There is a simple but searching truth at the heart of the spiritual life: we cannot love what we do not know. And we cannot know God—truly know God—without giving Him our attention.
Continue reading “Hearing the Voice of the Shepherd”
There are moments in life when love becomes something deeper than affection or companionship. It becomes witness. It becomes reverence. Walking beside my husband through his long health journey has taught me this in ways I never expected.
Continue reading “Strength That Grows in Suffering”
Every vocation is an invitation—a path that slowly shapes us into people who look a little more like Christ. We don’t always notice it at first. But over the years, the daily yeses, the quiet sacrifices, the unseen acts of love begin to form something holy within us.
Continue reading “Drawn Closer Through Vocation”
For eight years now, I’ve walked beside my husband through the slow, unrelenting landscape of chronic illness. It has been hard in ways I never expected—watching the body of someone you love weaken, learning to navigate fear and fatigue, holding space for the things that matter when so much feels fragile. And yet, even in the heaviness, there has been a strange and holy gift: the tenderness of walking each other home, one day at a time.
Continue reading “Held in the Long Journey”
Some days the spiritual life feels complicated, but Scripture keeps handing us simple, steady markers—quiet signposts that help us walk in the light.
Continue reading “Markers for a Life of Truth”
There is a truth so tender and so bold that Peter can only name it with the language of new birth: You have been born anew… from imperishable seed.
Continue reading “The Imperishable Seed Within”
Lately I’ve found myself lingering over the how necessary it is to look to Jesus to show me how to live. I’ve always been fascinated by the three moments in the Gospels when Jesus speaks in Aramaic—the everyday language of His people. Mark’s Gospel preserves these words with such care, almost as if he wants us to hear the tone, the breath, the intimacy of Jesus’ voice as He restores life and opens what has been closed.
Continue reading “Calling Us to Life”
If God’s vision is big enough for everyone, then the work of freedom can’t stay abstract. It has to take shape in the small, ordinary places where we live, speak, choose, and relate. Liberation is not only a sweeping theological idea; it is a daily practice of becoming the kind of people who make God’s wide welcome visible.
Continue reading “Freedom in Daily Life”
Justice is often imagined as something sharp and demanding, a virtue that draws lines, names wrongs, and insists on truth. But in the spiritual life, justice is also a widening of the heart. It is the virtue that clears space within us so God can dwell more freely.
Continue reading “The Spacious Work of God”
There comes a moment in every spiritual life when we realize that the inner sanctuary we carry is not a marketplace of anxieties, ambitions, and self‑concerns, but a Holy of Holies. And nothing changes until that realization dawns. As long as the soul is treated like a place of traffic, we will tolerate the noise. But once we recognize it as the dwelling place of God, we begin to drive out whatever does not belong.
From this truth flow two inseparable movements of the spiritual life:
self‑renunciation and dependence on the Holy Spirit. We cannot live fully in Christ without surrender, and we cannot surrender without cultivating a deep interior silence where God can speak.
Many people try to practice recollection without detachment, or detachment without recollection, and wonder why the effort feels strained. But the two are not parallel paths; they are one path with two expressions. Find a recollected person, and you will find someone detached. Seek one who is detached, and you will find someone recollected. To grow in one is to grow in the other.
Interior silence is not the absence of sound but the absence of inner grasping. Detachment is not indifference but freedom from the compulsions that crowd out God. Together, they create the spaciousness where the Spirit can guide, shape, and renew us.
Anyone who tries—even for a single day—to practice recollection or detachment discovers quickly that the work is doubled. To quiet the heart is to loosen its attachments; to loosen its attachments is to quiet the heart. This is the hidden rhythm of transformation.
And perhaps this is the invitation for us today is to treat the soul as the sacred place it is, to let silence soften us, to let detachment free us, and to let the Spirit lead us into the life we were made for.
Smitten With Goodness 