
or in prayer.
I cannot account for how,
as you draw near,
the blessing embedded in the horizon
begins to blossom
upon the soles of your feet,
shimmers in your two hands.
It is one of the mysteries
of the road,
how the blessing
you have traveled toward,
waited for,
ached for
suddenly appears
as if it had been with you
all this time,
as if it simply
needed to know
how far you were willing
to walk
to find the lines
that were traced upon you
before the day
that you were born.
—Jan Richardson
I had tended to view waiting as mere passivity. When I looked it up in the dictionary, however, I found the words passive and passion come the same Latin root, pati, which means “to endure.”
Waiting is both passive and passionate.
Devotion is always present in genuine waiting.
- Sue Monk Kidd, When The Heart Waits
You’re Not Alone
When you need a shoulder you can cry on
I'll be there to wipe your tears away
When it takes someone you can rely on
You can call me any time of day
When no one else will listen, I'll hang on every word
'Til you realize there's someone who really cares
When you need someone who'll always love you
You're not alone, you're not alone
When you're lost and stumblin' in the darkness
I'll be there to shed a little light
When it seems the whole world is against you
I'll be in your corner for a fight
Others might desert you and friends may turn away
I'll be there to help you every step along the way
'Cause as long as I'm around to help you
You're not alone, you're not alone
Better times are coming just around the bend
We'll be together once again
One day soon, the tide's gonna turn
The flame of love will forever burn
When you feel the burden on your shoulder
I'll be there to share the heavy load
Every day I'll walk along beside you
Every twist and turn along the road
Others might forsake you
As you swim against the tide
I will be the shelter
When there's nowhere else to hide
And as long as breath is in my body
You're not alone, you're not alone
— song by Paul Carrack
"We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”
— T.S. Eliot
