How to Keep Alive the Interior Life

Have you ever gone on a God Hunt? A God Hunt begins when you teach yourself to look for God’s hand at work in the everyday occurrences of your life. Here’s one of my personal God Hunt Sightings:



Every day I try to read a little from literature that is richly written and that stirs my soul. These last months I’ve been slowly perusing and underlining the book How to Read a Poem by Edward Hirsch. Poetry has always been a difficult genre for me to understand, but the author is a master teacher and suddenly, as I study his writing and the samples he includes, this world of literature is opening to me. Poems are becoming comprehensible, astounding, soul-shaking and renewing.

I’m halfway through Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman, for example, and I hear the thunder in the pages and have to close the volume. One can only stand so much ecstasy at a time. A new acquaintance loves and understands the work of Ranier Maria Rilke, so I have begun again to read the Duino Elegies; this is like reading another language, so I am going slowly, slowly, knowing that I can question my friend when I don’t understand (and there is much that I don’t understand).

This quote from Hirsch’s writing arrested me, and I’ve been asking myself the question in the days since I wrote it down in my prayer journal on April 3, 2012:

“The question poses itself as to how to keep alive the interior life in the face of our own and the world’s corruption.”

What a provocative inquiry. How do we (how do I) keep alive the interior life in the face of my own corruption as well as the world’s corruption?

I understand that God is often more a questioner than He is a forth-teller. So I am taking this disturbing question as something that has come my way because He wants me to chew on it.

First of all, what are my own corruptions? Where is the decay within me that pollutes the purity that an interior journey needs in order to sustain itself? I need to be still and let the Spirit whisper the answers to my heart.

Secondly, what are the corruptions of the world that compete with the maintenance of interiority? What is an interior life? Does everyone have an interior life? What must I give up? What must I clean out? What activities must I cease and what activities must I
establish in order to feed the soulish part of myself that is often starved by corruptions? How can I utilize the life that is given to me so that I can be fully alive?

Questions. Questions. Questions. There will be answers. The pathway lies ahead.

I spy God!

Opening Our Hearts and Homes

In Open Heart, Open Home (over 500,000 copies in print) award-winning Karen Mains steps far beyond how-to-entertain you hints to explore the deeper concepts of Christian hospitality-the Biblical way to use your home and an open heart to care for others like God wants us to. Countless pastors have recommended this classic resource as the meaningful example of how the Holy Spirit ministers to and through us to make other people feel truly welcome and deeply wanted.

Perfect for any womens bible study group, especially when used in tandem with the Opening Our Hearts & Homes Bible Study.

This new edition contains 54 helpful ways to make hospitality work whether you live on a country farm, in a house in the suburbs, or in an apartment in the city. Everyone in your bible study will appreciate the life-changing principles of this timeless classic. 

Slings and Arrows

Have you ever gone on a God Hunt? A God Hunt begins when you teach yourself to look for God’s hand at work in the everyday occurrences of your life. Here’s one of my personal God Hunt Sightings:



David and I have gone up to the Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario for some 39 years. Rather than have a cabin on a lake, or a vacation getaway, we have returned to this little stone town with its four theatres and amazing cultural life, inviting friends and family and acquaintances to come with us. Theatre in this environment, with the finest repertory company on the North American continent, has enriched our souls. Will Shakespeare is part of our family history.

On several occasions people have recommended the Canadian television series Slings and Arrows, a fictional account of a theatre company much like the Stratford Festival. “No one says its about the Festival,” said the friend who most recently recommended this series, no longer on television, “But it’s about the Festival. We laughed our heads off.”

Since Slings and Arrows had been recommended so frequently and so highly by people whose judgments we trust (most of whom have traveled to the Festival with us), I ordered the four-year series through Amazon.com. Last night after a wearying day, I sat down to view the first segment of the first DVD. I ended up watching one whole season and laughed all the way through it. It was outlandish; it was fascinating; it was filled with actor’s ego and performer’s angst. And at the same time, the story lines were unaccountably sweet. This first season is about the mounting of the play “Hamlet” and finally, when the young Hollywood star who has been brought in to boost the box-office receipts, reaches the deepest meaning of the lines he has memorized, I leaned into the television set, moved mightily by the power of the language and brushed away the tears that began to swell.

Remarkably, despite its wild display of human foibles, this quirky television series has captured some of the transcendency we often feel when we sit in the theatre and watch the dramatic presentations of the Bard.

Slings and Arrows is by no means a Christian production—far from it. So I am often left to puzzle how it is that non-church people capture those moments that open up before us all and in which the holy, in which the sacred reside. We’ve actually had conversations with Shakespeare Festival actors about this very thing. Something numinous, something transcendent occurs; they know it, they recognize it when it happens, but they struggle for the words to explain it. “Those are the moments in the life of the theatre that we wait for,” one lead actress explained. Her colleagues nodded their heads in agreement.

Perhaps, for the rest of us, less talented certainly in the dramatic arts, we also wait for moments when God comes near, when the veil of this life parts a little, and we know His presence in a way we don’t always know it, and we bow like Moses before the burning bush. We have taken off our shoes.

Thanks be given for a life filled with friends who recommend great things to read or see or places to go. Rich thinking and beautiful moments of being come from heeding their recommendations. Somehow, often despite us all, God is present.

I spy God!

Off to Africa

Have you ever gone on a God Hunt? A God Hunt begins when you teach yourself to look for God’s hand at work in the everyday occurrences of your life. Here’s one of my personal God Hunt Sightings:



David and I have flown to Africa to visit the native land of the Global Bag Project. Since we will have intermittent internet connections during the next few weeks, I will have to suspend my blogging until I return.

Please pray that God will give us safety as we travel. Please also pray that we will be able to encourage all those who work in this important ministry. God has given us a very special gift of being able to make this trip. We desire to use this opportunity for His glory.

I spy God!

Slings and Arrows

Have you ever gone on a God Hunt? A God Hunt begins when you teach yourself to look for God’s hand at work in the everyday occurrences of your life. Here’s one of my personal God Hunt Sightings:



David and I have gone up to the Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario for some 39 years. Rather than have a cabin on a lake, or a vacation getaway, we have returned to this little stone town with its four theatres and amazing cultural life, inviting friends and family and acquaintances to come with us. Theatre in this environment, with the finest repertory company on the North American continent, has enriched our souls. Will Shakespeare is part of our family history.

On several occasions people have recommended the Canadian television series Slings and Arrows, a fictional account of a theatre company much like the Stratford Festival. “No one says its about the Festival,” said the friend who most recently recommended this series, no longer on television, “But it’s about the Festival. We laughed our heads off.”

Since Slings and Arrows had been recommended so frequently and so highly by people whose judgments we trust (most of whom have traveled to the Festival with us), I ordered the four-year series through Amazon.com. Last night after a wearying day, I sat down to view the first segment of the first DVD. I ended up watching one whole season and laughed all the way through it. It was outlandish; it was fascinating; it was filled with actor’s ego and performer’s angst. And at the same time, the story lines were unaccountably sweet. This first season is about the mounting of the play “Hamlet” and finally, when the young Hollywood star who has been brought in to boost the box-office receipts, reaches the deepest meaning of the lines he has memorized, I leaned into the television set, moved mightily by the power of the language and brushed away the tears that began to swell.

Remarkably, despite its wild display of human foibles, this quirky television series has captured some of the transcendency we often feel when we sit in the theatre and watch the dramatic presentations of the Bard.

Slings and Arrows is by no means a Christian production—far from it. So I am often left to puzzle how it is that non-church people capture those moments that open up before us all and in which the holy, in which the sacred reside. We’ve actually had conversations with Shakespeare Festival actors about this very thing. Something numinous, something transcendent occurs; they know it, they recognize it when it happens, but they struggle for the words to explain it. “Those are the moments in the life of the theatre that we wait for,” one lead actress explained. Her colleagues nodded their heads in agreement.

Perhaps, for the rest of us, less talented certainly in the dramatic arts, we also wait for moments when God comes near, when the veil of this life parts a little, and we know His presence in a way we don’t always know it, and we bow like Moses before the burning bush. We have taken off our shoes.

Thanks be given for a life filled with friends who recommend great things to read or see or places to go. Rich thinking and beautiful moments of being come from heeding their recommendations. Somehow, often despite us all, God is present.

I spy God!

How to Keep Alive the Interior Life

Have you ever gone on a God Hunt? A God Hunt begins when you teach yourself to look for God’s hand at work in the everyday occurrences of your life. Here’s one of my personal God Hunt Sightings:



Every day I try to read a little from literature that is richly written and that stirs my soul. These last months I’ve been slowly perusing and underlining the book How to Read a Poem by Edward Hirsch. Poetry has always been a difficult genre for me to understand, but the author is a master teacher and suddenly, as I study his writing and the samples he includes, this world of literature is opening to me. Poems are becoming comprehensible, astounding, soul-shaking and renewing.

I’m halfway through Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman, for example, and I hear the thunder in the pages and have to close the volume. One can only stand so much ecstasy at a time. A new acquaintance loves and understands the work of Ranier Maria Rilke, so I have begun again to read the Duino Elegies; this is like reading another language, so I am going slowly, slowly, knowing that I can question my friend when I don’t understand (and there is much that I don’t understand).

This quote from Hirsch’s writing arrested me, and I’ve been asking myself the question in the days since I wrote it down in my prayer journal on April 3, 2012:

“The question poses itself as to how to keep alive the interior life in the face of our own and the world’s corruption.”

What a provocative inquiry. How do we (how do I) keep alive the interior life in the face of my own corruption as well as the world’s corruption?

I understand that God is often more a questioner than He is a forth-teller. So I am taking this disturbing question as something that has come my way because He wants me to chew on it.

First of all, what are my own corruptions? Where is the decay within me that pollutes the purity that an interior journey needs in order to sustain itself? I need to be still and let the Spirit whisper the answers to my heart.

Secondly, what are the corruptions of the world that compete with the maintenance of interiority? What is an interior life? Does everyone have an interior life? What must I give up? What must I clean out? What activities must I cease and what activities must I
establish in order to feed the soulish part of myself that is often starved by corruptions? How can I utilize the life that is given to me so that I can be fully alive?

Questions. Questions. Questions. There will be answers. The pathway lies ahead.

I spy God!

Friends and Strangers

Friends and Strangers chronicles the beginning of the journey into self-knowledge, a painful odyssey particular to the work of the middle years. This narrative focuses on the ages from 38-45. Each of us has hidden areas, lies we tell to ourselves that we don’t know we are telling. The work of the Holy Spirit is to continually bring us into truth. In this book I begin to look at truth through encounters with strangers, people I meet along the way, brought to me by God, who have rich gifts to give that shake my smug thinking. I am convinced that no encounter is casual, as each has the potential to move the ground beneath our feet, which is never as solid as we like to think.

The Bees, the Boys, and Me

Have you ever gone on a God Hunt? A God Hunt begins when you teach yourself to look for God’s hand at work in the everyday occurrences of your life. Here’s one of my personal God Hunt Sightings:



Elias and Ayden, my grandsons, ages 12 and 11, painted the new beehive this week. We are beginning a beekeeping enterprise together. The hive had to be painted this week because a bee brood has been ordered, and one day, I’m told, by the young man who has a year of beekeeping under his belt and who is walking us through this process, the phone will ring and a voice will say, “The broods are in. Can you pick up your brood today?” We need to have the boxes painted before this happens so that strong smell won’t bother the new habitation of bees.

Because the weather was cool on the Monday we planned to do our painting, we moved the hive down to the laundry room, bought outside latex white paint with a low VOX count, layered newspaper on the floor, donned Papa’s old painting T-shirts over our heads, gave each boy a brush and a small plastic tub of paint. They did a good job with minimal damage and took a break until the hives were dry enough to be ready for a second coat.

Some time was taken watching the “Starting Bee-Keeping” DVD I had ordered, but most of the time they just hung around outside watching the bees in my friend’s box, which he had moved to our yard while the weather was still cold and the bees were numb in their hibernation. Their talk was about bees (and nothing but bees). After lunch they asked, “Can we go out and watch the bees?” Their mothers reported they talked enthusiastically of bees upon returning home that evening.

I can’t tell you how happy this made me. I can remember the first time my father opened the hive he had purchased secondhand and moved to his retirement farm in Waterman, Illinois. He lifted a frame from the upmost super and the world of bees opened up to me; they crawled everywhere, flew about our heads and something sacred, rarified and wondrous awoke in my soul.

I’m sure this amazement with the bees in my backyard will moderate with the first bee stings, but for right now, it is most gratifying that my two grandsons love what I love.

How often do I wonder through the world and not love the things that God loves? I am innately neglectful, filled with my own little visions, occupied with the forceful habit of my lists, and taken by the ennui that forces me to look down instead of looking around.

Instead I would like to be like Celia in Shakespeare’s As You Like It: “O wonderful, wonderful, most wonderful wonderful, and yet again wonderful, and after that, out of all whooping!”

I want God to know that I love His bee scheme, His star scheme, His flowing rivers to the ocean scheme, His burgeoning growing plants scheme, His human soul-to-soul scheme, His all-things-created-beautiful scheme. I want to love what He loves.

“O wonderful, wonderful, most wonderful wonderful, and yet again wonderful, and after that, out of all whooping!” Perhaps we are learning this, the bees, the boys and me. Out of all whooping.

I spy God!

Cleaning the Attic

Have you ever gone on a God Hunt? A God Hunt begins when you teach yourself to look for God’s hand at work in the everyday occurrences of your life. Here’s one of my personal God Hunt Sightings:



My friend Cathie Clark gave me two and a half hours last week (well, we spent a half-hour drinking tea and chatting—a well-earned rest) storing my Christmas stuff away in the attic.

That started me on a cleaning purge in which I’ve spent a couple hours every day since she gave me her helping hand. I’ve been pushing around boxes, whomping my head on the slanted roof rafters (over and over—why can’t I remember to watch out for the low-hanging eaves?), sorting and tossing.

I just have to push the shop-vac up the narrow, awkward collapsible stairs and store the 30 feet of really thick rope some way that it doesn’t trip up attic explorers in the semi-darkness. We now have a Summer Corner (with canning supplies and jars tucked behind that). Here are the lawn chairs, the stadium chairs, the picnic baskets, the barrel of wicker chargers that hold paper plates, the red sun umbrella. Also here are stored the summer wreaths—three for outside doors, two for the garden gates.

Nearby the summer accessories is the Christmas Side—boxed trees, ornaments, more wreaths, outside lights, inside decorations, a bin of miniature tree lights, old sleds (and a set of crutches), and a brown waste-sized sack that stores all the artificial berries and red-twig dogwood branches I stick in the pots with greens (like the ones I’ve just burnt).

We have a Spring Corner and a Fall Wall. All guests either living with us now or who have lived with us in the past and left a barrel or box behind (to be picked up later—how I wish that would happen!) are in the far, far corner. There is an archival spot, crowded by a trunk of old photos, one carton of what looks like my daughter’s high-school yearbooks, boxes of “Fingertip Consultants”—a program we developed to train pastors in creating meaningful worship services—and the spindle baby crib I used for all four children. All this to be cleaned at another time, but at least for now, it’s all pushed together.

Then at the front of the attic, by the tricky collapsible stairs, is stored one lamp bought on sale that matches the outside door lamps, to be hung when I get the money to pay an electrician. Here also are the rotating fans since we try not to air condition the house as long as possible; they are covered with cloths from a son’s journey to Mexico. That’s to keep out unnecessary dust.

I’ve thrown away junk; broken things, emptied cardboard boxes, taken the library of horseback riding to my grandson who is into horses, and washed the few remaining Fiesta dishes that had escaped my eldest son’s collecting eye. The floor has been broom-swept and swept again. Now I just have to push up the dry-vac and get that black plastic wand into all the corners and the spaces in the attic floor where debris has dropped onto the garage ceiling drywall.

It is a lot of work to clean out an attic. My knees ache from kneeling and scooting into the corners. Some of the heavier boxes I’ve pushed up the treacherous stairs with my head—that hasn’t helped the feeling that I’ve overused my leg joints. (I push things up the stairs with my head because I’m hanging onto the rickety rails and don’t want to wait a couple hours for help.) I think I’ll use those yellow yardsticks to make signs, i.e.,This Is the Spring Corner—maybe with a literary quote—something from Emily Dickinson? Too much? This cleaning compulsion getting out of hand? At least I’ll have a way to remind myself of what’s where, not to mention sparing my adult children if I become disabled, disagreeable or disengaged.

Cleaning attics of the heart and soul is really what we need to do in order to be Easter-ready. Preparing the gardens for spring—raking up after winter, digging up weeds, transplanting when the nights are still cool and the roots can settle—these are all analogies by which we know how much work it can take to get the spiritual self ready to greet God. Dining with Him with dirty hands? Coming to the table with mud-caked boots? Having a mind so filled with junk and dirt and extraneous things that should have been discarded years back keeps a person from really concentrating on the conversation. Wearing inappropriate clothes that are either too tight, or too revealing, or spotted and torn and missing buttons—this is enough to make anyone wish they had taken time to put things right.

Who is ready for Easter? Who is not? We are standing, whether we recognize it or not, in the Spring Corner—look around.

I spy God!