I am s-l-o-w-l-y working my way through an Annual Examen. Not one that is guided, but one that is based on question prompts that I started at an online retreat on the 30th of December. 

​Thankfully, one of the recommendations was to move through these questions with an intentional slow pace, so they have time to sit in your head and your heart. Allowing us to notice what questions sit well with us and which ones poke at us. 

Well, one of the questions that poked at me was around what moments and events had significant meaning for you over the past year. 

A relatively harmless question that the Spirit used to reveal that I didn't see significant meaning in moment. In events, certainly! I had a whole list of them - but not so much moments. 

Which leads me into an invitation in this new year to find meaning not just in big events, but in the everyday. To embrace how and when the Spirit shows up - even if I don't notice it at first. 

What is the Spirit revealing to you in this new year?

"Radical Hospitality" has become a phrase in churches, inviting congregations to go beyond what they consider to be hospitality, but may really just be friendliness, to something deeper. Something more challenging and transformative.

​While churches may have recently picked up this phrase, spiritual direction has always been a place of radical hospitality. I was sharing with one of my students recently that my first spiritual director would meet me at the door, take my coat and ask if I wanted a cup of tea. As the tea brewed, we settled in with one another to do the holy work before us.

Holy work that focuses on the directee and their experience of the Divine. 

And perhaps that is what makes spiritual direction such a place of radical hospitality. It isn't about the director - their thoughts or preferences. Rather it's about the directee and their noticings of the Spirit.

There are so few places in our world today where we show up and something is about us. Is for us. And exists to help draw us closer to God. Where are places that you have discovered radical hospitality in your life?

 If you aren't familiar with nesting dolls they are a series of usually five or six figurines that fit inside of each other in a related way. Some are the same design with smaller and smaller features. Others tell an ongoing story - like a fairytale. Still others are related characters from a narrative, like my nativity nesting dolls. 

But more than the story the dolls themselves tell, whenever I see nesting dolls it reminds me of calling. Sometimes we think that we only have one calling, but I have described my life as a call within a call within in a call - working down the truest essence of who I am. 

For example, I think my truest call is listening passionately, which effects everything that I do, in my relationships and in my vocation.

​What is your truest calling and who is helping you to discover and live into it?