Stories

The Center for Leadership Excellence, in partnership with COSROW, is pleased to lift up the voices of women in ministry encouraging fellow women in ministry. Please enjoy this month’s Encouragement from Amanda Rigby, Pastor of Christian Education and Spiritual Formation at Edenton Street UMC and Executive Director of The Well Mental and Spiritual Care. You can reach out to Amanda at arigby@nccumc.org or follow The Well @thewellraleigh on Instagram.

Anyone can sign up to receive Encouragement emails here.

The Companion, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything and will remind you of everything I told you. Peace I leave with you. My peace I give you. I give to you not as the world gives. Don’t be troubled or afraid.” (John 14:26-27, CEB)

 Overwhelmed.

Everyone I encounter these days is overwhelmed – by schedules and events and commitments. By expectations and responsibilities and the demands of ministry. By relationships and parenting and caregiving for aging parents. Overwhelm is the thread running through the lives of family and friends, church members, colleagues, and even strangers I run into out and about in the city.

Everyone is overwhelmed, and I feel it. In the quiet moments, in between the events and the commitments and the demands, the crushing weight of all that we are collectively bearing settles in. I wonder if you feel it, too.

If only the reasons behind our overwhelm were simple, it might be easier to stumble our way into some peaceful relief. But there is so much contributing to this experience – loss and grief, ongoing COVID realities, so much violence, human rights issues, economic uncertainties… and that list doesn’t even begin to cover all that weighs us down in our daily lives.

In the words of Barbara Brown Taylor, the thing that is saving my life right now in the midst of all of that is actually the Holy Spirit. The last few years of my life have been spent leaning into the things of the Spirit through an experience called spiritual direction.

Spiritual direction is a discipline that most often takes the form of a monthly, hour-long meeting between a trained director and a seeker. The work of that time is looking together for the ways God is moving and working in and around the seeker. “Directors” don’t actually direct; instead, we are trained to be companions on the journey of spirituality for those who are seeking greater spiritual depth.

What I’m learning through spiritual direction is how to encounter the peace that Christ offers to us… how to not only glimpse it but also cling to it and share it. This is a peace I have yet to find anywhere else. It is a peace given not as the world gives.

Whether you meet with a spiritual director, or find someone who can be a “soul friend” for you, I hope you will join me in searching for disciplines that invite you to lean into the presence of the Spirit. It just might be the thing that moves you from overwhelm to overwhelming peace.

In partnership,
Center for Leadership Excellence and the Commission on the Status and Role of Women

The Center for Leadership Excellence, in partnership with COSROW, is pleased to lift up the voices of women in ministry encouraging fellow women in ministry. Please enjoy this month’s Encouragement from Kristen Hanna, Associate Pastor at Christ Church UMC. Anyone can sign up to receive these monthly emails here. 

This summer, in our neck of the woods in Chapel Hill, we have been journeying together through the “humble beginnings” of God’s people as recounted in Genesis. A few weeks ago, we came to the story of Jacob’s vision of the ascending ladder filled with angels traveling back and forth into paradise.

Genesis 28:16 (CEB): 
When Jacob woke from his sleep, he thought to himself, The Lord is definitely in this place, but I didn’t know it.

Verse sixteen of the pericope struck me. How often have I encountered God and been surprised to find God there? Or, how many times has the Holy Spirit snuck up behind me, completely unawares? 

And furthermore, how many situations have I walked through and been surprised to encounter the Divine around the corner, waiting like an unsuspecting friend who was there the entire time?

I have always joked that my best intentions for the summer months are to catch up on everything that I’ve needed to do, but every time summer rolls around, I find myself in a new kind of busy. Sure, it’s not the same fast-paced rhythm that comes with the cooler fall and spring seasons, but it is a different kind of hectic, one marked by schedule changes, VBSs, travel, mission trips, Annual Conference, and the list goes on.

As we straddle the middle of July, savoring these last summer weeks before the coming onslaught of fall scheduling mayhem, I wonder what it would look like to pause, to rest, and to dream as Jacob dreamed. Who knows, God may show up in the places we least expected!

In partnership,
Center for Leadership Excellence and the Commission on the Status and Role of Women