the heart as it is | courage • grief • beauty

Today’s prompt from Onsite is “What work do you feel you need to do to deepen your authenticity?”

I think this might be a short post, but some things came to mind very quickly:

1. More silence & solitude
2. More trying out and doing creative things
3. Serving others, not in a messianic complex sort of way that I used to have, but in the sense of we are all connected to each other and helping each other means helping all of us.

1. I feel like silence and solitude are just good ways for me to get to know myself, reflect about my life and myself, and organize my thoughts. This is something I used to do a lot more and am trying to figure out how to do again in married life (among some other distractions as well). One tiny step is trying to bring back honoring the Sabbath again which in the past for me had meant having the phone off the entire day. At this point, my Sabbath is just not having my phone on me if I head out. But perhaps the next right thing is to simply have it off for the day entirely. There’s some other ways I can incorporate silence and solitude too but listing and thinking about it here will feel a bit overwhelming.
2. Creativity is about risk and vulnerability, which I think how to express and hold those well can make us better humans (in addition to creative things being fun)
3. I’ve noticed in my life so far than even when I have been serving others from a more messianic sort of complex in the past, I’ve still learnt about myself and about humanity in general. I believe it is good to give when we can, and it really does help us with authenticity – what it is to be fully and genuinely human as Jesus was.

Thanks for reading if you did !