Dave Brisbin | 1.8.17
The beginning of 2017 also marks the first anniversary of a dear friend’s death—his suicide to be truthful. Can’t help the re-flooding of mental images and emotion imprinted almost exactly a year ago on a rainy Wednesday night when I got that first phone call. And yet, a year later, an email from his sister says that after a year, having now been put into contact with me and all of us as result of her brother’s death, to lose a brother but gain new friends that have become so important in her life carries its own “strange beauty.” That phrase, strange beauty, sticks with me like flypaper on the brain, and I realize that she had captured so much of what life is really about. 

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Seeing the strange beauty all around us that is always present, but disguised or invisible because of the mental judgments we make on what is good or evil in the narrow window of our emotional vision. To breathe through the hardest times and keep breathing until the strange beauty of watching new life always following any ending, any death—giving it time to coalesce, trusting that it always will– is another hallmark of Jesus’ Kingdom.

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Everyone is recovering from something… Admitting this is the first step in spiritual life, because any unfinished business in our lives–trauma, unforgiveness, fear-based perceptions–fosters compulsive behavior and keeps us from connecting spiritually and emotionally.

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Embedded in the fun and laughter of each of our gatherings and events is the connection and accountability as well as the structure, discipline, and opportunity for service that authentic community is all about. We help create programs for physical support, emotional recovery, and spiritual formation that can meet any person’s needs. Such programs work at two levels: first to address a person’s physical and emotional stability—clinical, financial, relational, professional—anything that distracts from working on the second level: true spiritual formation centered around the contemplative way of life defined by an original Hebrew understanding of the message of Jesus.

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