Seeking the Morning

Quotes and Reflections

Question: What do you do when you are the manager of a blog and you wake up Wednesday morning to the realization you have nothing to publish?

Answer: Defer to the Lord.

The Lord is present with every man, urging and pressing to be received; and His first coming, which is called the dawn, is when man receives Him, which he does when he acknowledges Him as his God, Creator, Redeemer, and Savior. From this time man’s understanding begins to be enlightened in spiritual things, and to advance into a more and more interior wisdom; and as he receives this wisdom from the Lord, he advances through morning into day, and this day lasts with him into old age, even to death; and after death he passes into heaven to the Lord Himself; and there, although he died an old man, he is restored to the morning of his life, and the rudiments of the wisdom implanted in him in the natural world grow to eternity. (True Christian Religion 766)

What Do You Expect?

Article

Planning for the future is an important part of life. My decisions today affect my day tomorrow, so I better look ahead to make sure I do what I need to. But by creating a plan for tomorrow, I also create an image of what I can expect tomorrow to look like. I create an expectation. My expectations may be based off past experience or from what I’ve heard or may be completely made up. No matter where they came from, my expectations trick me into thinking that I have control over the future and that is what makes them so dangerous.

Planning for the future is necessary for me to reach my goals to the best of my ability but what use do expectations serve in my life? What good is a predisposition that is based on information totally separate from the situations I look forward to? When I expect an event, I am deciding how I will react before having a chance to experience it. Not only does this take away from the experience itself but takes away some level of freedom in my reaction. If I have decided to be bored, I’m going to be a little bored even if the event is more fun than I expected. Continue reading What Do You Expect? →

Communities in Heaven and on Earth

Quotes and Reflections

I’ve been thinking a lot over the last year about the significance of community. Having a group of people who you feel known and understood by, loved and supported by, and with whome that feeling is reciprocated, is an amazing gift.

Earlier in my life I experienced high anxiety as a result of a lack of that kind of community. More specifically it was feeling like my internal emotions and experience didn’t line up with the external appearances about the community I lived in. In terms of religion, skin color, and economic standing I fit with the majority but internally I didn’t feel like I fit in. I also felt as if I had to hide some part of me and that caused significant anxiety.

In some ways being an “obvious” part of the majority of the community was a big part of my emotional conflict. I didn’t feel confrontational or brave enough to demonstrate to people the ways I didn’t fit expectations, but the internal awareness of the fact that I didn’t fit and hiding that caused a lot of anxiety. Continue reading Communities in Heaven and on Earth →

Introducing Our Intern

Article

Editor’s Note: New Christian Woman is happy to welcome Tykah Echols to our management team. We’ve partnered with the Religion Department at Bryn Athyn College of the New Church to create an internship for young women. Tykah, now a freshman, started writing for us on a volunteer basis in high school and we are excited to have her step into this far more involved role of intern. On top of writing articles, she will be managing the Facebook page, helping with promotion, updating and managing the back-end of the blog, and who knows what else.

For this week’s article, We’ve asked Tykah to give us her impression of how her peers are relating to the New Christianity.

It would seem that my destiny is to marry a minister. I come from a long line of minister’s daughters who married a minister and based on the track record of my five older sisters it doesn’t look like our generation is going to be the one to end that streak. Out of the six of us girls, the four who are married are married to ministers while my two brothers pursued other forms of use than the clergy. It would seem that this religious gene is passed through the female line. So now it falls to myself and my other unmarried sister. Continue reading Introducing Our Intern →