This is a long overdue update to share where my work is headed. But first, I need to back up a little.

I grew up in a loving family. We weren’t a church-going family, so I didn’t learn about God through Sunday school or Bible studies. I learned about God by being loved and observing love. Looking back, I think that love prepared me to recognize God that I would later come to know in Christ.

Earlier this year, during a spiritual formation training, we were asked to map our religious history. As I looked at mine, there were no denominations or doctrines. I saw people, potlucks, bonfires, weddings, funerals, nature, small-town community, and love.

Borrowing Richard Rohr’s words, I realized I had experienced God coming for me disguised as my life.

I started attending Church as a young adult right around the same time I started attending yoga. Yoga started simply enough. I was anxious, unsettled, and tired of trying to keep up with life. My yoga mat became one of the only places where I slowed down enough to notice what was happening inside me.

I thought I was learning yoga.

Looking back, I think I was learning how to become attentive to God.

I can only describe what happened this way, Jesus pursued me on my mat.

I wasn’t doing yoga for some extraordinary spiritual experience. I was simply trying to quiet my mind and feel better in my body. But as I learned to get slow, still, and attentive, I discovered Christ had been paying attention to me all along.

I wasn’t sure how this could be. My faith and my yoga lived in separate boxes because I wasn’t sure they belonged together. But the longer I tried to keep God in a box, the more He showed me He didn’t belong in one.

I thought I was coming to stretch, strengthen and feel calm. But, I realized how disconnected in my head, heart, and body I had become. Yoga therapy became one of the ways God gently invited me back toward wholeness.

There was a time in my life when I felt like I was catching up on Bible stories everyone else seemed to know. For a while I wondered if I had come to faith backward. But today I wouldn’t change it. I came to know God’s character through embodied experience before I had language to describe it. Scripture didn’t replace that experience. It illuminated and expanded it.

It was so much more than yoga for me and that is still true today.

I’ve always been fascinated by Jesus’ life before His baptism. Scripture doesn’t tell us much about his first thirty years of life leading up to his on-the-go ministry. I like to wonder about his ordinary days of waking, working, eating, resting, sharing life with family and friends, and living within a community.

When God became human in Jesus, He didn’t bypass ordinary life. He embraced it. He entered family life, work, relationships, celebrations, disappointments, and all the everyday rhythms that make up most of our lives. This encourages me.

It’s easy to believe that faithfulness means doing something extraordinary for God. We tell ourselves we'll begin when we're less anxious, more disciplined, less busy, more certain, or finally have life together. But Jesus spent most of His earthly life living faithfully in ordinary days.

One of my favorite stories is His first miracle turning water into wine at the wedding in Cana. I love the down-to-earth conversation between Jesus and His mother. There is something so simply human and familiar about their exchange. Jesus’ first miracle wasn’t performed in a temple or before religious leaders. It happened at a wedding, in the middle of an ordinary celebration, responding to a very human need when the wine ran out.

This story reminds me that God doesn’t wait for life to become extraordinary before He enters it. He’s present in our ordinary days, quietly transforming what we allow or invite Him into.

Looking back, I realize Jesus pursued me on my mat because He has always been the kind of Savior who meets people in ordinary life.

As I’ve been reflecting on my own story, I’ve realized this is a thread tying everything together.

Through my faith, study, teaching, and offerings I hope to help people become more attentive to God through embodied ordinary life.

I wonder where God has been meeting you in your own ordinary life. Maybe in a conversation, a walk, your work, a neighbor, a season of waiting, or even a struggle you wish were over.

My work isn’t changing nearly as much as it’s becoming more integrated. Yoga therapy is still at the heart of what I do, but there’s so much more. I’m interested in the intersections of body, soul, and spirit, and in the quiet ways God forms us through the rhythms of everyday life.