Stumbling our way forward

In a generously insightful piece over the weekend, the writer/poet Martin Wroe quoted Henri Nouwen:

“We don’t think our way into a new kind of living. We live our way into a new kind of thinking.”

And this is someone who knew the reality of stepping across the threshold into the awkward unknown.

Henri had been a priest/theologian with a soundly academic background (he taught at Yale and Harvard). Yet he spent the last years of his life living in a community with people with profound disabilities.

We will never step into our unknowns by getting our thinking straight first.

It’s far more awkward than that and requires us to get on with putting one foot in front of the other, choosing grace, hope and wisdom as our teachers.

Especially now.

~ Martin Wroe’s piece The Age of the New Awkward – new rules for living in the hybrid life of post-lockdown world started life as a short piece for radio and can be found on Medium.