Imaginative Prayer
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Three Methods that Helped Me Conquer Anxiety
I became aware of my anxiety, ironically, when suddenly I had less to fear. I found myself a single mother of four wonderful daughters and free of a narcissistic and cruel ex-husband. I was so used to feeling numb that when I began to reconnect with my emotions, all the fear I lived with for years came to the surface. My approach to life, similar to my father’s, is to get a few books on a topic and begin to educate myself, but somehow specific methods for curing anxiety proved elusive. The one thing that kept popping up in my research is that the brain is plastic, and we have…
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You Are What You Eat: Communion Reimagined
While in Jerusalem some years ago, we visited the Upper Room. It had long since been turned into a small chapel, and as we sat on the wooden pews, a tour guide took us through the story of Jesus’ communion with the disciples. Afterwards, one of the students I was with asked about the authenticity of this site as the actual location of the Upper Room. The tour guide smiled and then told us about the six other Upper Rooms in the vicinity. Apparently, an ambitious tourist could go around and partake of the sacrament in seven Upper Rooms in an afternoon. Honestly, if I had the time, I might…
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What Our Childhood Memories Reveal
Memories act as markers for our lives, and our first ones often reveal a lot about how we see the world. What you make of your childhood makes you, I believe. One of my first vivid memories involves a small house I lived in at the age of three or four. We lived in Colorado at the time and were quite poor as my parents attended graduate school. I would walk up and down the block and once knocked on a neighbor’s door to see if she had any children. I remember her house as pink and her hair as brown laced with silver. She had no children and clearly…
