In which I explore writing and blogging and creativity | Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

The Eagle, and Waiting to Discerning God’s Will Before You Act

The eagle waits at the edge of its nest for the winds of the storm to gain velocity. Once the storm is strong enough, it spreads its magnificent wings, and allows the storm to carry it where it wills.

By waiting for the wind to gain velocity before it flies, “it can run and not be weary, walk, and not be faint.” It wastes not an ounce of energy.

* * *

I think we can avoid much wasted effort if we do not act until the winds of the Spirit are strong, until we are sure we are flying with the wind of the Spirit, not without it, or, heaven forbid, against it.

And this is a learned skill.

I have been impulsive and impressionable for much of my life, and this does not make me rejoice. I look back on wasted efforts; projects committed to impulsively and later abandoned; or grimly seen through but without much fruit. Things done that came to nothing.

It is perhaps the story of many lives, but it does not have to be.

I have noticed the enormous difference even in small things– like deciding if and where to go on holiday, and what to do there—when I pray about it, and wait for guidance. It leaves me quite disinclined to commit to things, if I have not heard God’s guidance on whether I should be doing them. I now do not like to go through a weekend, or a vacation day without checking with God to see what ideas he may have for my day!

* * *

“Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor and the enemy of the people,” Ann Lamott says. I have, for decades, allowed my writing life to be poisoned by the stress and sadness of perfectionism.

“What we want is not more little books about Christianity, but more little books by Christians on other subjects—with their Christianity latent,” C.S. Lewis wrote.

So, I am trying to lower the bar–which is the best way to write well.

Apart from “little books,”–and I have just finished one which is with editors–I am trying to discipline myself to write more “little blogs,” 400-500 words (rather than my normal 800-1200 word blogs)– a single thought, a single insight, a single blessing, slight perhaps. I will write these on the off-chance that what spoke to me might speak to others.

Christian bloggers can play a prophetic role if they record what they hear the Lord saying to them. For He might be saying the same thing to others too, and perhaps our little blog is one way in which he will speak to our readers. Perhaps. God willing!

On Writing and Ambition and Some Thoughts from C.S. Lewis on Both

By Anita Mathias

So I have found myself a finalist for “The Tweeter of the Year,” an award from The Christian New Media Awards Conference.

I wondered if I should even mention it. But yeah, I am a bit pleased, for to be ambitious for one’s writing is natural–and why act deny it or be hyper-spiritual about it?

After all, nobody sets out to blog aiming to be the least-read, least-followed, or the very worst blogger in the whole world.

We write to be read, and to inspire and delight, and naturally we are pleased if we succeed in that aim.

* * *

The blogosphere is full of affirmation, and encouragement. Blogging has been a life-changing experience for me.

However, those Best of… Lists, while encouraging to those on it, as I have occasionally found myself, are discouraging—even a sock in the stomach–to those not on them. And the latter category includes most bloggers and writers.

The editor, Ted Solotaroff, says uncertainly, difficulty and doubt are as much part of a writer’s life as snow and ice are part of an Eskimo’s life.

It is the fact of anything competitive that everyone will NOT win more than they win; that no one can win ‘em all; that top bloggers or best writers lists change each year.

As Ted Solotaroff said in his brilliant essay “Writing in the Cold,” writers who survive and thrive must somehow learn to keep rowing, to not only not stop writing, but to somehow derive energy and resolve and inspiration from discouragement and failure itself.

Ah, a seemingly impossible task!!

* * *

As a Christian writer, here is how I deal with writing setbacks.

1 First of all, I consider my call. Am I indeed called to continue writing and blogging?

The answer is Yes.

It is my one gift, and I must continue.

(Both writing and blogging are such crowded fields, fraught with discouragement, that I now believe one should not embark on them unless one really loves them.)

2 Secondly, I hand it over. Hand over the success or failure of this enterprise of writing.

Surrender it to God. That gives me much peace.

3 Thirdly, I ask for God’s blessing. Visualize myself and this little blog of mine in the force field, the waterfall of God’s blessing.

4 Fourthly, have a little strategy session with God.

Am I using my gifts to the best advantage, writing about the things I can best write about? Is what I am saying genuinely helpful to my audience Are there simple tweaks which might increase readership? Any ideas for things to do differently?

If any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to him. (James 1:5). It’s true! Often amazingly simple but fruitful ideas will emerge from these sessions.

5 And then, convinced that I am indeed called to continue writing and blogging, that I have surrendered it to God, that it has his blessing, and that I am seeking the most time-effective and strategic way to write and blog, I continue rowing!!

* * *

And here are some thoughts from C. S. Lewis on ambition.

Ambition! We must be careful what we mean by it. If it means the desire to get ahead of other people . . .then it is bad. If it means simply wanting to do a thing well, then it is good. It isn’t wrong for an actor to want to act his part as well as it can possibly be acted, but the wish to gave his name in bigger type than the other actors is a bad one . . .

What we call “ambition” usually means the wish to be more conspicuous or more successful than someone else. It is this competitive element in it that is bad. It is perfectly reasonable to want to dance well or to look nice. But when the dominant wish to dance better or look nicer than the others – when you begin to feel that if the others danced as well as you or looked as nice as you, that would take all the fun out of it – then you are going wrong.

And here is a letter Lewis wrote to his long-time friend Arthur Greeves who was struggling with being rejected by a publisher.

From the age of sixteen onwards I had one single ambition [to succeed as a writer], from which I never wavered, in the prosecution of which I spent every ounce I could, on which I really and deliberately staked my whole contentment: and I recognise myself as having unmistakably failed in it.

…The side of me which longs, not to write– for no one can stop us doing that, but to be approved as a writer–is not the side of us that is really worth much. And depend upon it, unless God has abandoned us, he will find means to cauterise that side somehow or other.

…Think how difficult that would be if one succeeded as a writer: how bitter this necessary purgation at the age of sixty, when literary success had made your whole life and you had then got to begin to go through the stage of seeing it all as dust and ashes. Perhaps God has been specially kind to us in forcing us to get over it at the beginning. At all events, whether we like it or not, we have got to take the shock. As you know so well, we have got to die. Cry, kick, swear, we may: only like Lilith to come in the end and die far more painfully and later.

…I would have given almost anything—I shudder to think what I would have given if I had been allowed—to be a successful writer…I am writing as I do simply and solely because I think the only thing for you to do is absolutely to kill the part of you that wants success.

(The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume 1, Ed. Walter Hooper (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2004), pp. 925-927).

(Revised October 5^th, 2013)

Encounters with the Angel of Writing

By Anita Mathias

I heard a really amazing talk last month on writing at—get this!!– a large Charismatic Conference, RiverCamp. The speaker Mark Stibbe talked about the angel of writing, and prayed for an anointing to write for us.

I asked for it; I received it.

I have always felt guilty and conflicted about my writing, since I got married in 1989: wasn’t there some laundry or housework to do? Should I be encountering God in a laundry basket as a male spiritual adviser suggested?

Now I saw it as a calling, a spiritual gifting. An anointing!! I have, on a daily basis, written more words than ever since then. When I am stuck, I visualize myself as standing in the waterfall of God’s power and anointing, and ask to be refilled with the spirit.

* * *

Another thing Mark Stibbe said that interested me was that “Seeing” was a spiritual gift. If you have a gift for leading Bible studies, he said, you “see” things in the text which most people do not. I have long had the experience of seeing riches in a Biblical text which I thought were totally obvious to any reader, but which, apparently, were not. But I had never thought of this as a spiritual gift.

Stibbe talked about the gift of “seeing” as you write. And the manuscript which I had been stymied over for 15 years began to shape and coalesce in my mind as he spoke, and over the next couple of days.

That evening, a sweet Elim Pentecostal minister, Trevor Baker, in his sixties or older, spoke about how he had been stymied with his first book manuscript—his autobiography—for decades; how Mark Stibbe prayed for him; how the block dissolved; how he finished the manuscript in six months. He asked us to buy the published book!!

Stibbe himself spoke about how he received an anointing to write when John Wimber prayed for him.

(I am reading a book called The Anointing by R. T. Kendall, unusual, brilliant. It says God’s gifts and call are irrevocable. It examines how one might be able to transfer an anointing to write, let’s say, or be able to preach brilliantly, or heal, while no longer in a fresh, close relationship with God.)

I was delighted when Mark Stibbe prayed that we receive the anointing to write. Over the next few days, I saw the shape my book should take. I saw the painfully long chapters—between 12 and 20+ pages dissolve and reshape themselves into short 2-3 page 1000 word chapters. In the other words, the length of the blog-posts I’ve been writing for the last 29 months—the sound-bites in which I’ve been instinctively thinking. I was filled with a longing to write it, and it has been flowing freely and joyfully since then.

In which I Encounter the Angel of Writing

By Anita Mathias

Okay, I recently had one of the biggest sermon surprises in my decades of hanging around the beautiful, broken Church of Jesus Christ.

I came to RiverCamp to hear Heidi Baker, as well as Mark Stibbe because I am interested in his message of the Father Heart of God.

But what Mark talked about was—get this—writing!!

Yes, a whole sermon on writing!! Never ever heard one before.

That evening, the preacher Trevor Baker felt God told him he was going to heal someone with secondary cancer. And there was only one person in the huge tent with that. He said, “Well, that’s okay. Sometimes the message is just for one person.”

Stibbe’s message was so apposite that it felt as if it was also just for one person. Me.

* * *

Mark Stibbe spoke of writing as a spiritual gift, an anointing. He had attended a John Wimber conference as an ordinand from Nottingham and everyone else had a spiritual experience. But he did not.

However, when, on the last day, he went up for prayer, sad and disappointed, his right hand began shaking uncontrollably.

He asked God, “So, what’s going on?” God answers, “What can you do with your right hand which you cannot do with your left?”
“Write.”

And Stibbe said on that day, he received an anointing to write, an anointing, which, in R T Kendall’s phrase in his book, The Anointing, “makes the difficult easy.”

Stibbe then talked about an angel of writing, who would put its great golden wings around him when he was stuck, put a quill in his hands, and say, “Write.” Some pages from his most recent book, he says, were so “anointed” that he does not remember writing them.

He prayed for an anointing on us. Said part of an anointing is seeing things no one else sees. Seeing things before you write them down.

* * *

And in the course of the next two days, through talks on other subjects, through hours of “soaking prayer,” a vision jelled, clarified and solidified which filled my heart with joy. A re-vision, really. A recovery of lost dreams.

* * *

With a rush of sadness (because of how I’ve forgotten it) and joy (because God’s gifts and calls are irrevocable) I remembered how I began writing.

As a young woman, I had wanted to leave India to study abroad, and looked at several countries, the US, NZ, Australia, aiming low–and not thinking of the UK because of the exorbitant overseas student fees.

And then suddenly, I heard God say, “Apply to Oxford.”

Me, “Okay, I’ll apply to Oxford and Cambridge.” (Roy, now my husband, was then at Cambridge.)

Inner Voice, “No, just Oxford.”

Me, “And how will I pay for it?’

I hear, “You have your pen, haven’t you?”

And poetry came in a flood. Eight poems that evening.

(And the call to writing, and the call to Oxford are somehow intertwined, but in a way I do not understand. Yet!)

Later that month, I won a national poetry writing competition for a long poem I had written in three hours.

The gift came from God.

· * * *

But oh, how I have worried it and worried about it, tried to protect it, squeeze time for it, flog it, sinned in relationships to get time and space for it, necessarily and unnecessarily sacrificed for it.

And while—oh, I could cry—all the time it was a gift!!

* * *

As I have often written in this blog, I have two deep failures in my life. One is my failure to control my weight (though I have lost 13.5 pounds, and this is a battle I am going to win when the chairos time–is right).

The other is THE book. I had the idea for it in the late-eighties. I started writing it in 1991 and continued, off and on, until 2006, though, on the way, I got distracted and wrote and published essays, book reviews, film and theatre reviews. Oh, and had babies.

Chapters of the book met with success, the $20,000 NEA award, the $6000 Minnesota State Art Boards Award, prizes for the best article in the Catholic Press, many essay prizes, have been published in “Commonweal,” “Virginia Quarterly Review” The London Magazine, and magazines like “Notre Dame Magazine,” which paid $1000 etc. I once added up what I had already made from this unfinished, unpublished book—it was $35, 000.

And, yeah, if you detect a note of insecurity in the last paragraph, you are right!! I need to keep reminding myself there was goodness in the manuscript.

* * *

I took wrong turnings. I really wanted to write a story of my Roman Catholic Childhood in India. A teacher suggested I focus on my 14 months as a novice at Mother Teresa’s Convent. A leading editor and agent were very interested. I finished the manuscript in my life-blood through my pregnancy and the first year of my baby’s life. They turned it down. And in my naivete, I thought that that was the end of the world, instead of shipping it out again.

I then wrote the whole Indian Catholic childhood; again, agents were interested but each wanted changes which I couldn’t see how to make.

I had twisted my original vision of many short topical chapters into what the industry wanted—fewer, more thematic chapters. No wonder it was hard for me to formulate it in a magnetic proposal, write it or sell it. Also, I guess I did not try hard enough it to ship it, but crumbled with each rejection.

Crumbled too soon. Focusing on publication instead of finishing it. Focused on what the publishing industry wanted instead of my original vision. And, then, believe it or not, depressed, I shelved the project

* * *

And started selling antiquarian books in 2006, when I had bought my dream house I could not afford, and put both girls in a dream school I could not afford, either. I then founded a small publishing business in 2007. Which God blessed so much that within 3 years, my husband, Roy, was able to retire early at 47.

Which means I am writing full time, and have domestic support, the lack of which depressed and bedevilled me.

But I did not take up the book of my heart, which I have always been longing to write.

Instead, on guidance from God, I took up blogging!! Which for the last 40 months has squeezed out “real” writing. But taught me a huge amount about writing.

* * *

And then, as Mark Stibbe spoke, I clearly saw that the time had come to take up writing the book again.

And I saw the form it should take. Which was, interestingly, my original vision—many short chapters of 2-3 pages each. Roughly 800-1000 words each. In other words, the length of blog posts.

I am going to re-write the entire book, which is going to be so much easier than revising my original version. My style has changed over 40 months of blogging. It is less mandarin, less literary, less poetic, but easier to read. And to write!!

It will be too hard to revise the old manuscript. “Style is the man.” Or woman. It reflects your thinking and sensibility. When you change, your style changes. When you deliberately simplify your style and make it transparent, as one needs to in a blog, you also start thinking in shorter, lucid sentences and paragraphs.

Attempting to revise the old manuscript will be like revising someone else’s manuscript. I am a different woman now.

On the other hand, since much of the work of memory, writing and organizing into chapters is done, rewriting will be relatively easy. And very easy compared to writing it in the first place when I had masses and masses of notes and memories.

* * *

I am going to post chapters from the memoir on my blog as I write them.

I will plan to write 400-500 words of my book each day, posting each finished chapter on my blog as it’s done. 300 pages of 400 words each. 120,000 words. A page a day. And will be done with the book by September 1^st, 2014, so help me God.

And that is not an over-ambitious goal because A) the book is written. It just has to be rewritten into an easier and less mandarin style. B) I have been writing 800-1000 word blog posts every day for 40 months, and writing has now become quick and easy.

* * *

And I am so grateful to God for restoring my vision and enthusiasm for finishing my book at just the right time, the chairos time.

(Revised and edited, 31^st August, 2013)

The Deep Play of Blogging, Philosophy or Theology

By Anita Mathias

My daughter Irene, aged 5

The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his information and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence at whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he’s always doing both. James A. Michener
Simone Beauvoir, brilliant philosopher and life-long partner of Jean-Paul Sartre describes in Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter her pleasure in studying philosophy.

She found grown up, brilliant people seriously discussing the very same questions which had intrigued her as a child. Eternity. The good life. God. Right. Wrong. Happiness. Time. Goodness.

* * *

I find the same pleasure in theology. It deals with the same questions which puzzled me as a child. Is there a God? Is Christ God? Why did Christ die, and for whom? How can I be happy? How should I live? What is the purpose of life?

* * *

And blogging for me only retains its fun when it has a child-like sense of play. When I can play with ideas, think them through, record my conclusions, capturing stray bluebirds and hummingbirds of thought. Occasionally sharing cool things I’ve learned– beach glass and starfish of facts; little ideas, little insights, little delights. When I can write short imperfect posts every day, rather than one perfect post a week.

Whenever I get too ninja about it, and want to write big, significant, meaty posts, which make people think, and get shared and retweeted, blah-di-blah, blogging takes too long, and loses its fun. Stress enters the domain of play.

And my life becomes slightly less pleasurable because my blog is taking too much time, making “real writing” impossible.

* * *

So, when I was praying about my blog today, I heard surprising advice, but advice I hear each time I pray about my blog, “Lower your standards. Write shorter posts. Try just one idea per post.”

Yeah!!

I no longer even try to write the big meaty posts. I don’t have the energy to. Instead, I ask, “So what are you saying to me, Lord? What are you teaching me?” or even “What’s on my mind?”

And these may be small, slight things, but they may speak to someone I do not know.

One aspect of a prophetic ministry is tuning in to God’s thoughts and sharing them with others.

Can a blog do this? I would like mine to try.

* * *

I know that I have the most fun, and the most delight in writing when I calm down, slow down and tap into the stream of what God is saying to me, or even into my own inner stream of consciousness, and then record it, be it a minuscule humble insight or a life-changing one.

For we need both, don’t we? Cups of coffee, glasses of cold water, snacks, and the occasional banquet.
And I find the most joy in blogging when being at play in the fields of the Lord, or the fields of the blog, become one and the same.

Discovering your Unique Voice as a Writer or Blogger; Or, who’s afraid of C.S. Lewis?

By Anita Mathias

Thomas Merton

I enjoyed Michael Ward of Planet Narnia’s lecture on C. S. Lewis at Wycliffe College’s Summer School.

Rilke faced with the Archaic Torso of Apollo, with sheer beauty, feels he has wasted his life. His poem ends “You must revise your life.”

I feel like that when I consider that the richness of Lewis’s writing sprang from a lifetime of reading of poetry, myth, literature, the Bible. A life in books.

But then I remember that the world already has a Lewis. That the way for me to find my unique contribution as a writer, “be it less or more, or soon or slow,” is to be myself, to be the woman called forth by the unique circumstances of my life.

* * *

Thomas Merton writes that many writers fail to be really great for the same reason that many Christians fail to be really great Christians. They imitate other people’s poetry or spirituality instead of being the woman called for by all the unique circumstances of their lives. They compromise their integrity.

Many poets are not poets for the same reason that many religious men are not saints: they never succeed in being themselves. They never get around to being the particular poet or the particular monk they are intended to be by God. They never become the man or the artist who is called for by all the circumstances of their individual lives.

They waste their years in vain efforts to be some other poet, some other saint.

They wear out their bodies and minds in a hopeless endeavour to have somebody else’s experiences, or write somebody else’s poems, or possess somebody else’s spirituality.

There can be an intense egoism in following everybody else. People are in a hurry to magnify themselves by imitating what is popular—and too lazy to think of anything better.

Hurry ruins saints as well as artists. They want quick success and they are in such haste to get it that they cannot take time to be true to themselves.

( Thomas Merton, Integrity, New Seeds of Contemplation).

· * *

It’s all very counter-intuitive. In the blogosphere, one is tempted to write in the same way and on the same themes as bloggers who are succeeding.

Sometimes, I come across several bloggers who write in the same distinctive style, and on similar subjects. And while fitting in with the cool kids in style or subject matter will give you short term success, it will affect your long term success, because you will be suppressing the real you—your unique take on the world, your beauty and ugliness, the secret little experiences, obsessions, preoccupations and convictions which are shared by no one else.

If I had heard that lecture on the literary influences of C. S. Lewis when I was younger, I would have left on fire to read more and write more. And these are good, but now I do not exhort myself to do these particularly. Burnouts and middle-age have left me eager to work in a slow and steady sustainable way. I want to finish the work God has given me to do by the end, not necessarily the middle of my life.

So the counter-intuitive way to success as a blogger or writer is to read the great writers, let your thinking be transformed by them, pick up their themes if they resonate deeply with you, but, above all, be yourself.

If you are a kingfisher, flash fire. If you are a dragonfly, draw flame.If you are a writer or a blogger, be yourself.Be the writer or the blogger called forth by all the circumstances of your life. Write in the way that comes naturally to you, about the experiences your life gives you, and your interests and preoccupations. And, to your own surprise perhaps, you will have stumbled upon the secret of originality, even uniqueness.

* * *

Let me offer you a favourite passage from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet.

Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.

This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple “I must,” then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your while life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this impulse.

Then come close to Nature. Then, as if no one had ever tried before, try to say what you see and feel and love and lose. So rescue yourself from general themes and write about what your everyday life offers you; describe your sorrows and desires, the thoughts that pass through your mind and your belief in some kind of beauty – describe all these with heartfelt, silent, humble sincerity and, when you express yourself, use the Things around you, the images from your dreams, and the objects that you remember.

If your everyday life seems poor, don’t blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is not poverty and no poor, indifferent place. And even if you found yourself in some prison, whose walls let in none of the world’s sounds – wouldn’t you still have your childhood, that jewel beyond all price, that treasure house of memories? Turn your attentions to it.

Try to raise up the sunken feelings of this enormous past; your personality will grow stronger, your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the twilight, where the noise of other people passes by, far in the distance. And if out of this turning-within, out of this immersion in your own world, poems come, then you will not think of asking anyone whether they are good or not. For you will see them as your dear natural possession, a piece of your life, a voice from it.

What Kind of Blog would Jesus have Written?

By Anita Mathias

A few words Jesus wrote

Well, if Jesus were a blogger, rather than an itinerant preacher, what kind of blog would he have?

1) It would be unique. It’s recorded that people were amazed at his words. No man ever spoke the way this man does (John 7:46).

Oh great. That’s a tall order. And how do I be unique?

By being myself.

Since no two people see the world in the same way, by being honest, we stumble upon the secret of being original, of being unusual.

Each person is unique, as unique as each snowflake, rose, fingerprint, zebra’s stripes, the iris of an eye, or the dots on a penguin’s chest.

As we grow to utter honesty, we discover in the process–unique blogs.

2) It would be full of grace and truth.

Full of graciousness, of course, but it would be honest too. Hypocrisy was the trait Jesus most abhorred in the Pharisees, “who did everything to be seen by men” (Matt. 23:5) and honesty was the trait he adored, for instance, in his foot-in-the mouth, speak-first-and-then-think disciples.

3) It would be a blessing.

There would be life in it, living waters, and nourishment–the bread of life.

4) Would Jesus spend time in gaining readers for his blog, or would he proceed on the “If you build it, they will come?” principle?

Both. He sees Philip and Matthew and invites them to follow him. He invites himself to Zaccheus’s house for a meal.

And the real-life friendships which grow out of blogging is one of its great pleasures.

But I get the impression that Jesus went about his Father’s business and drew people to him because there was life in his words. That he would have delivered the Sermon on the Mount if there were five people there, instead of five thousand.

If one invests time in blogging, it is perhaps only sensible and responsible to invest some time in finding readers for one’s blog. And I do far too little of that…

5) Jesus would not embark on or continue a blog without being sure that blogging was his Father’s will for him, what he was called to do.

He said, “I do nothing on my own.” I think he would be continually checking in with his Father on what to write, and how much to write, and how.

6 A blog written by Jesus would be somehow prophetic.

He would listen to his Father until he heard him speak. He would record what he heard.

6 A blog written by Jesus would be varied, like his teaching ministry.

Jesus used parables and sermons, exhortation and admonition. He taught his disciples spiritual lessons from their everyday experiences. He used metaphor and allegory, humour and satire.

He loved pithy aphorisms—oh how he would have loved Twitter—and stories which, twenty centuries later, reveal fresh depths of meaning each time we ponder them.

He loved questions. His favourite answer, in common with many Jewish rabbis was a question, which silenced his questioners.

* * *

I would love my blog to bear some resemblance to the blog a central figure in my spiritual, emotional, and thought-life might have written.

And how do I do that?

Oddly enough, it begins with relaxing. Slowing down.

Spending more time with him–to catch his spirit. To have my soul filled with his bread of life, and with the living waters He said would flow from those who believe in him.

anita.mathias