making space for creativity
The snow has been falling thick and fast in Maryland these past few days. The morning after the Christmas ball, Evan and I left for a hike with just a few flurries, and when we got back five inches had fallen. The woods were deserted except for a few birds and three bounding deer, and…
Seven years ago, when I should have been studying for finals, I took out a sharpie marker and wrote down a quote from Lauren Winner’s book, Girl Meets God. I was engaged, and my betrothed was a thousand miles away. Winner’s writings on Advent spoke to me in that cold Illinois dorm room: …
Prayer is simultaneously a very personal and very communal event. It is just you and God talking; at the same time it is part of a great and ancient conversation of the Church Universal. Throughout the Fall we’ve talked about 9 great paper prayer books (part 1 and 2), definitions of reasons to and examples…
For years, I resisted reading Twilight. It wasn’t that I thought I wouldn’t like it. I was afraid I would like it too much. I had heard that they were poorly written, misogynistic, and spiritually dark. And what would it say about me—a writer, a feminist, a Christian—if I liked Twilight? Twilight hit upon some…
As a follow up to last week’s little glossary of terms, I thought this week we’d actually plunge into the Book of Common Prayer, and do Morning Prayer together. In terms of the church year, we’re three weeks out from Advent, or 27 weeks after Pentecost. There are a lot of different ways you…
Hi friends! I’m so happy that it’s early November, with a tiny bit more time to write and walk through swirls of red maples leave in the chilly Autumn winds. Here in the Rogers Hays household, we’re officially at the one-month mark until Evan is finished with his student teaching. Hooray! It’s also been…
Hi Friends. I wanted to pop in and let you know that I love you and blogging, but my October is more than I can handle, so I’m going to take a little blogging break for the rest of the month. In hindsight, I should have planned and announced this at the…
Today we’ll continue with part four of the Fall mini-series on liturgical prayer. I started with a reflection on my journey to loving liturgy, then began to look at some of my favorite resources, and last week I shared a prayer for the Fall Holiday Michaelmas. The four prayer books we’ll look at today…
In this post we’re continuing on the Fall miniseries on liturgical prayer. Last week we looked at 5 of my favorite prayer books, and next week we’ll look at the other half of our prayer book collection. Today we’ll focus on just one prayer, a prayer for the upcoming Fall holiday, Michaelmas. Closely…
Welcome to the second part in the Fall Liturgical resource mini-series! This week I had planned to tell you about all 10 of our prayer books, but I got through the first 5 and the post got rather lengthy…so I’ll tell you about the other 5 in another post. Last week I reflected on…
This Fall, my husband Evan and I ordered a couple of new prayer books. We love getting new prayer books! We are kind of nerdy-Anglican that way. So in celebration of these new additions to our prayer book collection, I thought I’d do a little mini-series on liturgical prayer resources. Today I’ll reflect on…
My first memory of church is of my Godmother. It must have been in the fall of 1987 because in my memory, I am shyly looking down at the church chairs that could attach and detach, and avoiding saying hi to her. I can hardly believe that there was a time that I wasn’t…
Sometime last year I had a small epiphany: I could wash a dish in water that was neither freezing nor scalding. This did require somewhat of a sacrifice on my part — I had to turn on both the hot and cold knobs on my sink and then wait 10 to 15 seconds for…
After re-imagining breakfast without cereal, the next step in your day is lunch. How do you do quick and easy lunches without sandwiches? One solution that a lot of people use is leftovers: just put whatever you had for dinner into a Pyrex container and skip off to work. But what if you ate…
The summer when I was 12, my family drove up to New Hampshire for a week. I remember knowing that the people we were going to stay with were my parents’ friends and mentors from college. My family had just moved to New Jersey and now we were no longer too far away to…