In Real Life: Wisdom for Life from the Lives of Biblical Heroes

This book was birthed during a season in my life where I was exploring my dream of practicing monasticism in a practical, contemporary, and life-giving way. I found a home for my monastic dream in The Order of Sustainable Faith, the monastic expression of the Vineyard movement. As I journeyed through my Novitiate Experience, I wanted to explore the Rule of Life from a biblical perspective, desiring to explore the lives of biblical personages who demonstrated the monastic commitments in a healthy way when facing challenges in the real world they lived in. I prayed and asked God to show me who to focus on for each of the commitments and which narratives would be best to use for personal reflection and prayer as I endeavored to establish those commitments in my own life.

Along the way I found myself changing: becoming more aware of my true self and seeing the world more clearly, expanding my soul and yet simplifying my life, listening to God and others and yet finding my own voice, facing my demons and soaring with angels. For each passage, each story, I wrestled with the same question, “What questions is God asking me about my own life through this story?” What I discovered is that God asks hard questions! Often the only answer I had was, “I don’t know,”. However, I began to discern that those are the very questions I should be most diligent about engaging with if I want to really explore what God has for me.