Become Good Soil

“A wholehearted life begins with values. They are the ‘why’ behind what we practice… while rules address behavior, values get to the heart of the matter.” —Melissa Helser, Cageless Birds Friends, what values are quietly shaping your life? And why does it matter? Not simply the values you would claim or aspire to, but the values revealed by your attention, your habits, your relationships, your pace...

“Values are the goods we prize and pursue—the things we regard as genuinely worth having, becoming, and giving ourselves to.” —Dallas Willard We must take the time to ask ourselves: How do the values we profess align with the values of God’s Kingdom? Core values quietly shape our lives. They influence what captures our attention, how we spend our time, what we celebrate, what we resist, and who we...

"This is the most difficult and at the same time the most important thing to embrace in the Christian life: that we become willing participants (with God), not only in what God does but in the way He does it." —Eugene Peterson, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places Friends, we continue to be gripped by these two questions. How are our daily activities shaping us into the people we are becoming? And,...

“The Hebrew way to understand salvation is not to read a theological treatise but to sit around a campfire with family and friends, listening to a story. It is the very nature of storytelling to include us, the hearers, in the story… For salvation is not the spiritual diagnosis of souls, one here, one there. It is the story of a people. A community with a past, with ancestors, with common experien...

“We cannot become spiritually mature while remaining emotionally immature.” —Pete Scazzero, Emotionally Healthy Spirituality Friends, how do we learn from Jesus to live the life of the Kingdom in every corner of our existence and every dimension of our personhood? How do we learn not only to see reality as Jesus sees it, but also to feel in our bodies, engage in our relationships, regulate our ner...

“For many former Smokejumpers, smokejumping is not closely tied with their (current) way of life, but is more something that was necessary for them to pass through and not around, and, once unmistakably done, does not have to be done again. The “it” is within, and is the need to settle some things with the universe and ourselves before taking on the “business of the world.” This “it” is the someth...

“It is a world of magic and mystery of deep darkness and flickering starlight. It is a world where terrible things happen and wonderful things too. It is a world where goodness is pitted against evil, love against hate, order against chaos, and where a great struggle often makes it hard to be sure who belongs to which side, because appearances are endlessly deceptive. Yet for all its confusion and...

“To be sure, the kingdom has been here as long as we humans have been here, and longer. But it has been made available to us through simple confidence in Jesus, the Anointed, only from the time he became a public figure. It is a kingdom that, in the person of Jesus, welcomes us just as we are, just where we are, and makes it possible for us to translate our “ordinary” life into an eternal one.” —D...

“Recovering Sabbath is an alternative to a culture ruled by an endless cycle of consumption, production, and progress. It is an awareness and practice of the claim that we are situated on the receiving end of the gifts of God. To be so situated is a staggering option, because we are accustomed to being on the initiating end of all things. We neither expect nor, at times, even want a gift to be giv...

“This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us…” —St. John Henri Nouwen offers these soulful questions: “In what quiet ways have you bartered the worth of your soul to other grade-givers—some clamoring voices in the world around you, other critical voices firmly within your own being? By what small, repeated surrenders have you allowed yourself to become the very thing the world applau...

“The creeds function like a treasure chest, waiting to be opened and explored. The creeds are not meant to reduce our faith to simple facts; they are not intended to drive away mystery and complexity. Rather, the creeds secure a framework for the whole of our faith, so that we can freely go and explore the riches of the mystery in each part and in the whole.”   —Jason Ortiz and Daniel Keating in T...

“We are greatly strengthened for life in the kingdom now by an understanding of what our future holds, and especially of how that future relates to our present experiences. For only then do we really understand what our current life is, and are we able to make choices that agree with that reality.” — Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy Where are we going? Friends, this simple question continues...

You are here. It turns out this matters more than we have come to believe. Consider this reflection from Henri Nouwen in The Wounded Healer: A waiting person is a person practicing patience. The word patience means to practice a daring willingness to stay where we are and live the situation out to the full, in the belief that something hidden here will make itself known to us. Impatient people are...

“In the darkness, something was happening at last. A voice had begun to sing. The hills were coming up. The earth was heaving and swelling like a wave of the sea. ‘Man, I give you the rule of this land. Treat it gently and cherish it.’” — C.S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew The apostle Paul reminds us that we have been grafted into the origin story of the People of God—a story that begins with God c...

“Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it,  I must first listen to my life telling me who I am.”  — Parker Palmer Important Note: HERE IS THE LINK to the most updated version of A Soul’s Review for Groups. Updates were made on 12/15/25. Please download THIS VERSION for any use of the guided Examen. God comes to us brilliantly disguised in the ordinary moments of our everyday lives. With...

“The main thing God gets out of your life is not the achievements you accomplish. It is the person you become. Spiritual transformation is not about behavior modification; it is about allowing the life of Jesus to permeate our whole being. This is a process that is slow, steady, and deeply relational. We become the kind of people who can naturally and easily do what Jesus would do, because His lif...

“When we intentionally bring awareness to our internal world—our emotions, our sensations, our impulses; we begin to see the patterns that have been driving us. And once we see them, we are no longer bound by them. Awareness creates choice. Choice creates change.”  — Dan Siegel ​Friends, In this second episode of a deeper dive into Styles of Relating, we reflect on how fear, hedging, and self-prot...

“We are born out of the laughter of the Trinity."  — Meister Eckhart (1260-1328),  Medieval Mystic Dear Friends, Around 2011, we discovered the work of Karen Horney and her insight into how humans relate to one another, especially under stress, in uncertainty, or for the sake of self-protection. Her work on the styles of relating became catalytic for both of us. It gave language to dynamics we wer...

“There are some things that only time can do. Dynamite can't touch them.” – Dwight D. Eisenhower In The Scandals of the Kingdom, Dallas Willard names a profound tension between the person of Jesus and the dilemma of modern American Christianity. We spend vast sums of money and energy trying to get people into church. Meanwhile, in the Gospels, people tore the roofs off buildings just to get to Jes...

“We are wounded in isolation and we are healed in community.” — Tim Keller What does it mean to be made in the image of a Triune God-in-Relationship? What if relational connection is the heartbeat of the with God life? What is a relational model for becoming a king or a queen, one who can steward from wholehearted maturity? We must begin by recovering our hidden life in God—the joyful intimacy ava...

“Karl Barth, a devoted apprentice of the Kingdom of God, emphasized the lived reality of the Christian life. He listened attentively as God revealed Himself—not by dissecting the Christian life in a laboratory, but by entering into God’s action, creation, and ongoing work of salvation. He chose to participate. He wasn’t indifferent to getting it right, but his passion was getting it lived.” —Eugen...

“If we believe that God made the world, then the world is important as a revelation of God, as a sacred text. If we believe that Jesus is the Son of God, then we must believe that he is the Son of God made flesh, made a human being—and therefore that the life of the human body in this world is important.” — Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community by Wendell Berry Take a moment to breathe. Slow your pace...

"Several of our young people were formerly brought up at the colleges of the northern provinces; they were instructed in all your sciences; but, when they came back to us, they were bad runners, ignorant of every means of living in the woods, unable to bear either cold or hunger, knew neither how to build a cabin, take a deer, or kill an enemy, spoke our language imperfectly, were therefore neithe...

“It is not about the greatness of the giant. It is about the greatness of God.” — King David “Can one stone change the course of history?” It is the question we reflect on when considering the life of David. In his youth, he was an outcast—rejected by his father and older brothers, exiled to wild places to perform the demeaning task of tending sheep rather than the noble work of training as a warr...

“We are all under the same mental calamity; we have all forgotten our names. We have all forgotten what we really are.” — G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 1908 In his essay The New Name, George MacDonald reflects on the mystery of each man’s unrepeatable uniqueness before God: “As the fir-tree lifts up itself with a far different need from the need of the palm-tree, so does each man stand before God, a...