Today's topic in this series on movements of growth is a controversial one. It is "the movement toward trust in oneself." A lot of you won't find this surprising at all; we talk a lot in our culture about trusting ourselves, trusting our gut or intuition, and so on. But others of you — especially … Continue reading The Movement toward Trust in Oneself
Today in this series on eight ways we grow into greater authenticity and greater faith, we shift from looking at the things we're moving away from to focus on what we are moving towards. The first of these is openness. I love how wonderfully vague this is. The very word is itself open. For me … Continue reading The Movement toward Openness
On an early April evening in 1968, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke in support of Black sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. It had been a long and difficult stretch for him and for his fellow workers in the Civil Rights Movement. That evening, in the face of increasingly hostile opposition — his flight … Continue reading I Have Seen the Promised Land: A Reflection on Deuteronomy 34.1-12
The other day, I introduced Wilkie Au and Noreen Cannon Au's eight movements of growth, as one framework through which we can explore what authentic spiritual growth looks like. Today, I'd like to look into the first of the eight movements they describe: "the movement away from facades, from a pretended self that we are … Continue reading The Movement away from Facades
'Who am I?' It's one of the most fundamental questions of the human experience. As children we learn to differentiate ourselves from our parents, families, and friend groups. Through trial and error, we figure out what we're good at (and where we struggle), what we value, what we believe, and who and how we want … Continue reading A Question of Identity: A Reflection on Matthew 16.13-20 and Romans 12.1-8
Matthew Root 