Today we share with you a note from a leader in her mid-30s: I struggle to set priorities. It feels as though there is a lot to juggle between raising children, nurturing my marriage, training others, participating in a missional community, working with refugees, serving at church, managing my home, extra-curricular activities, etc. - and still have time to pursue physical and spiritual health. I know that these are important but just what balance is optimal?

I don’t know about you,...

Sometimes I like to stretch myself with a culture-bending question. It’s too easy for me to remain unaware of my own assumptions and biases. This idea comes to me more and more as I travel around the world.

I have now been to Mexico, Singapore, the Dominican Republic, Germany, Israel, Jordan, Italy, Spain, and Russia. (If you count airport layovers, I’ve also been to Japan and Switzerland).

And each country has its own culture, ways and assumptions.

Each time I have traveled it...

In the Fall of 2018, we published our first Unhurried Living devotional called Inhaling Grace. We’ve appreciated the encouraging response we’ve received since then. Over the next few months, we’ll share the devotional here as an audiobook. We’ll have more to say about that in a moment on the Unhurried Living Podcast.

In early 2016, when Gem and I launched Unhurried Living, I spent a few days on retreat with a small group of Christian leaders. We met at a little Episcopal retreat house called St. Columba’s in Inverness, CA. It overlooks Tomales Bay on the Pacific Coast just above San Francisco. I’m grateful for little holy places like this where we can rest, reflect and pray.

While I was there, I found myself reading a few lines from the letter to the Hebrews:

Therefore he had to become like...

We often talk here about how a hurried soul costs us more than we realize, and that an unhurried soul is a way of following the genius of Jesus’ way of life and work. But there is a hurry that is actually holy, and there is a way of being unhurried that is actually unholy. We’ll tackle this pair on today’s episode of the Unhurried Living Podcast.

• Unholy hurry is that variety of soul hurry that we must ruthlessly eliminate as Dallas Willard urged us.

• Holy...

As Unhurried Living has grown, so have my opportunities to speak with people. From the quiet space of a spiritual direction room, to a talk on retreat, to a workshop in a church building, I (Gem) have had multiple chances to talk about what I know.

Over the last few years I have ridden waves of anxiety about the situations mentioned above, as well as everything in between. It usually comes in “what if” form. What if I forget what to say? What if I don’t have an answer...or...

God takes rest seriously. Rest is built into the very fabric of creation. The first full day after the creation of humanity is a day of rest—a Sabbath. God rests. We rest. And rest is the place in which relationship is established and cultivated. This is why God urges us to enter his rest. It isn’t merely a moralism. It is an invitation to be rooted in love and grace. But it’s an invitation that we too often fail to open.

I’ve often been struck by an almost throw-away...

We may be familiar with some of the Hebrew names for God: Elohim, El-Shaddai, Yahweh, Jehovah and Adonai. But what about the regular, day to day terms God uses in scripture to describe himself?

Today’s email is a little different than usual. I’d like to invite you to spend a few moments here engaging with this list of descriptive words. It will likely take just as long as it would take you to read one of my regular emails. Give yourself the gift of engaging here for a moment.

...

A practice that has meant a lot to me over the years has been praying scripture very personally. In the past, I was sometimes guilty of reading scripture at arm’s length. By that, I mean that I would study what certain words meant in original languages, I would read what others thought about the scriptures in commentaries, and I would talk about the scriptures as true and good. But I wouldn’t take them in. I wouldn’t see them intersecting with my actual life as I found it at...

In Holy Week, we remember Maundy Thursday and an upper room where Jesus shares a meal with his friends and shows his love by washing their feet. On Good Friday, we remember the suffering and death of Jesus Christ on the cross. On Easter, we celebrate a risen Savior. But on Holy Saturday, we have a tomb. And the tomb at this point in the story isn’t yet empty.

Holy Saturday is the silence between the “It is finished” of Good Friday and the “He is Risen” of Easter...