The next few posts are meant to help you know what you can expect to find here.
Each post will typically sit with just one word or short phrase. This is the pacing and the scope that feels about right to me. As if we are holding a magnifying glass, we’ll stay small, go slow, and begin to search out the oil-slick eyes, fuzzy golden streaks, and busy black-wire limbs of each diminutive little word, busy about its glory-work in the world.
As Google beautifully defines it, a word is “even the smallest amount of something spoken or written.”
In even one word there is complexity and nuance untold, pathways unfurling like ferns in the shade, stories written in the sky for our tracing out, a weightiness and kind of heaven-breathed glory that is well worth our attentiveness and inquiry. Like bent branches and breadcrumbs so carefully broken and laid down by one who has stepped just out of sight, who is longing to be found.
And how will we sit? As children do, of course. In our sitting, we will play, nudge each other, look around, get up and stand on our heads, wiggle, furrow our brows, get bored, and gaze at each other with a frank kind of wonder. We will inhabit the world of emotion, imagination and image, memory, association, intuition, rhyme, metaphor, and sound.
My hope is that these words will create a hospitable and compelling space for the various parts of ourselves. If we are to usher both our shy and timid, bold and brassy parts to Jesus – the ones we have exiled and the ones who are ever-present – let us try mimicking the ways in which he engaged with people: through narrative, riddle, question, image, and the invitation to come and see.
If you’d like to continue on this journey with me, please sign up below to get email updates when I post something new. I am very grateful for the time you give to reading these, and would be glad to hear any feedback or comments you have about how we can risk a next, slow step toward Jesus together.
– Amanda
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