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River Wind Fire is like a rubric for my work. It’s especially important to me in the four tasks that I describe on this site:

• offering spiritual direction and consulting
• offering cross-cultural spiritual consulting
• supporting churches
• providing Biblical education

The flame logo integrates three Biblical images from the deep past. They point to God’s incoming future, and give meaning and joy for our everyday now. Jesus called it the “Kingdom of heaven.”

River, Wind, and Fire are more than ancient images! They point to the inflow of God’s love into the world, which we experience through our senses. They’re places, times and events when we can see the spiritual world and the visible world coming together. They’re where the future flows into now. Think of them as echoes of the End, a doorway to the End … better still, an invitation to taste the life of the End … starting now.

Even if we say we believe in a spiritual world, here in the 21st century West we’re accustomed to living without relating to it! or with a sense of distance, a thick wall between heaven and earth. But River, Wind, and Fire call our attention to God’s closeness: “thin” times, “thin” places, “thin” events – and discovered in “thin” friendships.

What does that “visible inflow” look like? What happens when God “comes close” in the world we see and experience every day, in “thin places”?

Click on the photos for more about their stories.

The River brings God’s wildly abundant nourishment to the hitherto hopeless desert, enabling extraordinary new life to grow in places where it never could before – in places and times no one could possibly have imagined.  What would your life look like if you met God in the River?

The Wind is God’s unseen power: we feel its effects! It’s the “breath” of life from the spiritual world experienced in our own lives. It animates us and reminds us that we are not alone.  In the old stories it blows death away so that life can flourish. It cuts through absolutely impassable obstacles, opening the way to freedom never known before!  What freedom and new life would meet you in God’s Wind?

photo: Kari Browning, TheBeautifulRevolution.org

In the ancient stories God’s Fire shows up in times of deepest darkness, confusion, brutality, hopelessness – not primarily to destroy, but to give light.  It’s a spiritual “sign” of the most profound, life-changing hope breaking in on our lives with new freedom, new possibilities.  It speaks of deep promises, covenants. It brings Spiritual initiatives that we can respond to with confidence, even when our own world is darkened beyond our vision. What fresh light could God’s Fire bring to your world?

These three Biblical images speak of how God’s “invisible” love and grace come into our range of perception and living. They point to the ultimate re-union of the “spiritual” world and the world we see.  “As in heaven, so on earth.”

But more than this, they speak of God’s invitation to us to begin receiving these deepest, most powerful realities now. It’s an invitation to new life, new flourishing, previously unknown freedom, and vast hope. It changes not only us, but everything around us.  In the end, in God’s re-union of the unseen world and this one, love really does win; truth triumphs; compassion heals, and beauty really will save the world.  Your world, our world.  In the end, nothing that tries to stop God’s love will prevail. What would your life look like if you could begin tasting that future – now?

Growing into these things is the invitation and gift of spiritual direction, “consulting,” supporting community, Biblical education – and for me, all authentic talk of “God.”

Get in touch, and let’s work on it together.

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