RESOURCES FOR CREATING A QUIET INNER LIFE & CREATING MARGIN IN YOUR LIFE:
1. unQuiet Life Podcast "unQuiet Life is an ongoing conversation, delivered as a weekly podcast, about living a contemplative life in Urban America. Come discover the benefits of fostering a quiet inner life in a loud, complex, busy world. We aren’t experts. We’re just two guys in Chicago on a spiritual journey. Our guide has been Jesus of Nazareth, and contemporary followers of his like Henri Nouwen and Richard Rohr. Regardless of your religious background, we invite you to join us on a spiritual road-trip. We’ve found this part of the path to be largely uncharted by the churches we’ve known, so let’s find something special together."
2. Sabbath Society "Want to make rest a routine, not just something you fill in between the cracks of your busyness? Subscribe to the bi-weekly Sabbath Society email: "Every other Friday morning, a quiet email slips into your inbox with encouragement, ideas, recipes, resources and timely responses from our community; an ongoing conversation with the goal of helping you stay on the path toward finding a routine of rest. We’re not doing this to achieve perfection or sainthood, just linking arms knowing that what we gain in the observance results in transformation as we focus on Peace."
3. "Freedom From Stuff" This is one episode of "The Art of Simple Podcast". Listen to this episode if you need inspiration to de-clutter your home in order to have a simpler life style.
Books I Have Read:
1. Invitation to Solitude and Silence: Experiencing God's Transforming Presence by Ruth Haley Barton et al.
"Much of our faith and practice is about words―preaching, teaching, talking with others. Yet all of these words are not enough to take us into the real presence of God where we can hear his voice. This book is an invitation to you to meet God deeply and fully outside the demands and noise of daily life. It is an invitation to solitude and silence."
2. Cold Tangerines: Celebrating the Extraordinary Nature of Everyday Life by Shauna Niequist
"Cold Tangerines is a collection of stories that celebrate the extraordinary moments hidden in your everyday life. It is about God, and about life, and about the thousands of daily ways in which an awareness of God changes and infuses everything. It is about spiritual life, and about all the things that are called nonspiritual life that might be spiritual after all."
3. Found: A Story of Questions, Grace & Everyday Prayer by Micha Boyett et al.
"I read Micha's words and my breathing slows. She gives perspective. And hope. And a refreshing lightness to not take what doesn t matter too seriously. She revives: When you order the tangle of your days around Him, He untangles you. She moves: The moments all matter. The daily awareness of the small add up to the whole of your life, and her words are like a dawn, stirring you to wake and walk."
ANN VOSKAMP, <New York Times best-selling author of One Thousand Gifts
"With this beautiful book, Micha Boyett opens a door to Benedictine spirituality through which regular, busy people can enter and taste, see, smell, hear, and feel what it means to live life as a prayer."
RACHEL HELD EVANS, author of A Year of Biblical Womanhood
Books I Am Reading Now or Plan to Read Soon!
1. Wearing God: Clothing, Laughter, Fire, and Other Overlooked Ways of Meeting God by Lauren F. Winner
"There are hundreds of metaphors for God, but the church only uses a few familiar images: creator, judge, savior, father. In Wearing God, Lauren Winner gathers a number of lesser-known tropes, reflecting on how they work biblically and culturally, and reveals how they can deepen our spiritual lives."
2. Seeking God: The Way of St. Benedict by Esther de Waal
"For over fifteen hundred years St. Benedict's Rule has been a source of guidance, support, inspiration, challenge, comfort and discomfort for men and women. It has helped both those living under monastic vows and those living outside the cloister in all the mess and muddle of ordinary, busy lives in the world. Esther de Waal's Seeking God serves as an introduction to this life-giving way and encourages people to discover for themselves the gift that St. Benedict can bring to individuals, to the Church, and to the world, now and in the years to come."
3. Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal, and Delight in Our Busy Lives
by Wayne Muller
"In today's world, with its relentless emphasis on success and productivity, we have lost the necessary rhythm of life, the balance between work and rest. Constantly striving, we feel exhausted and deprived in the midst of great abundance. We long for time with friends and family, we long for a moment to ourselves.
Millennia ago, the tradition of Sabbath created an oasis of sacred time within a life of unceasing labor. Now, in a book that can heal our harried lives, Wayne Muller, author of the spiritual classic How, Then, Shall We Live?, shows us how to create a special time of rest, delight, and renewal--a refuge for our souls.
We need not even schedule an entire day each week. Sabbath time can be a Sabbath afternoon, a Sabbath hour, a Sabbath walk. With wonderful stories, poems, and suggestions for practice, Muller teaches us how we can use this time of sacred rest to refresh our bodies and minds, restore our creativity, and regain our birthright of inner happiness."
by Shauna Niequist
"The idea of bittersweet is changing the way I live, unraveling and re-weaving the way I understand life. Bittersweet is the idea that in all things there is both something broken and something beautiful, that there is a moment of lightness on even the darkest of nights, a shadow of hope in every heartbreak, and that rejoicing is no less rich even when it contains a splinter of sadness. It's the practice of believing that we really do need both the bitter and the sweet, and that a life of nothing but sweetness rots both your teeth and your soul. Bitter is what makes us strong, what forces us to push through, what helps us earn the lines on our faces and the calluses on our hands. Sweet is nice enough, but bittersweet is beautiful, nuanced, full of depth and complexity. Bittersweet is courageous, gutsy, audacious, earthy."
5. Bread For The Journey: A Daybook of Wisdom and Faith
by Henri J. M. Nouwen
"Intimately personal and inspiring, Bread for the Journey is a daily feast of fresh insight into the challenges and deep joys of a life lived in close communion with God. Nouwen is a wise, loving companion who invites us along as he finds joy in the community of loss, true freedom in forgiveness of others, and hope in surprising places. Each daily meditation is a stepping-stone along a path of private discovery, offering Nouwen's seasoned yet fresh ideas on kindness, love, suffering, and prayer, the Church as God's people, and the importance of Jesus in one's life-reflecting, as a whole, Nouwen's own 'personal creed.' Bread for the Journey brims with daily nourishment and guidance for devoted followers and new friends alike -- food for thought on a yearlong journey of discovery and faith."
6. The Cloister Walk by Kathleen Norris
"The allure of the monastic life baffles most lay people, but in her second book Norris goes far in explaining it. The author, raised Protestant, has been a Benedictine oblate, or lay associate, for 10 years, and has lived at a Benedictine monastery in Minnesota for two. Here, she compresses these years of experience into the diary of one liturgical year." From Publishers Weekly
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Getting Started with Faith Art Journaling:
1. Basic Instructions about Art Journaling: Art Journaling 101 by Daisy Yellow
2. Great site for learning about connecting your faith and your art journaling: Adore Him Creations by Diane Marra Diane also has some really great Videos on YouTube.
3. Beautiful and Inspiring: Visual Blessings by Valerie Sjodin /
Valerie's Visual Prayer Ideas & Techniques
4. Blogs I Love:
A Splendid Adventure Studio
Me, With My Head in the Clouds
Daisy Yellow Squarespace
Organizations That Connect Art & Faith:
1. Artway (www.artway.eu )
2. AEM – Arts & Entertainment Ministries (www.a-e-m.org )
3. Church & Art Network (www.churchandart.org )
4. CIVA – Christians in the Visual Arts (www.civa.org )
5. StoneWorks (www.stoneworks-arts.org )
6. The Worship Studio (www.theworshipstudio.org )
7. Engage Worship (www.engageworship.org )
Events:
1. Gathering of Artisans (by The Worship Studio) (www.gatheringofartisans.wordpress.com)
2. The Creative Church Conference ( http://creativechurchconference.wordpress.com/ )
Learn More:
1."Why The Church Needs Art" Excellent videos by Scott Erikson. A series of videos he made about some things he learned being the artist in residence at Ecclesia Church in Houston, TX from 2009-2012. (http://scottericksonart.com/portfolio/church-needs-art/)
2. Art Fruition / An Online Art Ministry School starting Fall 2015 founded by Jesse Nilo, Director of VineArts at Vineyard Church Boise. (http://artfruition.com)
3. The Christian Artist in Ministry (www.artsreformation.com/a001/cp-ministry.html)
4. Arts Reformation.com (www.artsreformation.com)
5. Art by Faith (www.artbyfaith.org )
6. The New Renaissance Rising (www.thenewr.org ) ***Many links and resources.
Church Art Ministries:
1. VineArts Boise (www.vineartsboise.org )
2. Mosaic (www.mosaic.org )
3. Redeemer Presbyterian Church - Center for Faith & Worship (www.faithandwork.org)
4. Ex Creatis / Saddleback church Lake Forest (excreatis.com)
5. Roswell Community Church / Visual Journaling (www.roswellchurch.org/connect/women)
6. Brushy Creek Baptist Church Taylors - Creative Connection Group /Faith Art Journaling Group ( email me for more info at leighann@lukens1.com )
