ra`anan   I once had a vision about my husband. To be fair, I’ve had a few. Some, I believe, were projections, wrought from my own longing. Some, parables, I thought I could interpret, that I did not yet have eyes to see. But there was one vision I held onto, through every ending relationship, and every test. One that I believed could actually be from God. It came from a question, one day in prayer. Can you show me a picture of what the gospel is like? God doesn’t always oblige me my immediate requests, but this particular day, […]

Community is delicate, deep and coloured. It moves in currents – wild and tidal. It grows, like so many living things, to the degree that it is tended.   When I first relocated to Melbourne four years ago, I had one friend. Blindly, I followed him into a beautiful, messy circle of people with whom I slowly began to show myself. I found a tiny two-bedroom apartment tucked at the back of a block of apartments, nestled above the trees. My writing desk looked over the mountains, and the bookshelf was half-full.   The home grew as my community did. At first, I […]

When I think of my heart’s journey over the past few years, I remember the time I watched my friend Laurine tenderise a chicken breast. She hit it with her kitchen mallet until it succumbed – limp.   I would rather you thought me valiant, in love. Independent, but entirely adorable. Definitely too devoted to make mistakes around men or marriage. Totally wifeable, but too holy to worry about it.   That is not the case.   The romantic paths I’ve taken over the past four years have twisted and turned and led me to both extraordinary wonder, and to […]

  ‘Like the ocean, the native state of the feminine is to flow with great power, and no single direction. The masculine builds canals, dams and boats to unite with the power of the feminine ocean and go from point A to point B. But the feminine moves in many directions at once. The masculine chooses a single goal and goes in that direction. Like a ship cutting through a vast ocean, the masculine decides on a course and navigates the direction: the feminine energy is itself undirected but immense, like the wind and deep currents of the ocean, ever-changing, […]

Every plane trip, my randomly selected neighbour strikes up the same conversation. “Are you going home?” “Yeah. I guess.” And somehow, I always figure that I am. My body has, for a month, crawled out of the brief cocoon of America – the corn syrup, yes – the dust, of course – but the safety, too. I have had to sweat out the stalled pain of the things I have had to leave behind, their memory preserved, hardly seeming real. Some days, jet-lagged or genuinely in transit, I feel like I have conditioned myself for loss. As if a relationship isn’t […]

(For Sunday) Here is a call Open and voiced From this gut Grated along the back Of this throat Come back My God As rock is smoothed By generations Of precipitation Of this pull Deeper Down To the animal Crouched In the crater Of this earth As the deer pants for Water So my soul longs for You I have these strange visions, sensations Under my eyes, along my skin I have an entire universe Lifted off my shoulders As if I have carried you while You Have waited To carry me I Have waited For the empty suitors For […]

(For Friday) I have chosen to speak to you publicly This is not an address a letter a collection of ideas I can now present I have nothing to say to you and so I pray You have said to me Ask and it will be given Seek and you will find My darling Just knock The door will be opened to you Oh we are raging at this door I have slept up against it The tomb is closed I have been looking You are the lost thing Are you so small Yeshua That I could drop you like […]