• delight,  Heart,  laughter,  relationship to God,  Self Awareness

    Delight: the Ministry of the Holy Spirit

    Delight did not come easily to me as a child. I had a somewhat lonely childhood. I even suffered from a lengthy stint of childhood depression. So when a lovely older lady named Winnie, from the house with the luscious orange and lemon trees a block away, invited me to milk and cookies in her backyard, I immediately agreed. This was back in the seventies when parental supervision was more relaxed. “You are such a good girl!’ she would say to me, and such was the pleasure in her tone that I was forced to reconsider my idea of myself.  I never thought of myself at bad, particularly, but neither…

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  • confession,  freedom,  Imaginative Prayer,  mindfulness,  prayer,  relationship,  Self Awareness,  Shame & Guilt

    Mindfulness and Confession: Reflections in the Mirror

    Mindfulness, in the early stages of my Christianity, did not exist, though I sure knew about confession.  I believed the truest thing about me was a list of all my sins.  And as a person for whom shame was a way of being, the idea of confessing my sins to someone else besides God seemed impossible. To begin with, I couldn’t even share my feelings with others, much less those faults and weaknesses I perceived in myself.  I could barely admit my feelings to myself, much less others.  I remember at one point listing out all of my transgressions on a sheet of paper and presenting them to God.  I…

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