eleven:eleven

How do you build a bridge from your heart to another’s heart, across your fear and through another’s? This is our conversation on Sunday. Let’s talk about building bridges and redemptive moments that remind us that the creative urge in all of us is really about connection.

So, it’s a New Year. 2020! The Internet is filled with New Year’s resolutions on how to get there – Ten Steps to a Better, Happier You, Five Way to Lose 5 lbs!, 100 Ways to Be More Creative. We love it when we can map it out – The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People, The Eightfold Path, The Ten Commandments, the Four Spiritual Laws. Life is full of maps, guide books, steps, and techniques for living it better, for getting us where we want to go (or at least where we think we ought to be).

As I write, we have approximately 168 hours left, give or take a few minutes, to get Christmas right this year. Really right — you know, the Christmas cards mailed. The tree and lights and all the right ornaments up, the Dickens Villages and the family holiday heirlooms all in their places.

Christmas at the McDermott’s was at my mother’s house every year I can remember as a teenager and later as an adult. Grandmother’s lipstick kisses on the cheeks when I was younger, and uncles with vice grip handshakes.

It is what I was born for: to look, to listen inside this soft world — to instruct myself over and over. — mary oliver There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a…

Everyone has a story to tell of a moment or place or person that mediated the presence of wonder and grace. This Sunday, November 24, at eleven:eleven, singer/songwriter Elizabeth Wills will join us for our first-ever, Open Mic Story Arc Sunday!

We see things differently. That’s the truth of it. To some, a gold ring is just a ring, a formal symbol of a commitment to fidelity and marriage. To another, it’s a symbol of abiding love and unity that holds all things together, an inheritance of a history of love.

This Sunday in eleven:eleven, we will continue our series, Imagine That! As we think together about prophetic imagination and the power of re-framing our ways of seeing things — and the stories we tell ourselves.

This Sunday, November 3, we will meet back at the Historic 512 (in the CTL) as we welcome special guest singer/songwriter Hannah Kirby!