Practicing spiritual disciplines like prayer, solitude, and unplugging can easily feel like needing to reach a super-high level of holiness or faith, to get it right, or to find that one perfect practice.

As artist-leaders who follow the most High God, we have a unique skill set to react to this time and season in 5 ways.

At various times over the past few years, I’ve been invited to pen a Beloved Charter. This is a letter from God to me, choosing and naming me as His own. It’s a simple way to practice compassion toward myself and others.

This poem reverberates of winters gone by, a mother’s memory of a fearless girl full of zest. Today she is an ever-changing beauty who teaches me about seizing life.

Here are 10 things that kept me from caving to creative burnout in 2021. Instead, I found sanity, and quite miraculously, ways to thrive, even in the midst of a pandemic and starting grad school.

What's saving your life? From the fog, disillusionment, pain, uncertainty. What’s bringing you life, salvation, and hope? Someone asked that question in a small group I was in recently. For some it was mystery novels. For me, it was the Psalms and some sonnets.

In the tension of racial injustice and pandemic, it’s important to curate places of peace.

The kind that stills.

The kind that heals.

A poem about reconnecting as close as a pandemic will allow:

Smiles, big eyes.

How the heck have you been?

Delight of recognition,

A triad, a row of connection, through three car windows

There's a woman in your life. She's the one behind the scenes. Mom or not, she needs to know she matters.

I asked one of my podcast interviews what he was learning about himself yesterday and he turned the tables on me, “What about you?”

Oh, me? I think I said something about living life more slowly. Yet the question sticks with me.

Let’s go deeper. What am I learning about myself? About how I operate in the world? About how I relate to others?