Yesterday at church I facilitated a session on the need to balance grief and gratitude. Before the service I made a list of what I am grieving and the gratitudes that balance those. I wrote about this after my brother died a couple of years ago and had no idea how powerful a ritual I would find it to be after Tom’s death too. I have done this several times since Tom went into the care home in February, repeating it before the memorial last week and again over the weekend. I always find it to be a very therapeutic and uplifting experience. It paired well with my experience of watching Tom’s memorial service again on Friday.

Several of you have asked about a recording of the memorial and how you can still watch it so I thought I would post it here. I am very grateful to Bethany Presbyterian Church who have made the service available for us to continue watching as we wish.

Tom Sine Memorial Service.

As you can imagine my head is still full of memories from the memorial for Tom on Thursday. On Monday I will post the full video of the service, but as I have had many requests for the song Sing a New World into Being, by Mary Louise Bringle, which we ended with I decided to post it separately here. It speaks so much of the world that Tom wanted people to sing about and imagine, a world of inclusivity, of justice and compassion, but is not a well known song and I know most people at the service had not heard it before.

Sing a new world into being. Sound a bold and hopeful theme
Find a tune for silent yearnings. Lend your voice and dare to dream
Dream a church where all who worship find their lives and loves belong
Sing a new world into being. Sing as Christ inspires your song

Sing a new world into being where each gender, class and race
Brings its rainbow gifts and colors to God’s limitless embrace:
Where the lines that once divided form instead the ties that bind
Sing a new world into being: risk transforming heart and mind

Sing a new world into being where the homeless find a home
Where no children ever hunger but are filled in God’s Shalom
Where all people work for justice, where all hate and vengeance cease
Sing a new world into being: raise the harmonies of peace

Sing a new world into being, join the ancient prophets’ cry
For a time of health and plenty, when all tears have been wiped dry
When compassion flows like waters, pouring balm for all who grieve
Sing a new world into being: live the promise you believe

Yesterday we held a wonderful memorial for my husband Tom Sine. One of the delights of this event for me was that my nephew Matt was able to visit from Australia to be a part of it. Tom’s niece Erin also flew in from the East coast, Tom Blake drove down from Canada, and our good friends Mark and Lisa Scandrette came from San Francisco. It was a very memorable event. Much fun and fellowship as well as much sorrow and tears.

Here is the beautiful tribute Matt wrote last night about Tom.

Today, we farewelled my uncle, Tom Sine, in a memorial in Seattle. Tonight I am sitting in his prayer tower. In the enclosed front porch of his house, there is a wonderful garden of potted indoor plants. From there a ladder leads up to a dormer in the roof. Positioned perfectly up there is a single chair that looks out over Green Lake and across to the magnificent Olympic Mountains, where the sun is now setting.

Behind me are books of a dizzying variety. Books on economics and sociology, on the nature of American culture, academic biblical commentaries, and a vast array of theologians. To one side are a pile of prayer journals, perhaps fifty or so. Then there are boxes and boxes of legal pads and endless clippings from the New York Times. Here is the centre of my uncle’s creativity and spirituality. It was here that he prayed, here that he read and researched. It was a hub of his life. A life not split into spiritual and secular halves, but one life lived for Jesus. It is so special to sit here, and yet I feel a deep ache for him. I’ve been walking around his house for a few days, hearing his voice in my head and wondering how it could ever feel the same without him.

There is a poem, whose name and author I have long forgotten, which tells of a young man and an old man on two journeys of their own. One is spritely, having just begun, the other is measured and steady, having journeyed for some time. For a moment in time, their paths cross. They sit around the campfire, sharing stories and a meal; they linger for a few days, then continue on their respective paths. It is a beautiful way to depict how we journey with some people for just a short time as our paths cross. Yet sometimes those crossways drip with meaning. This was Uncle Tom and me, meeting for a short piece of time as his journey finished and as mine began.

I’ve been asking myself this whole month, why am I so sad? I’ve been cloaked in grief. I am very used to death; I pray with the dying, with the dead, with the mourning; I am used to it. But I had not realised what Tom’s presence had meant in my life. Tom was my uncle but also a dear friend. Tom was caring, encouraging, warm, hospitable, often cheeky, unswervingly attentive, curious and a lifelong learner. He, like me, was a man of faith, an intellectual and a writer. I found in him a model and an image of the path before me in life. He had gone before me in this remarkable way. I found in him a path to a ministry in life I would now have known without him. I found a co-traveller, and a friend.

Tom would tell the story, on one of our visits to Seattle, of how he first started going to church in San Francisco, where he grew up. Having been to church with his grandparents, of whom he spoke fondly, in Blackfoot, Idaho, he decided he wanted to go in San Francisco too. He asked his parents whether he could take himself to church, so he’d walk the half mile to the church through the city. This is a good picture of the independent kid who roamed the city freely in the 1940’s. Later, when he was older and what he called an ‘aspiring delinquent’ – which I think is a group of young people who’d like to get up to no good but don’t really know how to do it – he would have an encounter with Jesus that changed his life. He said: ‘My life was going nowhere, my grades were terrible, I should never have been allowed to go to college.’ Meeting Jesus gave him purpose, path and hope.

Tom did indeed attend Cascade College in Portland and then went on to the University of Washington in Seattle, where he earned a PhD in history with a minor in future studies. I’ve read parts of his very clever PhD thesis, in which he traced the evolution of American Education through centuries-long trends. He had a great mind for connecting the past, present, and future. He believed we needed to trace these trends and live in light of them. We needed to pay attention to what the world was becoming and live in light of it. He turned this passion into a longing for an awakening in the American church. The first book he wrote in 1980 was called “The Mustard Seed Conspiracy”; it was a bestseller in America and indeed around the world. At the memorial today, it was asked who first encountered Tom through this book, and half the congregation raised their hands.

Tom’s book is compelling because it presents a way to live a Christian faith that tangibly affects how you live your whole life. It involves a relationship with the environment, technology, community, and the future of God’s world. It drips with Tom’s optimism about agency: mustard seeds matter. Tom has one clear message: “Jesus let us in on an astonishing secret. God has chosen to change the world through the lowly, the unassuming, and the imperceptible… That has always been God’s strategy — changing the world through the conspiracy of the insignificant.”¹ This is a conspiracy born of the hope of the gospel. It is Jesus’ victory which makes it possible to live a new kingdom vision for all of life:

God calls us to hope and to action. Our hope is based on the biblical reality that God is alive and well and is the Lord of history — that he is working to bring his new future into being…In the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, the conspiracy has already conquered the world and is ushering in the new age of God.²

Tom believed that we could make a difference to the world. If we take our agency seriously, in the power of the Holy Spirit, because of the victory of Christ, our mustard seed could change things.

Tom deploys in this book what he learned in his PhD; he looks back in American history at the trends that shape it and projects forward to the new world that is emerging. It acts like an apocalypse, an unveiling of how the world is and how the church has become complicit in powers it does not quite understand. He looks back and considers how:

Franklin and Jefferson both viewed religion as subordinate to and supportive of the new American political order and their dreams for a new society…that free men pursuing their own aims in a free society would inevitably progress toward a new temporal, political, economic and social kingdom right here on earth.³

As a result: “we tend to assume our national and personal agendas are automatically the agendas of God.”⁴ Here the American church had become captive to the suburban dream of the individual. “It is time we faced up to the reality that the American dream and the Christian image of the future are not synonymous.”⁵ Further, he considered the environmental, global and social impact of this religious conflation. He looks ot the strains in global culture and the need for Christians to respond to the deeper reality of God’s kingdom.

Tom took up and maintained this prophetic stance in every decade of his life. In the 1990s, at the height of consumerism and the expansion of American influence, he wrote: Live It Up! (1993); Cease Fire (1995) and Mustard Seed vs. McWorld (1999). He presented a whole new series of examples for the new millennium, New Conspirators (2009), and sought to speak to Millennials in particular with Life Like You Give a Damn!(2016). His final book was a look through the Decade to come: 2020s Foresight: Three Vital Practices for Thriving in a Decade of Accelerating Change (2020). As the world continued to change, as technology accelerated, as the global order shifted, he summoned Christians to respond, to use their agency in the face of the crises before them. But also, more than that, to look to the future of the world. He called for a fundamental rethink of every aspect of life. From housing, to how we organise and renew neighbourhoods, to how we celebrate and give dinner parties.

As I look through his body of work, I think back to the aspiring delinquent who found hope in Jesus. In everything he did, he was simply giving away the same experience he had been given. Giving purpose, hope and meaning to particularly young people unsure of life, not feeling like there was a path or a place for them. Handing out the hope he received. Hope was the very centre of what he saw in the Christian hope. If American Christianity was captive to its culture, the way out was the mesmerising hope of the future in Christ.

I think my affinity with Tom came from our mutual love of reading and ideas. I have been progressively taking his books home. I find in them so much that I, too, love. Tom’s theological vision was forged, I think, by three thinkers: Jüregn Moltmann, Jacque Ellul and Walter Brueggemann. Moltmann made the theme of hope central and brought a clear social vision for change embedded in that hope. Hope required an ethical response. From Ellul, he learned the need to discern true, faithful action from Christian faith, which was compromised by culture. Ellul is a master at spotting Christianity’s acquiescence to a cultural trend. Brueggemann grounded hope in the Old Testament and also saw the prophetic role Christians played in reality. Tom found a vision from a nexus of these thinkers, yet he made their thinking real. To demand that their vision mean something in the reality of everyday life. You had to “live it up” and “live like you give a damn!” Hope was not hope; it did not grab hold of you and reshape your vision for living.

At the very centre for Tom was Isaiah 25. He loved the book of Isaiah; he understood it as one long vision, one summons and promise to a future beyond compare, beyond imagining. He believed in the hope of the gospel as Isaiah gave it. He knew that the antidote to Christian intoxication was the wild hope of Isaiah.

“On this mountain the LORD Almighty will prepare a feast of rich food for all peoples, a banquet of aged wine— the best of meats and the finest of wines. On this mountain he will destroy the shroud that enfolds all peoples, the sheet that covers all nations; he will swallow up death forever.” (Isaiah 25:6–8)

The feast of the resurrected global people of God. Here is Tom’s heart. He believed the world would end with this feast. He longed for his; it was no naive or simple thing for him. He lost both his sons, Clint and Wes, in their adulthood. The deep optimism, resilience and energy came from this hope. As I’ve been reading his books, I’ve noticed that these verses grow in prominence over time; he sinks deeper into them. You would not believe how hospitable he was nor how many feasts he gave. How he summoned others around his table, a longing and invitation to the feast to come.

To help us get what he was saying, he wrote not one but two re-tellings of this moment:

I awaken to the song of a single bird. Incredibly, it smells like the first morning of Spring… Looking to the horizon, I spot small dark specks - millions of small specks…I realize they are people converging on the mountain — people from all over the world. most of them very poor… I join the crowds singing and dancing into an enormous square…Before us a feast gathered from every part of the world. The spread includes pita, hummus and olives from Lebanon; kimchi from Korea; tamales from Mexico; mangoes, papaya and star fruit from Costa Rica; rice and beans from Haiti; asparagus and mushrooms sauteed in sherry from France; sushi from Japan…Suddenly I spot my son Clint among those who have artfully prepared the feast, and we strongly embrace for what seems like an eternity. God’s presence is palpable, and we sense his generous welcome.⁶

This is much longer than I’ve quoted. I was reading it on the morning after I’d heard Tom had gone home to his Lord. I got to the bit where he described his long embrace with his son, who died many years before him, and then I shattered into a thousand pieces. I could not control the pain or the tears. Tom Sine, the great prophet of hope, was at that moment enjoying the reality he had described and prophetically declared his whole life.

Tom was a disciple of hope. He was a prophet of hope. He believed deeply in God’s coming future; he believed in feasting, laughter and the joyful ending promised by the gospel. He believed in these so much that he lived them in the present; every meal he gave was a little taste of what God is doing. This was his great gift and provocation. Hope demands something from us; God’s hope wants to invade us with this joy. Such joy cannot leave us unchanged. I think this is what I will miss most about Tom: the joy of his hope and the way you could find it in everything he did.

I know his reply to this would be simple: it is now my time to live that joyful hope until we sit again at the feast of God together.

Who ever thought that walking the labyrinth each morning could be so refreshing, so relaxing and so life giving? When I shared a couple of weeks ago about the backyard redo which coincided so unexpectedly with Tom’s passing, I wondered why on earth I felt compelled to make these changes at this time. Now, at least in part I understand why. And it is not just because Goldie loves to lie in the middle of the labyrinth, though rarely displacing the stones around her.

“What draws me towards the labyrinth? I have always loved labyrinths and have dreamt of having one in my backyard for years. Now it invites me to cross the threshold into a new life, a new way of seeing, a new way of walking and a new way of being.

Walking the labyrinth each morning. Greeting the sunrise on its threshold. Standing and breathing slowly in and out before I begin my walk. Walking with questions about the future on my mind. This has become the centre of my morning ritual. I am learning a lot from a little book Pondering the Labyrinth: Questions to Pray on the Path by Jill Kimberly Hartwell Geoffrion. It was recommended to me as a good book to use during my journey through grief, though to be honest when I first picked it up I was not impressed. Basically it is a book of questions to ask at each step of a labyrinth walk. It breaks the labyrinth walk into Preparing, Crossing the Threshold, Between the Threshold and the Centre, In the Centre, and then on the return journey Between the Centre and the Threshold and Before Exiting the Threshold.

In preparing I often ask myself “What hungers lead me to seek to walk this labyrinth today?” It is interesting to see how this can change each morning. Sometimes it is primarily my sorrow over Tom’s loss. At other times it is my joy in God’s world.

Then as I stand at the threshold each morning I am reminded that I also stand at the threshold of a new life. The path ahead is mapped out for me, but with many twists and turns that do not always lead where I expect. This threshold time, when I stand in silence for a few minutes, is very important. What I experience here. The questions I ask and the attitude I take into my walk will set the pattern for the whole of the walk. If my heart is full of turmoil and uncertainty I will take that into the walk with me and it will be very difficult to hear clearly what God wants to say. If my heart is full of memories of the past, of joy for what was, then I will carry that with me and my path ahead will be filled with joy and love, no matter where it leads. Two questions I am finding very important are “What am I waiting for? and What will I bring into the labyrinth with me?”

I walk slowly, one step at a time. Looking down at my feet and listening to the crunch of the gravel beneath them. Sometimes my steps seem hesitant and unbalanced. At other times confident and sure. Always, though, I pay close attention to where I put my feet because the path is narrow and curvy. I need to concentrate on one step at a time. My favourite question to ask at the moment is: What do I hear when I listen to the voice of my steps? each step matters. Each step has its own sound. Each step can teach me something different and I need to listen and learn as I move.

At the centre I often perform a version of the four directions prayer which I find is a great way to anchor myself and to invite the world around me into my reflections. Here I stand at the centre of God’s love, embraced, comforted, surrounded. But I don’t stand alone. I stand with my memories. I stand with my experiences from the past and my hopes for the future. And I stand with an awareness of God’s world around me. “How might I become more open to divine love that surrounds and envelops me?

Then I move back towards the threshold. I have come in to the centre of God’s love, now I move out aware that I am walking out towards a world that might look very different than it once did. My life is changing. What is dying within me? I wonder. What is being resurrected? What still needs to change so that the dreams God has for me can be fulfilled? Again I move slowly and it seems that this is the place where most questions emerge. Perhaps it is because the path ahead is so uncertain, so full of change and newness that I am not really able to fully embrace it at the moment. However in the movement outwards there is a sense of freedom. I am indeed walking into the dreams of God no matter what they may look like.

Again I stand on the threshold for a couple of minutes, eager this time to exit and to sit down with my journal and recount what I experienced and how God spoke to me. “What truths, if any have become clearer?” At the moment the “if any” part seems to be uppermost however I am hopeful that in the future this will change. More than anything however I have a growing certainty that at the centre of my life, as at the centre of the labyrinth, is God’s love, God’s embrace, God’s dream for a world transformed and somehow I suspect my life will be part of that.

Jesus, friend and companion, 
Lover of my soul,
The One who walks beside me,
Wherever I might go.
The One who hold me close,
When despair lurks at the door.
Who comforts me
When the way is rough,
And I stumble over rocks 
I did not see. 
Walk with me now,
Through all the twists and turns of life,
When clouds obscure the way.
When what once seemed close,
Now looks so far away,
Walk with me,
Down paths of light
And trails of night,
Help me paint rocks,
That glow in the dark.
No longer obstacles but markers on the Way. 
Walk with me till I trust in you,
And journey towards the life,
At the centre of your love.

It’s been a tough week, and I know next week will be even harder. And I am not only carrying my own sorrow but that of a dear friend whose husband died last week. In the midst I find I am drawn to poetry, both writing and reading it. Last week someone gave me Jan Richardson’s The Cure for Sorrow: A Book of Blessings for Times of Grief. It is a great book to read at a time like this. Prayers and blessings to meditate on that speak of her journey in sorrow and help me enter more deeply into my own. Here is a prayer I wrote a couple of days ago that I thought some of you might appreciate.

In the midst of grief,
God breathes for me.
Inhale, exhale,
Eternal breath
Coursing through my body.
Breathed in at birth,
Breathed out at death.
Holding us through all eternity.
Inhale, exhale.
Breathe in the desire to be filled,
Breathe out the need to be emptied.
Accept and cherish the past,
Hold onto its memories.
Feel a calm hope within.
Allow it to shape the future.
Let your soul rest
In the assurance 
That God will never leave you.
Accept the wondrous embrace 
Of divine presence.
Inhale, exhale
The wonder of eternal breath,
In you, around you, breathing through you. 

Christine Sine August 2026

In case you want to listen to the live stream :

The memorial is next Wednesday at 2pm PT. It will be live streamed here:

https://bpcseattle.online.church/nIn lieu of flowers please consider memorial donations to Circlewood https://www.circlewood.online/ to help enable the further development of the land on Camano Island that Tom was so passionate about. For more information or to leave comments or photos on the digital site at the funeral home https://www.funerals.coop/obituaries/thomas-sine

According to physicists, at the heart of any chaos system there is a mysterious strange attractor at work. When things break down and chaos seems to reign, there appears to be a new order waiting to be revealed. Beneath the chaos there always seems to lie an immense and incredibly complex pattern, “a geometric labyrinth of endless convolutions and a surreal landscape of enchanting beauty”(Cheryl Hsu) Even though a system's exact path looks random and never repeats, it stays confined within a specific, intricate, and beautiful shape that has a fractal structure.

I am intrigued and heartened by these patterns. They suggest to me that no matter how chaotic life becomes, no matter how uncontrollable and unfathomable it seems, God is always at work “in a surreal landscape of enchanted beauty..”

It was once again Margaret Silf who started me thinking about and reaching for the surreal landscape of enchanted beauty at the heart of everything. She equates the strange attractor with divine mystery and the activity of the Spirit. She encourages us to nurture the practice of inner stillness and the habit of listening for the movements of the Spirit in our lives so that we can find the beauty and hear the music resonating within and around us. “Our task is simply to nourish the unseen growth, to be loving towards it; and to wait until, when the time is ripe, it will reveal itself. (Self 99).

That so much mirrors the place I am in at the moment. Not meant to be trying to push something into being. Not seeking to let go of things before I should, but listening, looking and waiting.

Here are some thoughts that came to me as I read Cheryl Hsu’s article and more of Margaret Silf’s book. In the place of transition we need to:

• Stay humble always open to learning, prepared for surprises and unexpected obstacles. Life never progresses in a straight line. It is more like a river that meanders across a plain, making its way around obstacles until sudden fold waters overflow the banks, push the obstacles aside and make new channels for the water to flow through.

• Pay attention to what is important, not what seems productive. That of course assumes we know what is important. At the moment I am not sure, though I do sense that following Tom’s death I am more aware of the reality of God’s world around me and of the dross of so much that is human created. I am aware of my own aliveness and of how precious that is. I am aware too of my own mortality and the vulnerability that being alive gives us.

• Go for the good of the whole not for myself. Creativity, stability, diversity, resilience, and sustainability, these are all values that surface in me as I look to the future. The statement at the centre of my calling is strengthening “Enable others to become who God intends them to be.” which sounds great until I try to determine what that looks like. I cannot assume I know the path that is right for someone else so I commit myself again to watching and staying encourage what seems to emerge in those around me.

• Expand the boundary of caring. We are all interconnected, compassion and empathy is central to who God intends all of us to be, and the boundaries of my caring need to expand to include all created life too. The horrors of the wildfires raging in so many places make me more aware of that.

• Hold fast to the goal of goodness and wholeness. Again I feel that this is central to who God created all of us to be. We are created for goodness and wholeness and the need to encourage that development in others.

• Expand your time and thought horizons. We are meant to care about the here and now but also think ahead to how our actions will impact those who come after us down to the seventh generation. As I walked the labyrinth this morning it reminded me that I need to notice what is under my feet, but also look ahead so that I do not miss the next curve in the path. Life is a tricky journey fraught with surprises and strewn with unseen obstacles. Walking slowly and noticing closely is essential.

• Celebrate complexity. It is easy to look for simple paths through life. It is easy to ignore those unexpected convolutions of unpredictable complexity until something like death of a loved one or illness within our own bodies stops us in our tracks. Yet so often it is in the midst of these that we learn the most about God and what it means to be a follower of Jesus. It is here that we touch the divine presence in ways that we normally don’t. The complexity of God is unfathomable to us yet we want to confine and simplify it.

• Life is uncontrollable, and we must learn to go with the flow. I am more convinced than ever that at the heart of life is not answers but questions. Our place is to listen for the questions that are being asked of us. And the only demand of listening is to take time to sit in the stillness of our hearts and focus on and pay attention to the stirrings that come both from beyond ourselves and from our inner being. As we sit in that stillness, eventually God’s patterns will emerge.

Today I invite you to sit in your own stillness and listen for the questions God might ask of you too. Maybe you are not going though the same kinds of major transitions I am, but we are all aware of the chaos in our minds and in our world. Opening ourselves to the “strange attractor” that is the spirit can work wonders for all of us.

A big thank you to those of you who noticed and let me know that I made a mistake with the time for Tom’s Celebration of Life. It is August 26 at 2pm, at Bethany Presbyterian Church on Queen Anne Hill, not July 26 as mentioned in yesterday’s email (which I have since corrected). Also parking around Queen Anne is challenging so if possible try to car pool or live stream https://bpcseattle.online.church/.

Here is the complete announcement again:

Tom Sine, a long term Seattle resident, passed away on July 23rd, 2026 after a long battle with dementia. He was 90. Born in Pocatello Idaho to Kathrine and Thomas Sine, Tom graduated from San Mateo High in 1954, attended Cascade College in Portland and gained a Ph.D. in history with a minor in futures study from the University of Washington in 1980.

For most of his life, Tom Sine worked as a consultant in futures research and planning for both Christian and secular organizations. Together with his wife Christine, he assisted organizations to evaluate how their world, nation and communities were changing so they could adapt more adequately to face the challenges of the 21^st Century. Tom also helped Christian organizations develop a holistic theology of mission. He spoke widely at colleges, churches, and missions conferences around the world and led creativity seminars for a variety of Christian groups.

Tom worked as an adjunct professor for Fuller Theological Seminary in Seattle for many years, teaching a course on Christian World View. He also spent several years working with World Concern on a project in Haiti, and assisted them in developing a theology of mission. He was a prolific writer. His first book The Mustard Seed Conspiracy (Word 1980) was a best seller and challenged people around the world to become more authentic followers of Jesus. His last book was 2020s Foresight:Three Vital Practices for Thriving in a Decade of Accelerating Change. (Fortress Press 2020) which he co-authored with Dwight Friesen. Other books included Live Like You Give A Damn: Join The Change-making Revolution (Wipff and Stock 2016) The New Conspirators: Creating the Future One Mustard Seed At A Time, Mustard Seed vs McWorld: Reinventing Life and Faith for the Future (Baker 1999), Cease Fire: Searching for Sanity in America’s Culture Wars (Eerdmans 1995) Live It Up! How To Create A Life You Can Love (Herald Press 1993). He also co-authored with his wife, Dr. Christine Sine, Living On Purpose: Finding God’s Best for Your Life published in January 2002.

Tom and Christine are the founders of Mustard Seed Associates. They focused on raising awareness of issues facing Christians and churches in the future and enabled people to develop creative responses. Tom purchased 40 acres on Camano Island in 1989 as a retreat site. He was passionate about seeing this property develop as a site where young people could learn more about a whole life faith. Together with Christine he facilitated Celtic retreats on the land each year. The property was renamed Circlewood in 2017 when James Amadon and Forrest Inslee took over leadership. Tom was delighted to see the first building, the Sine Center for Ecological Learning, completed at Circlewood last year.

Tom lived together with Christine, his wife of 34 years, in a small intentional community in Seattle called The Mustard Seed House. They loved doing hospitality and often entertained both friends and strangers in their home. They also loved to travel together and enjoyed many adventures in North America, Australia, New Zealand, Britain, Europe and Asia. Tom enjoyed sketching, was known for his wonderful BBQ sauce and found great joy in their golden retrievers Bonnie and Goldie. He was well known for his ability to get lost anywhere in the world.

Tom was predeceased by his sons Thomas Wesley Sine and Clinton Stuart Sine and survived by his wife Christine Aroney-Sine.

A memorial service will be held on August 26th at 2:00 pm at Bethany Presbyterian Church, Queen Ann Hill in Seattle. It will be live streamed here:

In lieu of flowers please make memorial donations to Circlewood to help enable the further development of the land Tom was so passionate about.

There is something very final about planning a memorial service, even more so than picking up death certificates and ashes. Here is the information about Tom’s upcoming memorial service and how you can attend, watch live stream, make donations, plant a memorial tree and leave a comment on the funeral home’s website. We are also collecting comments and accolades from social media sites as well as here on Substack where you might feel more comfortable leaving comments. We already have 35 pages collected… and that’s just from Facebook. I am overwhelmed by the response and the beautiful comments people have left. Lovely stories of shared meals, travels together, and lives changed by Tom’s ministry. Quite remarkable. Please share this info with others you think might be interested.

I am using the same photo as before because it is my absolute favourite photo of Tom from the last few years - a beautiful way for me to remember him.

Tom Sine

Feb 19, 1936 — Jul 23, 2026

Tom Sine, a long term Seattle resident, passed away on July 23rd, 2026 after a long battle with dementia. He was 90. Born in Pocatello Idaho to Katherine and Thomas Sine, Tom graduated from San Mateo High in 1954, attended Cascade College in Portland and gained a Ph.D. in history with a minor in futures study from the University of Washington in 1980.

For most of his life, Tom Sine worked as a consultant in futures research and planning for both Christian and secular organizations. Together with his wife Christine, he assisted organizations to evaluate how their world, nation and communities were changing so they could adapt more adequately to face the challenges of the 21st Century. Tom also helped Christian organizations develop a holistic theology of mission. He spoke widely at colleges, churches, and missions conferences around the world and led creativity seminars for a variety of Christian groups.

Tom worked as an adjunct professor for Fuller Theological Seminary in Seattle for many years, teaching a course on Christian World View. He also spent several years working with World Concern on a project in Haiti, and assisted them in developing a theology of mission. He was a prolific writer. His first book The Mustard Seed Conspiracy (Word 1980) was a best seller and challenged people around the world to become more authentic followers of Jesus. His last book was 2020s Foresight: Three Vital Practices for Thriving in a Decade of Accelerating Change (Fortress Press 2020) which he co-authored with Dwight Friesen. Other books included Live Like You Give A Damn: Join The Change-making Revolution (Wipff and Stock 2016), The New Conspirators: Creating the Future One Mustard Seed At A Time, Mustard Seed vs McWorld: Reinventing Life and Faith for the Future (Baker 1999), Cease Fire: Searching for Sanity in America’s Culture Wars (Eerdmans 1995), Live It Up! How To Create A Life You Can Love (Herald Press 1993). He also co-authored with his wife, Dr. Christine Sine, Living On Purpose: Finding God’s Best for Your Life published in January 2002.

Tom and Christine are the founders of Mustard Seed Associates. They focused on raising awareness of issues facing Christians and churches in the future and enabled people to develop creative responses. Tom purchased 40 acres on Camano Island in 1989 as a retreat site. He was passionate about seeing this property develop as a site where young people could learn more about a whole life faith. Together with Christine he facilitated Celtic retreats on the land each year. The property was renamed Circlewood in 2017 when James Amadon and Forrest Inslee took over leadership. Tom was delighted to see the first building, the Sine Center for Ecological Learning, completed at Circlewood last year.

Tom lived together with Christine, his wife of 34 years, in a small intentional community in Seattle called The Mustard Seed House. They loved doing hospitality and often entertained both friends and strangers in their home. They also loved to travel together and enjoyed many adventures in North America, Australia, New Zealand, Britain, Europe and Asia. Tom enjoyed sketching, was known for his wonderful BBQ sauce and found great joy in their golden retrievers Bonnie and Goldie. He was also well known for his ability to get lost anywhere in the world.

Tom was predeceased by his sons Thomas Wesley Sine and Clinton Stuart Sine and survived by his wife Christine Aroney-Sine.

A memorial service will be held on August 26th at 2:00 pm at Bethany Presbyterian Church, Queen Ann Hill in Seattle. It will be live streamed here:

In lieu of flowers please consider making memorial donations to Circlewood

to help enable the further development of the land Tom was so passionate about.

Alternatively consider giving a tree as a memorial through The Co-Op funeral Home

It’s been quite a week. Chaotic is some ways. Refreshing and renewing in others. The backyard garden redo is complete and though I would never have chosen this timing, I can see value and wisdom in it. New beginnings often emerge from painful endings and I very much feel as though I am balancing the emerging shoots of newness with the still painful aspects of Tom’s passing.

On Friday, my good friends from Circlewood came to install the labyrinth. They were incredibly organised. They staked out where the centre should be and with tape measure and string soon had a perfect circle of stones arranged. In no time it seemed they were done and we were able to enjoy our first meal on the newly completed patio. Such a delight.

The next morning, at dawn, with the pink glow of the rising sun on the clouds, I walked the labyrinth for the first time. I began with a couple of minutes standing at the opening taking deep breaths in and out, then slowly walked my way to the centre where I one more stood silently enjoying the stillness of the morning. The stones around encompassed me like a warm circle of God’s loving embrace me, that infinite embrace that surrounds the entire cosmos and enfolds all of both the visible and invisible world in the loving warmth of divine presence. Even Goldie seemed to be aware of it.

Circles I think are God’s foundational building blocks. They remind us of the completeness and wholeness that is God, as well as of the wholeness God desires for all creation. They remind us too that God is always surrounding us with the warmth of eternal love.

Some of you may notice that there is chicken wire covering the sod. That is because the first night after it was laid the racoons decided to hold a party. Fortunately they neatly folded or rolled the sod rather than destroying it. The last few nights they have left it alone.

I feel Tom’s presence too in everything that happens. I see him smiling down on the new development in the back yard and cheering me on through all the ups and downs of the week. I see him making sure there is someone with me whenever I expect to do something hard, like picking up death certificates, on my own. I sense him smiling down on me and saying “well done love, well done. A beautiful place to continue the ministry of hospitality and sharing that was so central to our enjoyment of life together.” And each time I sit out there I am reminded of Tom sitting here last year.

Imagining our loved ones with us is one of the healthy responses to their loss. It helps us solidify their presence with us and encourages us to grieve for what has passed and will not return. I find it also brings back lots of happy memories washing over the challenges of the last few months.

Memorial plans are now made. I will post a new article tomorrow, making up for the lack of posts last week, with all the details. It will of course be live streamed and I do hope some of you will join the celebration - August 26th 2pm Pacific Time.

Serendipitous coincidences like this tend to have three characteristics.

• Improbable correlation - the odds of the events lining up randomly is very low

• Provoke an uneasy sense of wonder - a deep gut feeling that tells us “this is not an accident”

• There is no obvious connection between the events - in other words nothing was planned but events match up perfectly.

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I have experienced several such coincidences since Tom died, but the most vivid occurred at church the Sunday after Tom passed. I was a little spacey as it was only a few days after Tom died, but as someone began reading the scripture I was shocked into full attention. It was the parable of the mustard seed, one of Tom’s favourite scriptures. It is at the core of his writing - the idea that God uses the small and insignificant to transform our lives and change the world. His first book that many did take seriously and commit to changing the world was called The Mustard Seed Conspiracy, and a later book was Mustard Seed vs McWorld. I understand that this scripture was the reading in many churches that Sunday. I burst into tears while being very aware that Tom was still with me, still touching people’s lives through the small and insignificant.

Even more inspiring was our final hymn “Sing a New World Into Being” a beautiful hymn that talks about a new world coming here on earth. Tom always talked about us needing more songs that help us see God’s kingdom here on earth and this one certainly fits the bill. I could not imagine a service more honouring to my memories of Tom or to the messages closest to his heart. A sign indeed of God’s affirmation of who he was. I felt God affirming him as a good and faithful servant.

Where have you seen seeming random coincidences in your life that speak clearly of the presence and guidance of God?

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Everything takes twice as long as usual. Unexpected flashes of memory or bursts of tears punctuate everything. At the least they distract. At the most they temporarily stop me in my tracks. Like the photos above. The sweatshirt is the first gift Tom ever gave me and I still have the embroidered panel which I came across unexpectedly this week. People keep telling me I am coping very well. At times it doesn’t always feel like it but most of the time I think they are right.

I realize there are a number of spiritual practices that are part of my rhythm of life that certainly help me maintain a fairly good equilibrium at this time. Most of these I have talked about before and I know you will hear about them again but here is a brief snapshot of what I find most helpful.

Breath prayers are the way I start my day. Imagining the spirit of God inhaled and exhaled into and out if my body each time I breathe is awe inspiring. Breath I see increasingly is one of the major ways we interact with God. The thought of the breath of God hovering over the chaos and breathing the entire creation into being gives me life.

Awe and wonder walks around the garden and through the neighbourhood each day listening, looking, taking notice of the beauty, the diversity, the intricate details of what I encounter stir my soul with a wonderful sense of God’s presence.

Circling prayers and imagery. In John O’Donohue’s book Anam Cara he says that “God is the biggest circle of all, the largest embrace in the universe, which holds visible and invisible, temporal and eternal together as one.” I sit and contemplate that sentence each morning imagining the loving embrace of God encompassing me, Tom and all those we love living and dead in an eternal embrace. We are all, together with creation, enclosed in this amazing circle of God’s love. It is so comforting.

Holding grief and gratitude in balance. Each wave of grief is associated with special memories of Tom, memories that are rising to the surface and overcoming the memories of his final days. As I recount stories, share memories and offer gratitude I find Tom becomes even more special.

Quiet retreat time. I am writing this from Circlewood on Camano Island, my favourite retreat destinations at the moment. I am coming here once a month and am enjoying the quiet serenity as a place to journal, process what had happened and just allow the healing power of nature to be absorbed into my being.

Solidifying memories. I am journaling every day, capturing not just the memories of the day but also the the remembrances they invoke. Have even started a special new journal in which to capture them.

I realize I am only just beginning this journey of grief. There is lots to come. Lots to unpack lots to both mourn and give thanks for but I am sure that these practices will continue to carry me through the ups and downs of the journey that lies ahead.

What are the practices you find most useful during times of stress?

As many of you already know, my husband Tom Sine passed away on Thursday after a long struggle with dementia. What I realized as I read through the hundreds of prayers, comments and condolences that so many of you posted is that some of you have known Tom mainly through my eyes as he struggled with dementia and I hate to think that this might be the way that people remember him. I would not be the person I am today without Tom’s influence, not just as my partner and encourager, but also as a guide and challenger to a deeper faith with Jesus.

Tom was an incredible man whose life and ministry impacted the lives of many around the world. The outpouring of comments and memories on social media makes that obvious. His books, which included The Mustard Seed Conspiracy, Mustard Seed vs McWorld and Wild Hope, were best sellers, and changed peoples’ lives in ways that always astounded both of us. Tom challenged people to focus more on the outward call of God’s kingdom and people responded. They changed careers and lifestyles to follow Jesus in a more kingdom focused way.

It was this that first attracted me to Tom back in 1984 when we first met. I had just come from working in the refugee camps on the Thai-Cambodian border and was overwhelmed by the incongruity between what I had been taught it meant to follow Jesus and what the horrors of this situation suggested to me. His words and actions rang true and challenged me to commit the rest of my life seeking to bring glimpses of God’s eternal shalom kingdom into being. I had no idea I would spend much of the rest of my life as his partner.

We were married in 1992, and our life together was rich and fulfilling. We particularly loved doing hospitality together and sharing community with others, and in the last few days I loved reading stories and memories from people we have hosted (I cannot imagine how many people we have entertained in our home) or cooked for in other parts of the world. We also enjoyed writing and ministering together in many different ways and many countries too. Here is a beautiful tribute from our friend Michael Frost in Australia that says better than I could how he impacted lives.

Tom was one of those rare voices who could see the future without losing sight of the demands of the gospel. Long before many of us were talking about missional living, the changing shape of the church, or the opportunities posed by our current cultural upheaval, Tom was already inviting Christians to imagine what faithful discipleship might look like in a rapidly changing world.

His books challenged me not simply to think differently, but to *hope* differently. He believed the church’s best days were not behind us, provided we had the courage to listen, adapt, and recover the radical simplicity of following Jesus. He had a remarkable gift for combining prophetic imagination with deep encouragement. Rather than lamenting decline, he looked for signs of God’s new creation already breaking through. I’ve eaten at his table, shared the platform with him in various conferences, and written endorsements for a few of his books (as he did for mine). He was always a kind and inspirational presence. Thank you, Tom. You helped us see the horizon more clearly, and you pointed us, always, toward Christ.

If you want to know more about Tom you might like to check out these podcast episodes from the last couple of years

Goodbye to 2025, Welcome to 2026

Introduction to Celtic Christianity

Or check out these videos on YouTube

Establishing a Rule of Life

Hospitality as A Doorway to the Kingdom of God

It is a good thing to have all of our props pulled out from under us occasionally. It gives us some sense of what is rock under our feet and what is sand (Madeleine L’Engle)

I found this quote a couple of days ago shortly after pondering Margaret Silf’s question “Where is your rock?” Then in Marty Folsom’s The Psalms: A Sanctuary for the Soul, I was once again reminded to ground myself on the rock of God’s presence, Christ’s companionship and the Spirit’s guidance. “Stand on the rock and envision a different kind of day. Take the hand of Jesus s he invites you to walk with confidence through what lies ahead saying “I got you.”

My whole concept of rocks and shifting sand seems to have changed dramatically over the last few years. What I once thought was solid ground now seems to be shifting sand and vise versa.

These different quotes on “the Rock” inspired me to think about how I know that God is real and why I trust my Creator in the midst of a wounded and suffering world. In the midst of Tom’s decline I feel I have found a new certainty - that God will never leave nor forsake either of us no matter what we may experience.

As I thought about this I was reminded of the exercises I do each morning for my foot. One of their goals is to strengthen my balance. I stand on one foot with the other raised for 30 seconds and then repeat it with the other foot. Last week my physical therapist added another exercise. Now I stand on a 3” thick foam mat and try to balance. It is much harder even though there is still solid ground under my foot. Sometimes I feel that faith is like that. Just when we think we have achieved a place of balance the solid ground beneath shifts and suddenly seems more like sand.

As I contemplated these various images this morning I realized that my rock looks more like trust than like belief or any concrete spiritual practice. It is more about mystery than knowledge, and rests on the assurance of Jesus’ companionship. To me this implies constant change, which seems more like shifting sand than a rock.

However I do believe that this is the rock on which we stand. It’s a place where we can indeed envision a different world and face the constant changes that keep flying towards us with confidence.

Where is your rock? Take some time to contemplate that question today.

Here are some of the thoughts that come to me:

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A few days ago I posted this meme on Facebook. I was fascinated by the comments many of which focused on justifying spiritual warfare and its necessity. As you note, in the Mme I don’t deny the need for spiritual warfare, but that is the way people seemed to interpret it. Even when I tried to challenge the justification of spiritual warfare , obviously not very successfully, it just seemed to lead to more scripture quotes and explanations about why spiritual warfare was necessary. A couple of people asked me what I meant by spiritual peacemaking and this post is my response.

We live in a militaristic society in which unfortunately we take on many of the attributes of that society and incorporate them in our Christian worldview. It is easier for us to think about warfare than about peacemaking. It is easier for us to see Jesus as a warrior king than a humble servant peacemaker. So what do I mean by spiritual peacemaking?

Jesus tells us “Blessed are the peacemakers for they will be called children of God” , but we act more as though it is the war makers that are blessed. Spiritual peacemaking is the active, often courageous practice of working to reconcile conflict through engaging in hard conversation with and being willing to listen to those with whom we are in conflict. It requires us to have open minds and compassionate hearts and to work with empathy and grace rather than force. Spiritual peacemaking is often able to transform difficult situations by stepping into places of high tension, disagreement and lack of understanding with humility and a focus on genuine restoration, rather than on simply keeping things calm.

Peacemaking also incorporates conflict prevention, employing diplomatic measures before violence breaks out. It embraces peacekeeping, using neutral personnel to manage or contain a conflict and maintain a ceasefire. And it works towards peace building, searching for long-term actions that can be taken after a peace agreement to address the structural, social, and economic root causes of the dispute.

How Did Jesus Practice Peacemaking?

I think that what often confuses us is that Jesus practiced peacemaking not as passive conflict avoidance, but as an active and often courageous pursuit of reconciliation and justice. He repeatedly challenged societal and religious barriers in so much of what he did and said.

Here are some of the ways in which Jesus practiced and modeled peacemaking:

• Reconciling Humanity with God: Jesus viewed the ultimate root of human conflict and turmoil as separation from God. He taught that true peace (shalom) is not about some end times war but is a restored relationship with the Creator and the establishment of a world in which allele creation once more lives in harmony. This he accomplished not through warfare but through sacrifice of himself, death and resurrection.

• Active Conflict Engagement: Jesus did not avoid tension. Nor did he act as a passive peacemaker. Jesus intentionally stepped into areas of societal hostility. He modeled “peace doing”—confronting systems of oppression, challenging religious hypocrisy, and addressing individual sins with a mixture of radical truth and generous mercy. His entry into Jerusalem in his last days was a confrontation of the political forces of the day as I talked about in this previous post. But he did not confront through violence but through laying down his life.

• Breaking Down Barriers: Jesus deliberately crossed cultural, social, and gender boundary lines in ways that sometimes confused and alienated the religious leaders and even his followers. He elevated women in a patriarchal society, engaged with marginalized individuals like tax collectors, lepers and the Samaritan woman at the well, and taught his disciples to love their enemies, bless those who persecute them, and pray for their oppressors (Matthew 5:44). This was a radical and countercultural approach.

• Promoting Nonviolence: Jesus modeled nonviolent resistance, rejecting the use of physical force, coercion, or political domination to achieve his goals. When confronted with violence in the Garden of Gethsemane, He healed an attacker (Luke 22:50-51) and told his followers to put away their sword.

• Prioritizing Humility and Forgiveness: He taught and lived out an ethic of gentleness, forgiveness, and servant leadership. He instructed his followers to resolve disputes by directly seeking out the offending party and prioritizing mutual restoration over personal pride or rights (e.g., Matthew 5:23-24, Matthew 18:15

As a Mennonite I embrace the Mennonite peacemaking agenda which is an active commitment to nonviolent conflict resolution.

How Do We Embrace Spiritual Peacemaking?

Spiritual peacemaking is an attitude of heart as much as a path of action. There is a lot of anger, anxiety and discontent circulating in our society at present and that makes it hard to establish this attitude of peacemaking however. Here are some suggestions on how to cultivate this attitude in our own lives.

• Prioritize Inner Reflection and meditation: Ground yourself in prayer, meditation, or silent contemplation in order to calm your soul and bring an inner peace to your spirit, before engaging with conflict. This ensures your actions stem from a place of rest and clarity rather than reaction.

• Initiate Reconciliation: Be the first to reach out when there is a fracture in a relationship. Taking the first step requires vulnerability, but it sets the stage for genuine healing. Often the best way to do this is by bringing those who disagree together around a meal or a playful event.

• Listen Attentively with Compassion: Practice non judgmental empathetic listening by allowing others to speak their truth without immediate judgment, interruption, or defending yourself. I learned a lot from Parker Palmer in his book A Hidden Wholeness about how to conduct and participate in compassionate listening circles, with the emphasis on listening not doing or trying to tell others what we think and do.

• Focus on Restoration: Approach tough conversations with the explicit goal of understanding and rebuilding the relationship, rather than attempting to win an argument or prove the other person wrong. So often we go into conflict discussions with our won set agenda of what the outcome should be. We do not trust that the spirit is both present and active in all the participants in the conversation. Jesus often listened and changed his mind based on the input of people outside the Jewish religion. In Mathew 15:21-28 for example, the Canaanite woman helps him to see that his ministry is not only to Jews but to all.

I love journalling, but my journalling over the last few months has become very dissatisfying, scattered, random and not very cohesive. There is one place I am doodling, another I am processing ideas and reporting on what I am writing, another where I am sketching, and yet another where I write about my journey with Tom. Not good to be so scattered but it’s probably a reflection of the chaos that is uppermost in my brain at the moment but I don’t feel that is a good excuse. So as I thought about this yesterday I realized that there is a lot I can do to create order and to make it easier for the transitions that lie ahead to happen.

There are many forms of journalling apart from straight written journals and I have dabbled in quite a few of these over the years - collage journalling; nature journalling; doodle journalling; sketch journalling and photo journalling to name but a few. I don’t think I will ever give up the written journals that help me document life’s ups and downs but I am itching to be creative again wanting a more imaginative and lighthearted way to both process and to create.

I was chatting to a friend this morning about my potential writing projects and he reminded me that it is always the creatives - the artists, the musicians, the poets and I would add, the out of the box imaginers, who lead the way. This, on top of my new resolve to express my creativity and be playful again strengthened my resolve to use my imagination to put together a new journal.

I was reminded of a couple of posts on creative journalling I wrote several years ago that I revisited and have adapted for the rest of this post.

Keep it simple, make it meaningful, stick to it, the mantra that has seen me through many transitions is once more guiding my creativity. Here are the steps I used to help me focus. Let me know if you find them helpful in shaping your own practices for the season.

Dream Possibilities

I started last week by setting aside time to reflect, imagine and create what I thought would be most helpful for me during the upcoming season.

It is hard for me to imagine what the next few months will look like but that does not stop me dreaming new possibilities. What would I like to accomplish? Where would I like to be? Who do I want to be with? All these questions help to shape my journalling journey ahead. It helps me prioritize my desires and put my faith back at the centre of my journey.

Choose themes for the weeks ahead.

Out of my times of prayer and reflection I wrote down the thoughts that came to mind. I chatted to friends and advisors about the upcoming season and wrote down the new thoughts that emerged. I sat with them for a while and allowed those that spoke to my heart to emerge. I chose themes for the upcoming weeks – Seek God; Breathe deeply; Rest Quietly; Share joy; Love others; Let God find you; Create a sacred path for others to follow.

Then I went on line to find artistic fonts to print out my themes. I chose a different font for each theme. This in itself was a fun exercise.How would I use them? Did I just want fonts that looked interesting? Did I want to be able to colour them? Did I want to be able to craft them myself? This process too helped shaped what I planned to do over the upcoming months and enabled me to develop more structure for the time ahead.

Develop a Process.

When I got all my bits and pieces together I was so excited that I wanted to start immediately. I sat down to start but my mind went blank. I got distracted by a work project I had left on my desk and soon realized I needed a well thought out process to focus my practice and discipline my actions. I am still working on the details but thought you would like to know what I have come up with so far.

1. Sit quietly in my chosen space taking deep breaths in and out for a couple of minutes.

2. Recite one of my centering or breathing prayers.

3. Add some colour to the words of my chosen theme and allow their meaning to seep into my soul. As I worked on this a couple of days ago I smudged my colouring. My immediate response was to start over, then I realized that the smudge too was part of the pattern God wanted me to learn from. I smudged it because I tried to colour too much too quickly, obviously getting ahead of what God wanted to do that day. As I thought about this I was reminded of the Japanese art of kintsugi in which the artist takes a broken piece of pottery and mends it with gold lacquer. The repair is highlighted and adds to the beauty, just as God is able to use the mistakes and broken places in our lives to increase the beauty of who we become.

4. Read through the prayer/poem that anchors me in my theme and go over it every morning, not just reading it but tracing out the letters with a different coloured pen each day.

5. Reflect on words, scripture or images that come to mind. There are several ways to do this depending on what I sense God is saying. I love variety and so having these options allows me to flow wherever the Spirit wants to take me.

   1. I left plenty of space to write down the thoughts that come to me and write these in colour, highlighting special words, open to what God is saying. It has already revealed much to me as I begin this journey. It is making me more attentive to listen to what is happening within me, around me and in my relationship to God.

   2. I printed out a couple of scriptures on my theme Seek God – Acts 17:26-30 and Luke 12:28-34 from The Voice. These too can provide a focus for my reflections.

   3. I experimented with some artistic designs and doodles. This is a little scary for me. It makes me feel very vulnerable for some reason, more vulnerable than when I paint on rocks and add them to my meditation gardens, but I realize that God has called me to both step outside the boxes of the traditional and also be willing to be vulnerable.

Create Your On Path

It is good to have structure for the months ahead but I suspect that this could still all go up in a puff of smoke and I will eventually be led down an entirely different path. However it has been very therapeutic to write down these thoughts.

What do you plan to use as spiritual practices for the upcoming months? My plan of action is not shared for you to follow. It is shared to stir your creativity to imagine the unique and special pathway God wants you to follow through the upcoming season.

God has gifted all of us with creativity and imagination that needs to be stirred and developed so that our practices strengthen rather than weaken our faith. We are all formed from God’s creative act to be co-creators in this God infused world we live in. Take some time, take back your life and make Christ the focus of all you do over the coming months.

Below in more detail is the process I developed out of these guidelines above

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Today was a hard visit with Tom. He was very much in his own little world, an unresponsive cocoon that no one else could enter. “Jesus Wept” I remembered as I drove home. He experienced grief over the city and the country he loved. He wept at Lazarus’s tomb. He wept in the garden of Gethsemane. I am sure he wept at many other times too. He allowed his grief to be expressed and suspect that often that grief propelled him into action. This morning I felt that the knowledge of how he expressed his grief gave me the freedom to express mine too, and to share it with you.

Weeping unfortunately isn’t always restricted to the grief uppermost in our minds. Sometimes, as the grief over Tom overwhelms me it uncovers other hidden griefs that have simmered beneath the surface. We all have them - the loss of loved ones, severance from a job we loved, illness that incapacitates., injustice in the world around us, climate change and devastation to our planet. Most of us still bear the hidden grief of what we lost because of COVID and the periods of isolation it forced on us. I have talked about this before in my post On the Wild Edge of Sorrow but at the moment I need to revisit it frequently.

I thank God for tears. I thank God that Jesus wept. I thank God that grief is often expressed in the bible, especially the psalms. I would love it if the grief that we feel could be poured out in these salty offerings and then “gotten over”. But there is no getting over intense grief. There are however ways to learn to live with it and become comfortable with it.

The scriptures give our grief permission to surface.

I have been reading a lot of psalms lately and find they really help me process my grief. Motivated by Marty Folsom’s book The Psalms: Sanctuary for the Soul, in which he walks through each psalm one at a time, I like to read through a psalm in several different versions, slowly, sometimes aloud and allow the cadences of the rhythm, slightly different in each version to settle into my soul. Then I read through the section on the appropriate psalm in Marty’s book.

Marty handles each psalm in a garden setting. He divides his discourse into several sections inviting us to first survey the garden, then enter it in order to know the Gardener who walks with us through it. The next section incorporates illustrations done by his daughter which he calls “visions of paradise” then a walk along the garden path. The last sections incorporate poetry and a final reflection.

Spending a lot of times in the psalms is very helpful, especially when I take time as Marty suggests to reflect on what I am reading. My favourite book to read alongside his is Open to You: Zen-Inspired Translations of the Psalms. by Norman Fischer. This easy to read book often helps me to put into words what I cannot express. This week I was caught in Psalm 6, a psalm of lament which ends with the words “My lamentation has turned into courage”. I love that thought and pray that my lament too may be turned into courage, that the tears I shed, though they may not go away, will give me the courage to face each day, each visit to Tom with resilience and fortitude.

My other solace is spending time in the garden. In fact this post almost didn’t get written as I was fascinated by the bees on my thyme, borage and echinacea and spent far more time than I intended watching them. Strangely, their frantic, hurried activity was soothing for me. Seeing them laden with pollen as in the photo above was a delight.

Solace Doesn’t Take Away the Grief.

It is easy for me to try and turn my back on the grief I feel, especially when special occasions make it feel raw, like a festering wound. Saturday is our 34th anniversary. I feel the pain of the hole this leaves. Anniversaries were always very important for us. Trips to Victoria B.C., or sometimes further afield, like for our 25th anniversary when we enjoyed a boat trip in Europe. Live theatre, Gilbert and Sullivan, dinner at our favourite restaurants. these are some of the things I grieve. My first thought was to ignore the anniversary, pretend it wasn’t real, but then, as I read Psalm 6 and particularly those words “My lamentation has turned into courage,” I was encouraged to think about ways that it might be possible to celebrate., to have the courage to bring a card, and a special piece of cake, a small present.

Our grief in the presence of dementia, I realize, is a call to love the person we have lost even more deeply, even as we learn to love the person who now is. Sometimes visiting Tom can seem like a chore rather than a loving act. How do I show my love for THIS Tom? It’s not easy but I am learning that there are ways to show my love. Holding hands, looking into his eyes, giving him a hug and a kiss. He doesn’t always acknowledge them, but these are expressions of love I can still give, and need to as frequently as possible. I know that what I do is often more for me than for Tom, but I feel it says: I still love you no matter who you have become.”

What deep griefs do you hold in your heart and where do you look for solace and relief? What scriptures help you cope in the midst of your tears? What other suggestions to you have for those who are grieving?

In her book The Other Side of Chaos: Breaking Through When Life is Breaking Down, Margaret Silf suggests that this is how we need to interpret chaos. In the beginning of creation God’s Spirit, God’s breath, an unseen, dynamic and creative force hovers over the chaos and out of the formless void creates our world and our universe.

Similarly when we allow the Spirit of God, the Breath of God to hover over the chaos of our lives and of our world, something new, something beautiful can emerge. “Without a period of breakdown and chaotic dislocation, nothing new can emerge.” (Silf 48) It’s true. So often we try to hurry the process, wanting to create out of ourselves the future we look forward to. But what if in the periods of transition, the messiness and the pain of our lives, we need not to actively try to shape something new but rather allow the spirit of God, the breath of God to hover, to imagine, to pour divine energy into what will be created.

One tool that I have found helps me to relax and feel comfortable with the chaos and imagine God creating something new and beautiful out of it is doodling - with my non dominant hand and with my eyes closed. Believe it or not it is an activity that can stir our imaginations and inspire our creativity. Once we have doodled we sit, like the spirit hovering, and we allow a shape, or a creative image to emerge. That’s what I did this morning and as I did so not only did a shape emerge (a dog to me) but I felt new energy, new life and new hope planted in me too. The spirit sees life in the midst of chaos, The breath of God imagines beauty in the midst of a void. All chaos has shape and form hidden within it if we take time to look closely and allow the spirit to bring it into being through us.

I hope you will try this and tell me what emerges for you. How did you feel God spoke to you in the midst of the chaotic image of the doodle?

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Over the last couple of years I have had several complaints that ended up with visits to physical therapists. Now I have exercises for my breathing, feet, shoulders, neck, back and legs. I also play brain games to keep my mind alert and active. What about my spirit and soul I wonder? What exercises did I relish in those first heady days as a new Christian that I have forgotten or dismissed?

It is fascinating to realize that the solution to pain is not painkillers but activity. And the solution to shortness of breath is not more rapid breaths but slow deep breathing. It’s not just balance and muscle strength that can be improved however. We all know the benefits of cardio exercise for our hearts. Even illnesses like asthma, high blood pressure and diabetes can be improved with the use of appropriate exercises. What about for our spiritual lives and the health of our souls? We don’t necessarily need spiritual painkillers, we need soul and spirit exercises.

The problem we face is that as we get older we stop using our muscles effectively and our modern sedentary lives spent in front of screens don’t help. Kids don’t seem to have the same problems we do using all their muscles. They dance, they sing, they laugh, they jump and skip, they wiggle their toes and run around as much as possible. Talk about a good cardio workout! There is lots that we can learn here and it’s not just true for physical muscles. It’s true for our spiritual muscles too.

What are the spiritual practices you engaged in as a young follower of Jesus that you no longer pay attention to? In what ways do you feel you may have become a sedentary Christian taking short rapid breaths rather than long deep ones? Don’t worry I am not going to suggest more time spent reading the Bible necessarily or more time in intercessory prayer. What I do think we need is more time spent interacting with the world around us in the same ways that children do.

When I dedicated my life to following Jesus as a teenager the world around me became more real, more beautiful, more alive with the presence of God. Becoming a follower of Jesus lightened my spirit, gave me joy in what I did, made me more compassionate towards others and gave me a deep appreciation of the beauty of the world around me.

As so often happens, that initial glow, that honeymoon stage faded and I began to see following Jesus as a dedication to Bible reading and prayer, particularly intercessory prayer. I must confess these sometimes became toil and hard work rather than joy and delight.

The last ten years or so changed that. I think it all began when I did research for my book The Gift Of Wonder: Creative Practices for Delighting in God, exploring the question “What are the characteristics of kids that make them fit for the kingdom of God?” which led me to the bigger question: “What if the goal of our spiritual disciplines was to restore the intense joy and enthusiasm God, and I think humans, experienced at the creation of the garden of Eden which God called a place of utter delight?” As I read children’s books, laughed and played like a kid again, engaged in awe and wonder walks and interacted with the beauty of creation for the sheer joy of it, my whole perspective on life changed. I found myself delighting in God again not through busy work or scripture study but through the sheer delight of interacting with God’s world joyfully, playfully and in awe and wonder. In other words I started exercising those muscles that came alive when I first followed Jesus and then began to atrophy through my intense work ethic.

As I struggle through the pain and grief of Tom’s deteriorating mental condition I find the need to really plug into the practices I developed as I wrote The Gift of Wonder. Re-reading parts of the book today made me realize how much I miss out on because I have let go of playful, fun activities that don’t have any obvious purpose. I need to exercise these muscles again.

I shared this with a friend at lunch yesterday and teared up when I talked about play. She commented “Our family used to have doodle and drawing nights when we just had fun making aimless art together. I think it’s time to reintroduce those evenings” I agree we all need this kind of playful time together.

As we get closer to the midterm elections I think that all of us need these kinds of practices to maintain our equilibrium and our joy in life. Will you re-read The Gift of Wonder with me and help us rediscover the joy of play and laughter, awe and wonder and fun? If you would like to do that let me know in the comments below or email me and I will organize a couple of zoom sessions in the next few months for us to connect.

Here are seven suggestions to get you started:

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This weekend I decided to relax and let go of Substack and social media for a few days. I helped to celebrate a friend’s 90th birthday, I enjoyed the delight of a visit from friends I have not seen for 25 years, did lots of reading and wandered frequently around my garden saying “Wow, wow, wow,” as I discovered something more of its beauty. Fortunately, here in Seattle we did not experience the heat dome that hovered so viciously over much of the country. We really were able to enjoy the weekend.

My reading focused on two things - breath and beauty. You may not think they have much in common but yesterday I was awed by the commonality of thought I read about.

In Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art, James Nestor talks about the fact that breathing is much more than getting air into our bodies. It is he says “the most intimate connection to our surrounds.” (I would add “and to God” but more about that on Thursday.) He goes on to comment:

Breathing is so much more than just getting air into our bodies. It is the most intimate connection to our surroundings.

…. To breathe is to absorb ourselves in what surrounds us, to take in little bits of life, understand them, and give pieces of ourselves back out. Respiration is, at its core reciprocation.” (Breath, 39)

“Breathe in the breath of God and hold it deep within me, breathe out and share it with the world.” has become a mantra for me. each morning as I do breath exercises I love to remind myself that breath cannot be held to myself. It must be shared with the world around me. Inhale then exhale. Our breath, this ruah that hovered over the waters at our world’s creation, gifted to us from the breath of God every time we breathe in and out is meant to be shared with those around us. There is a reciprocity in every breath we take that comes straight from God’s holy presence.

What does this have to do with beauty you may wonder. A lot I would answer. The beauty of this world enthralls us. We stop to stare at a rainbow at the end of the street. We are mesmerized by a humming bird frolicking in the birdbath. We travel miles to admire the beauty of the aurora where there are no lights and we drink in the beauty of the sun setting in spectacular colors.

Then we want to share it.

Beauty, like breath is not something to hold to ourselves however. It excites us in such a way that we want to tell others - look, wonder with me, did you see what I did? And then we want to create more beauty so that we can share it more effectively. We take photos, we write poetry, we draw, we paint. All kinds of creative arts revolve around our desire to share the beauty we see around us with others.

In his book Watch and Wonder: Birding as a Spiritual Practice, Ragan Sutterfield quotes from Elaine Scarry’s book On Beauty and Being Just.

Beauty brings copies of itself into being. It makes us draw it, takes photographs of it or describe it to other people. (Sutterfield 112)

So true. It is almost impossible for us to hold beauty to ourselves, just as we cannot hold breath to ourselves. Reciprocity is at the heart of both these aspects of our world. Everything that is most beautiful as well as everything that is most intimate in our interactions with the world is meant to be shared. In fact I might say we are compelled to share it.

No wonder I want to go on awe and wonder walks every day and take photos all the time of the beauty I experience. I want to share the beauty God has so wonderfully surrounded me with. Sometimes I write poetry too. It’s another wonderful way to share the beauty of God’s world.

It fascinates me to think that God designed us in such a way that we must interact with the world around us in these two glorious ways in order not just to value beauty and breath, but to appreciate and be awed by the divine presence that brought it all into being and permeates all of it too.

Just after I wrote this I took Goldie for a walk and was mesmerized as always by the beauty of Mt Rainier. Something more of God’s beauty to share with you.

Take time today to appreciate the reciprocity of breath and of beauty. Go outside to your favourite park or into your garden and take some deep breaths in and out. Say “Wow, wow, wow” to yourself several times, relishing your breath and encouraging it to spread out and be absorbed by the trees around you. Admire the beauty that surrounds you. Take photos, draw a sketch or write a poem. Say wow, wow, wow again and imagine that beauty spreading out from you to bless and nourish the lives of others. Consider going home and sharing what you have experienced as a comment on this post, or on your social media channels. If you do so please don’t forget to tag me.

And here for you to meditate on as you think about breath and beauty is the poem it inspired within me:

God who gives me breath,
Breathe on me today,
Spirit who is my breath,
Breathe in me today.
Jesus who gives life to my breath,
Breathe through me today.
Holy God, 
Three in One, One in three,
Breathe on me,
Breathe in me,
Breathe through me,

I don’t feel like celebrating Independence Day this year. I know it is the 250 year celebration here in the U.S. of the arrival of Europeans to the continent and I am very grateful for the freedom that I personally have experienced in living in this country. However I am also aware of the pain that this so called freee country imposes on so many. The pain that my Native American friends, and African American friends still feel because of their lack of acceptance and discrimination is incredible. On top of that my LBGTQ+ and immigrant friends are constantly on edge as they face very uncertain futures. It makes me very aware the so call freedom of American society and the ability to vote was initially only extended to white landowners. Slowly over the centuries it was extended to white women, then African Americans and finally to the native people who had lived in this country for centuries.

In Canada my friends are already celebrating Canada Day which is today. Their celebrations highlight the richness of their land, the strength of their diversity, the vibrancy of their culture, and the contributions Canadians make both nationally and internationally. Resilience, peace between peoples and compassion all continue to shape the country's future and are applauding in this celebration. Interdependence rather than independence seems to be the focus of what I see. There is quite a contrast between what and how the two countries celebrate.

In light of all of this I want to re-share a post I wrote a few years ago that focuses on our need to consider interdependence rather than independence. We need our neighbours both in our communities and across the world to be the people God intends us to be. We need God’s good creation, which suffers so much too. We cannot survive without it.

This post still holds true for me as I reflect on the meaning of freedom, interdependence and independence in the US. The current state of this country makes me very aware that freedom on paper does not mean freedom from injustice, prejudice, distrust and abuse. So many people and many parts of God’s good creation have had their freedoms stripped away over the last year and I think that this is a good time to consider that and think about what freedom really means.

So Christ has truly set us free. Now make sure that you stay free, and don’t get tied up again in slavery to the law.

For you have been called to live in freedom, my brothers and sisters. But don’t use your freedom to satisfy your sinful nature. Instead, use your freedom to serve one another in love. For the whole law can be summed up in this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” But if you are always biting and devouring one another, watch out! Beware of destroying one another. Galatians 5:1, 13-15 NLT

What does it mean to be free? Saturday is Independence Day in the U.S. when Americans celebrate their “freedom”. To be honest, it is a celebration I struggle with because I don’t believe God calls us to be independent but rather interdependent. I also realize that our cultural perspectives shape our views of freedom.

To Americans, the concept of freedom focuses on the freedom of individual choice, which can be as trivial as the right to choose whether I want my eggs sunny side up or over easy, or as serious as the right to bear arms. What I struggle with is that there seems to be little recognition of the often dire consequences our individual choices can have for the society or for the world in which we live.

To Australians, freedom revolves around the freedom of society and the recognition that our decisions all have consequences, not just for us as individuals, but for all of our society and our world. Consequently, most Australians are willing to give up the right to bear arms for the good of a safe society in which we don’t have to worry about mass gun violence and killings. In the Australian political system, voting is compulsory because of the belief that with the freedom of citizenship comes the responsibility of participation in the process that provides our freedom.

Unfortunately, neither country does very well when it comes to granting freedom to all. We like to be exclusive – no freedom to immigrants, to those of other sexual orientation, those with disabilities, those of other races or religions. And of course we were all slow to grant freedom to our indigenous brothers and sisters and there are many who still don’t feel free in spite of the abolition of slavery. Whether we think of freedom as individual or societal, we all like to limit who we give freedom to.

All of this leads me to my most important question about freedom, “What does freedom look like in the kingdom of God?”. Obviously there is an element of individual freedom – all of us need to take on the individual responsibility to follow Jesus in the ways we live out our lives. However, our entry into the family of God faces us with serious consequences for how we act in society. We are not called as individuals but as part of an interdependent community of rich diversity in which we acknowledge and seek to understand those who are different from us without trying to make them “in our own image”.

Our freedom as Christians means that we no longer focus on our own needs but rather “consider the needs of others as more important than our own” (Philippians 2). It means that we live by the law of love – what James calls “the royal law” (James 2:8). In the quote above, Paul sums this up very well, “Do not use your freedom to indulge the sinful nature; rather serve one another humbly in love. For the entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command: Love your neighbour as yourself.”

What is Your Response?

What comes to mind when you think about freedom? Take out your journal and piece of paper and divide it into 2 columns. On one side write the words that come to mind when you think of freedom. In the other column, write down the negative consequences of your personal freedoms for others, for the earth and even for your life. Listen to the video below and reflect on the true meaning of freedom.

Sit quietly for a few minutes reflecting on your lists and the video you have listened to. Allow God to speak to you. Are there changes you need to make to your original lists based on your reflections? Are there places in which God calls you to repent of your “independence”? Are there ways in which God may ask you to give up your personal freedoms for the common good?

I wrote the prayer below several years ago when I first became aware of the inequalities I see around me. If you have time meditate on this prayer and let me know what you think.