isaiah on Impermanence

I saw a live podcast a few weeks ago, and the host, actor Dax Shepherd, gave the audience a couple minutes to ask questions. One young woman in the front row asked him, “How do you get through the har...

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.

One of the dangers of living in a constant state of distraction is that we never go to the bottom of our pain, our sadness, our emptiness, which means we never find that rock-bottom place of the peace...

We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.

The mystery of perfection as an aspect of beauty is its transcendence. It points to a glory beyond itself. I knew that when I held my children, I didn’t simply cradle flesh and blood. I held a living ...

Life is precious. Not because it is unchangeable, like a diamond, but because it is vulnerable, like a little bird. To love life means to love its vulnerability, asking for care, attention, guidance, ...

Reality is what doesn’t go away when you stop believing in it.

We all live between two worlds. We are planted here on earth while our hope is in heaven. We are given work to do in temporary soil that, we’re told, has the potential to spring up into unending fruit...

I would later learn that these are two characteristics of beauty: it never stays, and it never fully satisfies.

Imagination disposes of everything; it creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which are everything in this world.

This is the end - for me the beginning of life.

Those who can’t change their minds can’t change anything.

Justice is less like finite land and more like the wildflowers that grow there, continually spreading as they bloom and re-seed themselves. Justice—like beauty—is rooted in infinity.

It is the very essence of a festival that it breaks upon one brilliantly and abruptly, that at one moment the great day is not and the next moment the great day is.

Time is too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who fear, too long for those who grieve, too short for those who rejoice, but for those who love, time is eternity

One of the essential paradoxes of Advent: that while we wait for God, we are with God all along, that while we need to be reassured of God’s arrival, or the arrival of our homecoming, we are already a...

To enter into the realm of contemplation one must in a certain sense die: but this death is in fact the entrance into a higher life. It is a death for the sake of life, which leaves behind all that we...

Life is short, and we do not have much time to gladden the hearts of those who are traveling the dark journey with us. Oh, be swift to love, make haste to be kind.

Barbara Brown Taylor recounts her first experience with caving, the exploration of caves that are not prepared or made easily accessible for inexperienced explorers. Her guides gave her a bit of helpf...

Poet Donald Hall told the story of a hermit in New Hampshire, a man who passed away leaving behind sheds full of hoarded stuff. In one of the sheds was a box labeled, “string too short to be saved.” ...

The human capacity for burden is like bamboo – far more flexible than you’d ever believe at first glance.

Why is change important? Why do we avoid it, even when it means experiencing much more pain staying stuck? Writer Ann Lammott explains: If we stay where we are, where we’re stuck, where we’re comfort...

Poetry too is a little incarnation, giving body to what had been before invisible and inaudible.

Our culture is afraid of grief, but not just because it is afraid of death. That is natural and normal, a proper reaction to the Last Enemy. Our culture is afraid because it seems to be afraid of the ...

We come into this world blissfully unaware of these fragile, beautiful things we call our bodies. In our mother’s womb, we bathe in continuous warmth and nourishment, changing shadows and muffled voic...

One of the stunning realities of the Christian life is that in a world where everything is in some state of decay, God’s mercies never grow old. They never run out. They never are ill timed. They neve...

Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.

If you see a thing whole—it seems that it’s always beautiful. Planets, lives… But up close a world’s all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life is a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You ne...

Patience is a hard discipline. It is not just waiting until something happens over which we have no control: the arrival of the bus, the end of the rain, the return of a friend, the resolution of a co...

Adversity is always unexpected and unwelcome. It is an intruder and a thief, and yet in the hands of God, adversity becomes the means through which His supernatural power is demonstrated.