Category: Relationship
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Become a We: The Quickest Path to Healing Relational Wounds
“Become a ‘We’ as fast as you can.” Of all the advice that my father gave me in the 32 years that he was physically in my life, this was the most important. When he was dying from Multiple Myeloma, something awakened in him that transformed the way he saw reality. All of the time…
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Stepping into the Mystery
Are you willing to step into the Mystery? “I don’t know” is a viable answer to any question if “not knowing” is the truth. Two years ago, when I listened to the “Voice” that called me into pastoral ministry saying that it was time to leave the pulpit and the building and go out into…
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I Work For Your Organization. And You Can’t Stop Me.
In Mandarin there is a phrase that goes, 水涨船高 (shuǐzhǎngchuángāo)–literally water rise boat high–which basically comes down to the often expressed wisdom that we hear in American economics, “a rising tide lifts all boats”. A lot of people attribute the saying to John F. Kennedy. But it turns out he got it from his speechwriter,…
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The Alpha and the Omega: Why Endings Are as Important as Beginnings
Endings matter because the final moments of a group’s togetherness can substantially influence the entire experience. The ending can modify the experience, make it better or worse, embed it deeply in memory or, absent a strong close, can dilute an experience into something that happened, but mattered little. Tim McNamara – https://sweetunrest.com/ending-well-treating-classes-like-gatherings-part-three/ One of the…
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Employment, Engagement, and Empowerment: The Way of Enough
When I entered seminary back in 2009, it was because, after working on a very disappointing Diversity Recruiting project with a certain company, I became convinced that a seminary degree would be just what I needed to “evangelize” the good news of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging in organizations. After all, at their best, I…
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Living Loveward Ch. 2 – Certainty Kills Relationships
Most of us imagine that if we just had certainty, all of our relationships would run more smoothly. Like most love myths, it’s probably not true. In this video, I challenge hearers to ask ourselves if we really want what we say we want from our relationships.
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“I” Does Not Exist – The Power and Peril of Family Systems (Boulder, CO)
When One Suffers, We All Suffer I have been trying to do soul surgery on myself ever since learning about the shooting at the King Soopers in Boulder, CO where I have shopped countless times and sometimes drop my daughter off for her gymnastics carpool. I am doing this because in my heart of hearts,…
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A Box as Big as the Universe
My uncle, Vernon Kitabu Turner, can’t be put in a box. And it is time that I thank God for him. He just loves God and has ceaselessly sought to understand the Spirit that he has witnessed as active his entire life by any means necessary. When I was younger, people told me that I…
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Being With God
God is the ground of being, being-itself; who concerns us ultimately. Thus, God is our ultimate concern. — Paul Tillich I’ll be honest with you and say that on a weekly if not daily basis, I find myself wondering what good I am doing as a pastor. It’s not that I don’t appreciate what I do or the people with…
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Communicating to Death (or some better title)
“Urkel is dead and I can’t breathe.” Those were the words Oprah spoke to the interviewer when they asked her about one of the most recent casualties of a senseless shooting. I couldn’t breathe either. How could Urkel be gone? He held the hopes of so many of us. He had achieved the dream and…
The Roofless Church 