Do you long for deeper communion with God? Spiritual director Jennie Isbell and Quaker minister Brent Bill know how easy it is to lapse into repetitious refrains of prayer:

"Our hearts told us that we had lapsed into easy God speak. We weren't reaching deep into our spirits and drawing out living words of praise, confession, concern, intercession and longing. We were tired of speaking in clipped shorthand to God. We wanted to pray in such a way that we showed up with our whole selves."

If you have experienced a similar longing, come join the authors on this prayer journey into the deep waters of the Spirit. This book and workshop offer companionship and guidance as you begin to notice, consider and deepen your prayer experiences, with refreshing exercises sprinkled through every chapter to offer you a fresh language for prayer. Find God here—in the nouns and the verbs of your conversation.

Finding God in the Verbs can be presented as a two or four hour introductory workshop or a full weekend retreat. Either way, it's a lively opportunity to explore and unpack the language of prayer, including inherited and ancestral prayers, spontaneous prayers, and the unuttered prayers of your heart. In this highly experiential workshop, participants play with scriptural and personal images for God and the verbs (and other words) and implications that go with them. We dive into language and the silence that yields to listening, all while leaving theological baggage at the bag check.

A compass makes a good metaphor for our spiritual lives and the work of discerning God’s will for them.  God doesn’t speak as clearly and as obviously as Mapquest or GoogleMaps or GPS.  Maybe that’s because we don’t navigate the life of faith via anything remotely resembling GPS.  Instead, the divine compass points us to the mind and love of God.  Keeping our soul’s eyes on the sacred compass leads us to the holy discovery that we can move through life with purpose and promise, even in those times when we may not sense with certainty what that purpose and promise are.  In a grace-filled way, our compass invites us into a life of continuous experiences of God and of spiritual transformation.  As we move toward Divine guidance, we joyfully behold the face of a loving God gazing back at us. 

This workshop, based on my book Sacred Compass, is an interactive opportunity to check our compasses and see where God has lead and is leading us.  We’ll use experiences such as drawing Life Maps, charting the call of the Divine in our lives, and more.  Available in half-day, day-long, and weekend formats.

Download information here!

There are the silences of monastic discipline, of contemplative prayer, of Zen meditation - but the particular ways of Quaker silence are distinctive. And that distinctiveness has contributions to offer across spiritual traditions.   Brent Bill,  a Quaker minister, reads from his book Holy Silence: The Gift of Quaker Silence and leads participants into learning to listen for the sounds and voice of God in the midst of our busy lives. A self-confessed Type A personality, I examine the interior and exterior barriers to silence that confront us daily, sometimes by drawing (with "a droll sense of humor" according to one participant) on situations from my own life.

Download information here!