• Eat breakfast? Check.
• Teeth brushed? Check.
• Hair in order? Check.
• Socks match? Yikes…glad I checked.

What was different on this particular morning was that I happened to glance down at the swirling pattern of my fingerprint on my left index finger. It occurred to me that I hadn’t looked this closely at my finger since I was 5 or 6 years old, if not younger. I was struck by the complexity of the pattern and astounded by how unfamiliar it looked to me. I wondered, “How on earth have I been bearing these marks on my fingers for all of this time and yet failed to notice them, literally, for decades?”

If this was true about the pattern of my fingertip, how much more is it true regarding the complexity of the whole of who I am? I have an idea of self, but how closely have I looked at what is really there? Is it possible that there are parts of my self that, like my fingerprints, exist beneath the surface of my awareness? I became aware that my understanding of myself and of others is likely incomplete and certainly not fully accurate. Initially, this was unsettling since I had constructed a life on the foundation of who I knew myself to be.

We often define what we believe to be possible in our lives based on what has happened in the past. We tend to lack curiosity because we have a sense that we already know what to expect from ourselves, from others, and from the world around us. Unfortunately, this knowing often becomes a foregone conclusion, which vastly limits the realm of possibility. We miss so much because of how much we know.

Over time – and through The Seattle School – I have learned the value of being willing to engage what I know with a sense of curiosity.  As a therapist I have found this to be enormously helpful with my clients.  Often, clients are most stuck in the areas that they are most familiar with and least curious about. It could be a job, a relationship, an addiction, or even just their way of being in and making sense of their world.  It is common that the places clients feel most hopeless in their lives are the very places in which they claim to know themselves the best.  Familiarity breeds comfort even in misery.  How many people do you know who seem unhappy with their life, but do absolutely nothing to change it? It is easy for people to become comfortably miserable. This type of comfort lends itself to a false sense of safety, which is insidious in relation to hope and desire because its primary ingredients are a mixture of complacency and a fear of the unknown.

It is the hope of psychotherapy that the client will gain a growing sense of curiosity about themselves and about their relationships outside the therapeutic environment; that over time they will gain the courage to risk engaging what they know with curiosity about what else may be dancing just beneath the surface of their awareness. Where there is curiosity there is room for possibility. Where there is room for possibility there is room for hope and change.

Bryan Nixon graduated from the Counseling Psychology program in 2007. He is currently a psychotherapist at the Christian Counseling Center in Grand Rapids, MI.

1. Loving to Know: Covenant Epistemology, by Esther L. Meek
2. The Wisdom of Stability: Rooting Faith in a Mobile Culture, by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove
3. God and the Art of Happiness, by Ellen T. Charry
4. Recovering the Commons: Democracy, Place, and Global Justice, by Herbert Reid & Betsy Taylor
5. Christ the Key, by Kathryn Tanner
6. The Pastor: A Memoir, by Eugene H. Peterson
7. The End of Evangelicalism? Discerning a New Faithfulness for Mission: Towards an Evangelical Political Theology, by David E. Fitch
8. Practicing the Way of Jesus: Life Together in the Kingdom of Love, by Mark Scandrette
9. Migrations of the Holy: God, State, and the Political Meaning of the Church, by William T. Cavanaugh
10. Missional Spirituality: Embodying God’s Love from the Inside Out, by Roger Helland & Leonard Hjalmarson

We recently commissioned Blaine Hogan to write up a post about our school on his blog. It’s a great read and highlights the-very-messy-but-always-worth-it transformation that happens through our education:

They believe (as do I) that with intentionality, sacrifice, and a dot of hope, glorious things can be redeemed through the process of uncovering your story…It was in this intersection that I began to discover what I referred to above as my “full self.” It is because I ventured into this intersection that I’m starting to tell more truth and create continually better work.

Give the post a read, and be sure to subscribe to Blaine’s great blog.

Blaine’s also been very busy himself! This summer, he published his first book, aptly titled UNTITLED: Thoughts on the Creative Process.

UNTITLED will walk you through the creative process of attacking the blank page, executing vision, believing in the importance of contemplation, fighting the beast of resistance, learning from your failures, and creating beauty from the inside out.

This book is my manifesto and I hope it becomes yours as well.

You should buy two copies of his book: one for you and one for a friends!

As if that wasn’t enough, Blaine is currently working on a short film. He’s blogging a bit about the process and we can’t wait to watch it. This teaser is making us itch for more!

Reaching Alice (look & feel teaser)

How does the rest of your life influence your artwork?
I have been teaching painting and drawing for the past three years in academia.  It is a place where I find an incredible amount of reciprocity between teaching and learning.  Cultivating the community of the studio classroom with my students keeps me on my toes and accountable for practicing what I preach.

What keeps you motivated to keep creating?
That same learning process keeps me thinking, and thinking keeps me painting.  Paint is often a challenging medium with which to convey content.  It is exactly that inadequacy that keeps me moving from one painting to the next in an attempt to convey meaning.  It propels me forward into new forms and compositions, where each painting builds where the other has left off to collectively they convey a narrative.

Is there a specific theme that this body of work represents for you?
In the course of a move to southwest Virginia, I rediscovered a box full of artifacts from my time as a pediatric cancer patient – get well cards, old pill bottles, a braid of hair cut off before I lost all my hair, slides of my blood from the day of my diagnosis, hospital records, calendars and journals.  There are very few photos from that three-year period when I was on treatments.  I forbade them.  I hated the way I looked.  Now, twenty years later, I wish I had more.

Why did you choose to represent it in this way?
This new body of work – raw and vulnerable – allows me to document my story, and the parallel story of a dear friend, Codi Ackerson-Porter (June 18, 1989 – December 4, 2009).  We have shared many of the same struggles inherent to the cancer community.  In some ways, I feel responsible for her memory because I am the one who gets to live.

What is on the horizon for you and your work?
I am not too sure where this body of work will lead.  I sense that this may be just a season for me – a way of processing through aspects of my story, and the continual process of coming to terms with a loss that still is a part of me.  My story with cancer has been extraordinarily life giving; yet at the same time, incredibly damaging. I am trust right into the middle of a very personal narrative and painting in a manner that feels a bit foreign.  It is hard to trust this tangent from my usual urban landscapes.  It is raw and vulnerable – not my story as much as the style in which I am now painting and the content I am trying to convey… and there is still more of the story to tell.

Top: Kristi, Mallory, Brian, Drew; Bottom: Claire, Cori (Facilitator), Grace, Lindy, Hayden

It was the second week of my graduate school experience. I had been drowning in readings, questions and fears as I sat in a room with eight strangers, better known as my assigned Reading Group. We are required to meet for two hours each week to discuss the readings in our Interpersonal Foundations and Hermeneutics classes. Although it was only our second meeting, I’d already grown to dread it – just another thing jamming up my calendar.

On this particular Tuesday evening, I decided to share with this group of strangers the decision I had considered about 30 minutes earlier. “I think I’m going to quit school,” I said, fearfully. Little did I know that through this true confession to a new group in a mandatory meeting, I found strength, peace and community. I spoke, they listened, and we shared, with raw honesty, our experiences since beginning school.

We are each so different, a mix of gender, age, race and marital status. We are from all over the world. Some of us grew up in Christian homes; some of us can count on one hand the number of times we’ve stepped into a church. We meet every Tuesday night to eat dinner together, drink wine together and find our way through this first year – together. In that room, the meaning of “community” comes alive in my life. We wrestle with theology, shed tears, confess failure, admit confusion, acknowledge fears and express doubt. We disagree, challenge and question. We embrace honesty, offer encouragement, commend courage and provide a safe space for vulnerability – but the greatest of these is love.

That night, during the second week of school, I was struggling. Overwhelmed, tired and lonely, I hadn’t planned to emotionally collapse in the presence of these near-strangers, but, even so, I was caught in a safety net of love, encouragement and understanding.

Some weeks at The Seattle School are easier than others. There are moments when I think I have this whole grad school thing under control, while other times I want to quit it all and run away to some beach somewhere. Yet, regardless of how we’re feeling, we all bring ourselves to Hayden’s home every Tuesday night, where both the meal and the conversation are different each week. And every time I leave, my head is clear, my stomach is full and my heart is happy – and then, honestly, the beach doesn’t sound quite as appealing anymore.

Mallory Larsen is a first year MACS student, gratefully accepting your suggestions regarding her vocational direction. While contentedly figuring out what she wants to be when she grows up, Mallory loves engaging in deep conversations about superheroes with her 2 nephews, the fulfilling exhaustion at the end of a [moderately] long run and drinking troubling amounts of coffee each day. She is deeply loved by her reading group…because she supplies the wine.

Dan Allender speaks before a room of Seattle business leaders

Today, Dr. Dan Allender spoke with leaders at a Leadership Luncheon hosted by The Seattle School. In this brief message, Dr. Allender identifies the reasons why most people are leaders, the top 5 issues leaders face, as well as some personal reflections on how to care for one’s self in the midst of leadership fatigue. Dan draws from his life experience and extensive psychological research. Dan’s central question is “Leaders know they should take better care of themselves, why do they not?”

Listen to Dan’s message below:

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So when he was assigned to write a piece of fiction on text, soul, and culture, he used it as another trigger. Below is Scott’s story:

In a way, it was back at the beginning of all things. Before the light and the darkness, before anything at all. Yet, in another way, it was not in the beginning. It was in the space outside of beginnings and time. At once before the beginning, after the beginning, above and below the beginning. This is when the Storyteller walked in the shade of the nothingness. Clearly, there was no true walking, or shade, or even nothingness; yet, this is one of those times when the truth can only be touched by saying things that are merely hints and gestures. Sometimes we get at the truth of the matter best by telling a story, of a story, of a story. This is one of those times.

So it is here, at, but also not at, the beginning, The Storyteller walked in the shade of the nothingness, full of Story, full of Beauty, Art, and Truth. The Storyteller was glad, for she knew that soon she would open her mouth, and through her lips would flow the substance of all things. Not just from her lips, but from her heart, her womb, her lungs, and her mind. Story would leap from her tongue, and within Story, within each line and pause, in each whisper and change of tone, in the cracks between meaning and in the meaning itself, in all of these, being would light into existence.

Like an ember heating until it grows into a flame, it slowly warmed until there was Love and Life and Song and Sex and Evolution and Passion and Peace and Goodness. There was also space for great darkness and absence and pain.

It should be noted that these metaphors are at once apt and alien, because of course, there was no ember, or heat, or flame yet in the universe. Then again, there has always been ember, and heat, and flame, for there has never been a time when the great story was not in the heart of the Storyteller.

And as all things were created in and through the fabric of the great story, The Storyteller thinks to herselves, “With all these stories going around, I should get to making a people from and for my stories. They can hear my stories, and tell my stories, and live my stories, and even help write my stories.”

And so, as she continues to speak the world into being, she also gets to making a people. She whispers them into existence, just as she would a new story.

The people are storytellers, too. They come to hear, and live, and tell, and even write stories. To be storytellers, they are given the ability to write good stories and bad alike, or else they wouldn’t truly be storytellers, but puppets. Thus, some of the stories are happy stories, filled with joy and laughter. Some of the stories are painful, filled with tragedy and darkness. But all stories must be told, even the ones we wish weren’t stories at all.

Some of these people created from and for the stories are captured by Story in a different way than most. It is their heartbeat, their lifeblood, the frame in which they see all things. They are the keepers of the great story. They must always be listening, and watching, and feeling for the story under the story. They must always be telling stories to the world, to remind people of who they are, and who they might become.

These people who are captured by stories in a special way must exist throughout all of human history. They are an interesting and frustrating people. They are tricksters and fools. Many cultures will call them many things, ravens and spiders, demons and angels. Yet, they cannot escape the stories that have captured them, nor the great story underneath all stories. If they try to escape, they do so at their own peril, and it never goes well.

For better or worse, I myself am one of these people. Story is my lot, my task, my burden and my wings. I am a storyteller.

Scott Small is a writes experimental fiction at Trigger Fiction and blogs on pop culture at Roused to Mediocrity. He loves to have deep conversations about movies and culture and their impact on the church.

It was the first day of orientation. I was walking toward that red brick building and I was terrified. I had given up so much to pursue this journey, and suddenly, here I was at the end of the process. I was at the doorstep of matriculation, and I didn’t know if I was ready.

My first few weeks in Seattle were heavy and light. I arrived a month before the beginning of school, and I found out my move-in date a week before I was supposed to be there. I quickly packed up my life in Atlanta, GA and soon found myself in Seattle, feeling unprepared and overwhelmed. For the first week, I lay on my couch reading, watching movies and weeping. The tears came naturally, and there were many moments when I could not even name what was causing them. I slowly realized that with the move came a sense of release – the discovery of a place that was safe enough, and far enough from home, to allow myself the space to grieve losses I had never acknowledged existed. It was beautiful and painful and new, those first few days of allowing myself to speak. I had never done that willingly before.

The light came in the weeks following, as classmates responded with open arms to my arrival. My weeks were full of coffee dates and explorations of my new city. I discovered peaceful parks, great reading spots and life-giving conversations almost everywhere I went. I found myself in a place where I came alive, where everything was an adventure, a glorious dance of passion and fresh air.

I treasured these things as I crossed the street that would lead me to my new life’s front door. I remembered the process of becoming, the moments of pain and beauty that had already taken place in this new city. It overwhelmed me, and filled me with a deep curiosity. I took a deep breath and I opened the door.

The best way I know how to explain those first few days of orientation and classes is that I stepped into a world of colour. The school was full of people who were kind and engaging, who were committed to honesty and education. There was art everywhere, pieces that touched my soul and filled me with the inspiration I had been longing to rediscover. There was music, candlelight and singing at Vespers, and a heavy sense of honouring, mutual commitment between students, faculty and staff at Convocation. There was laughter and tears and encouragement in the company of people I could actually trust to hold my story well. There were classes that terrified and excited me, that introduced thoughts and ideas I had never known existed.

I left everyday feeling exhausted and satisfied. I was full of life and ready for rest. As I lay in bed one night, reflecting on the whirlwind pace of the last few weeks, I finally found the word to express this experience in the deepest way I knew how: home. I was home.

Kelly Pattison is a first year MACP student. She is in the process of discovering how to work hard, rest well and actually enjoy the taste of black coffee. You can read more of her [significantly less formulated] thoughts on her blog.

Chelle is also a regular blogger and you can follow her writings on her own site, where she posts great photos like these:

Along the lake’s edge, a ruffled group of people were searching for some lost chord in an apparent attempt to connect with Gaia. Tousled, sun-freckled kids were playing amongst the rushes as a sinister layer of weed smoke slunk across the tepid water. It seemed like some sacred welcome mat rolled out to usher this worship into the night air. The alternating legato chants of Shanti ‚ Om‚ and harmony made their way into my sodden ears.

I did not expect this expression at the lake I call home. The strange beauty of the music continues even now as I write, though almost every song has been in the same key. There is a near dullness to this music. The object of this worship is untethered to The Divine Being. Rather it is yearning to connect with elusive divine-ness in us all. The strains of these melodies seem on a futile search. As I’m lulled to consider the divine-ness in me, I find it deeply muddled, jammed back into dark, scarred corners of past traumas. Somehow, through this foreboding, Jesus emerges. I wonder if He is emerging to these well-intentioned worshippers. Perhaps.

It’s eerie hearing this reverie after most of a life listening to Christian hymns, contemporary and worship songs. There is a sense – as I have sung these many songs in appreciation for God – of connection, renewal, remembrance and grace. But not always.

Even with music that has the Creator of the Universe as its object, I am at times distracted by the saccharine, the commercial, and the trite. Somehow, even so, I connect with something that is far beyond my understanding. Even when dumbed down and trivialized, this music sung and played to God contains shreds of beauty that tease the hunger of my soul and brings to light the pains of my past. The music I still hear now floating across the humid night air does not provide nearly the same solace.

Even so, a primal creative urge is being expressed by these people. Even in the dullness I feel in their music, there is the DNA of the Creator, who is the Source of every note, brush stroke, word written, line delivered, aria sung, and mantra uttered. Perhaps these earnest people are misguided in the object of their worship. But I’d like to think that God is above and amidst them smiling as they utter His very impulses. Maybe in this tainted goodness, they will see True Divinity in the midst of the contrived, tarnished idols of themselves. Maybe, just maybe, God has grace enough to imbue the strains of their music in ways He can only redeem. Perhaps these timbres will ultimately remind them of the only One that perfectly, and wildly, loves them.

I can still see the faint fires flickering across the placid lake. The music is dying down in synchrony with the flames. An errant duck duck squawks in the distance and softly flapping bats punctuate the air as they go about their nighttime meal. And God longingly smiles…

Alexander Seidel is in his final year of the MACP/MACS programs at The Seattle School. To dissociate from the impressive emotional workload of school, he loves to paint pictures with words, drink hop-saturated beverages with friends, and find the deeper meaning in the gum wall at the Pike Place Market. In his off time, he interns at Meier Clinics and seeks to understand the impact of pathology on ecclesiology.