I burned my hand while cooking. It was a stupid, split-second mistake with painful consequences. I needed to move a pan that was sitting on the stove – a pan I cook with regularly. However, in my rush, I forgot that tonight, I had put that whole pan into the oven to finish cooking and,
My journey with purpose has been fraught with fits and starts and loads of apparently meaningless lulls in between. I was born and raised in Texas and my worldview was highly influenced by the predominantly white southern Baptist church that taught me about Jesus and who He expected me to be. It became my understanding
My all-time favorite movie line comes from the Western Five Card Stud. Dean Martin is out demonstrating his six-gun prowess to Inga Stevens, shooting bottles off the corral rails, when up rides Bob Mitchum as “The Preacher.” Mitchum asks to give it a try, so Dean hands him the pistol and Big Bob proceeds to
The Resilience Report is a 25-page document intended to outline what resilience actually is and what it might look like in practice, and to begin a discussion on its theological and practical implications for Christian leaders. Download: The Resilience Report The report is presented by Kate Davis, Director of Resilient Leaders Project, Dr. J. Derek
I live near Seattle, one of the first places in the US that COVID-19 hit hard. The first time I went to the grocery store after we all started to get a sense of the magnitude of this crisis, I took pictures of empty shelves where rice, flour, and chicken had been, as if I
When I was in college, a speaker at a conference showed a clip from the movie Instinct as an illustration for her talk. The visceral impact of that scene has stayed with me across the years and keeps coming to mind whenever I feel a lack of control in the midst of pandemic. In the
We are early in the new year, both in the calendar and liturgically. With Epiphany, we conclude the Christmas season in which we celebrated the birth of Jesus, the arrival of Emmanuel, the Incarnation of God. The divine force that creates, includes, and transcends all of creation, all of the universe, became human, with all
In the shared staff workspace of Resilient Leaders Project, on the fourth floor of The Seattle School’s red brick building, there’s an entire wall devoted to a calendar. Each page is a calendar month, stuck up with blue painter’s tape, and covered with post-it notes that represent the due dates of the team’s major projects.
In the months prior to the launch of Resilient Leaders Project, the team (at that point Dr. Derek McNeil, Andrea Sielaff, and myself) spent time sifting through research on resilience, trying to come up with a cohesive way to understand what leads to thriving, especially after suffering. Eventually, we expanded and consolidated categories into three
If you’ve been following Resilient Leaders Project for long, you’ve likely heard mention of the three streams of resilience: people, practice, and purpose. Each are a necessary component of resilience; no one is sufficient on its own. I always talk about ‘people’ first because it’s the most vital. Although people, practice, and purpose are important,