Posts tagged as:

Parker Palmer

Eliminating Options and Accepting Limits Brings About True Freedom

by Rhett Smith on July 20, 2010

This last week my wife gave birth to our second child, a baby boy. The birth of a child is an amazing event, but I am hard pressed to find an event that better brings to focus one’s limitations in life, quickly eliminating many choices and options, but therefore bringing better clarity and focus to [...]

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Self-Care Is Not Just About Doing, But About Being–And Some Books for the Journey

by Rhett Smith on October 13, 2009

[image by Tamara Areshian] In my last post, When You Refuse To Take Care Of Yourself, You Are Refusing To Take Care Of Those Around You, I just briefly reflected on some comments by Rob Bell at the Catalyst Conference 2009 and how I felt they played into self-care. Self-care is a large topic. For [...]

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Pushing Beyond the Limits of Your Pie

by Rhett Smith on August 6, 2009

[image by net_efekt's] Marathon Training In the Spring of 2006 I had this deep yearning to run a marathon, something I had never done before, yet something I always wanted to do. Training for this marathon was going to require some shifting of things in my schedule, because 3 days a week of running, over [...]

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Depression: Hope Through Hospitality

by Rhett Smith on July 23, 2009

The fourth and final video I shot for LifeChurch.tv on depression aired today and is titled Finding Hope. Monday’s video was An Anchor in the Journey-Exodus 17:1. Tuesday’s video was Depression-At the Movies continued. Wednesday’s video was Walking Through Depression. As we end this week looking at depression I wanted to focus on the idea [...]

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Identity & Relationality

by Rhett Smith on March 23, 2009

“The Quaker teacher Douglas Steere was fond of saying that the ancient human question ‘Who am I?’ leads inevitably to the equally important question, ‘Whose am I?’–for there is no selfhood outside of relationship. We must ask the question of selfhood and answer it as honestly as we can, no matter where it takes us. [...]

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Identity in Weakness

by Rhett Smith on March 19, 2009

This post is an ongoing reflection on the book Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation by Parker Palmer. “But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s [...]

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Paradigm Shifting, Life Shaping Books

by Rhett Smith on March 17, 2009

It seems we all like books. And we especially like making lists of books. In 2005 I wrote The Five Books I Would Recommend to a College Student…or Actually, to Anyone!, and listed in another post the Top 100 Religious Books of the 20th Century According to Christianity Today. If you want you could access [...]

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Limits and Potential: Living Free Within That Tension

by Rhett Smith on March 16, 2009

“Everything in the universe has a nature, which means limits as well as potentials, a truth well known by people who work daily with the things of the world. Making pottery, for example, involves more than telling the clay what to become. The clay presses back on the potter’s hands, telling her what it can [...]

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Reclaimining Our “Birthright Gifts”

by Rhett Smith on March 11, 2009

“We arrive in this world with birthright gifts–then we spend the first half of our lives abandoning them or letting other disabuse us of them. As young people, we are surrounded by expectations that may have little to do with who we really are, expectations held by people who are not trying to discern our [...]

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In Violation of our True Self

by Rhett Smith on March 9, 2009

I have been returning time and time again to one of my favorite books on the topic of identity and vocation, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation by Parker Palmer. I first read the book in 2002 when I was finishing up my M. Div. at Fuller Theological Seminary at it [...]

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