I have been reading Barbara Brown Taylor's new book An Altar in the World. I highly recommend it. Not only is it packed full of wonderful suggestions for deepening your spiritual life and practice but her words are always so well chosen, so poetic and beautiful.

In the introduction to the book, she tells a story of a speaking invitation she received from a priest in a church in Alabama. When she inquired what he wanted her to speak about he said: "Come tell us what is saving your life now." I shared this story at our regular weekly staff meeting this past week inviting people to reflect on what is saving their lives right now. There were some beautiful and simple answers.

What is saving your life right now? What lifeline are you reaching out for that gives you reason to get up in the morning and put your two feet on the ground? What practice or prayer is filling you with hope for movement forward? Who has looked at you and really helped you to know you are known and cherished just as you are?

The wonderful thing about this invitation is that how we answer today will be completely different than how we might have answered yesterday or will answer tomorrow. And yet the gift of reflecting on what is saving our life calls us to go to some deeper place, a place that strips away all the distractions of daily life, those things that can seem so urgent,and, instead, causes us to name what is at our core. Asking ourselves the question 'what is saving my life?' can cause us to breathe more deeply, walk more slowly, life more intentionally. And this, I believe, is always a good thing.

So today, as you go about your work, your play, your life, I invite you to reflect on what is saving your life. I invite you to ask a friend, a family member, a stranger, the same question. It could lead to some compelling conversation…..one that just might save your life.

"One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice-though the whole house began to tremble and you felt the old tug at your ankles. "Mend my life!" each voice cried. But you didn't stop. You knew what you had to do, though the wind pried with its stiff fingers at the very foundations, though their melancholy was terrible. It was already late enough, and a wild night, and the road full of fallen branches and stones. But little by little, as you left their voices behind, the stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds, and there was a new voice which you slowly recognized as your own, that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world, determined to do the only thing you could do-determined to save the only life you could save." Mary Oliver, The Journey