photo by artem beliaikin
What I Do
I am a calling and vocation coach. I support individuals, communities, and organizations in first visioning and discerning how they believe we are called to live our gifts in and as holy relationships of justice and belovedness—and then to faithfully live it out. You know—faith without living it out is dead, and all that good ish.
Basically: I coach us to imagine and receive our whole Selves one another in our innate worth and gifts, such that we are mutually respecting one another’s presence, being, and needs as beloved and called—simply because God created us.
How I Do It
Discerning Patterns Through Storysharing & Truth-Telling Towards Healing, Resilience-Building & Thriving
Our stories—how we learn to receive, experience, live, capture, and share them—are the most powerful thing about us. It is critical that we hear, learn, and live them well. We must learn and live them and ourselves as part with God’s greater story, and so collectively born of and living towards mutual belovedness, healing, thriving, and flourishing—just alignment, or *gasp* justice.
The surfacing and receiving of our full and genuine stories and patterns are critical for transformational process—to living beyond pieces and parts, towards our greater whole.
My BA is in English and Africana Studies, focusing on our patterns of storysharing in the post-antebellum through contemporary US—who and what get told, what and who get left out; how we allow power dynamics to make these decisions; and how exclusion and reduction of our collective story for parts masquerading the whole causes significant harm, damage, and separation to everyone:
Who do we understand ourselves to be;
According to (called and named by) whom;
How are we living out what we believe (the healthy and the unhealthy); and
What impacts does this have in how we help shape and co-create in the world?
The stories we tell are often vision-casting of who we desire and feel called to be/become (via positiva). The omissions or gaps frequently reveal the spaces where we are invited to further grow towards our being/becoming (via negativa).
The first, we have a tendency to pretend we have already fulfilled or achieved. The latter we often pretend we don’t see or notice, because to do so would eliminate our delusional belief in our accomplishment of the former—hence the burying and omissions. And in both of these dishonesties, we co-create, sustain, and perpetrate harm against ourselves and one another.
My M.Div. focus is in holy play and transformational change (visioning and co-creation, and transforming grief and fear from pilot mechanism into powerful energy to move forward). I am certified both as a group facilitator, and listening circle facilitator.
The questions I am often invited by the Holy Spirit to help us address are:
What stories do we share, and so what are we receiving about, ourselves? One another?
What are we neglecting (intentionally or unintentionally) in truth-telling about ourselves? One another?
How are our omissions preventing us genuinely and healthfully moving forward?
What do we need so that we can receive greater truth about who we are and where we are, and go forward more deeply and richly?
Undergraduate Thesis Selling Out to Buy In: A Black Feminist Literary Critique on Willful Self-Negation and Inherent Self-Destruction within the Capitalist White Patriarchy
Masters’ Thesis Reclaiming Eden | Pursuing Transformational Healing towards Our Whole & Holy Selves in Beloved Community
I am a ritualist. I am a healer (prophetic witness and verger). I am my Self a sojourner.
I am an Audre Lorde womanist. Sensuality is our Wholeness is our Greatest Pleasure and Power.
I am a PK of a PK of PKs. (Which matters more than I have realized over most of my life—a story I omitted until recently.)
I am a Reverend | Deacon in the United Methodist Church. As a “bridge builder” of the church, I help folks to understand what means and how to live our faith—not simply to have it.