Danielle Klafter
Reflections on writing, life, and contemplative spirituality
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Subtitle: What “Surrender” Doesn’t Mean. I’m struggling so much this week with internal drama. There are external pressures and relationships in my life right now that are creating a pressure-cooker of dissatisfaction and anger in my being. I’ve been angry a lot—a much higher percentage of my time than is normally like me. It’s uncomfortable…
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Reconsider that given a set of options there is only one choice that is within the “will of God.” Which choice is THE choice? Is God for one, and against the other? But God is often not that binary.
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What is meaningful work and how do we go about it? Whether you are creating something, serving clients, running a business, or being a parent, we all have to face the question of “why do we do the things that we do?” and “why do they matter?”
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Being born again is about presence and a way of being in the world. It’s about reaching for new lenses each time the one you currently hold gets too scratched or cloudy. We grow out of our current stages of life, and we grow into new ones. And we are reborn and reborn and reborn.
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Why am turning to the feeds? Am I bored? Insecure? Looking for worth? Spiraling in comparisons? Venting my anger? Numbing out to avoid something more difficult in my life, or even just a mundane task or a five-minute wait that I don’t want to face?
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“We all have the same amount of time, so feeling like we have all the time in the world is really about managing expectations. Some suffering, the kind we must learn to be good at, is inevitable. But other suffering is self-imposed. In particular, we suffer when expectations exceed reality.”
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I had to leave church in order to grieve and be a mess because my grief and mess seemed to make others uncomfortable. They didn’t know what to do with me. Some sadness might be allowed, but then it needed to be hurried up and gotten over. Jesus fixes everything after all. He is the…
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In The Awakened Heart, Gerald G. May writes, “I think most people have trouble with prayer because prayer is really an act of love, and therefore demands vulnerability. As with the love, the more we try to control prayer, the less prayer can happen.
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At the root of asking, Why do bad things happen? is a much deeper, dangerous question: Does God love me? Personally, I think the challenge is to answer the second question without always getting a clear answer to the first. Suffering is a mystery. Learn to hold the mystery. Work to accept that you aren’t…
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Doubt is not a sign of weakness or something to be ashamed of. It’s not an omen of the death of your faith. It’s an invitation to open and trust. It’s an opportunity to acknowledge that you are part of a mystery that is so large and breathtaking that it will take more than a…
- Thin Places: Death and Life Intermingled
- Crabapples
- Owning Your Voice: A Bit on Writing Craft and a Lot on Identity
- Facing a Double Bind: A Birthing Dilemma
- Ebbs and Flows: Two Things True Simultaneously
I read my blog aloud as a podcast:
Danielle Klafter 