A familiar saying goes, everyone wants a village. We ache for belonging, for warmth, for a people to hold us steady when the ground feels unsteady. As beings created in the image of a God who cannot exsist in isolation, we are, at our very foundations, people created for relationship. 

This  week, Pastor Brendan and I were in Holland, Michigan, gathered with a small community of friends for the Doxology Conference hosted by the Eugene Peterson Center for Pastoral Imagination.

Our guides were a strikingly varied group: novelist Marilynne Robinson, whose words make the soul ache for clarity; devotional songwriter Jon Guerra, whose music feels written for this very moment; Gisela Kreglinger, who grew up among the vineyards of Bavaria and writes with rare depth about the spirituality of wine; my bishop, Chris Green, whose teaching always leaves me seeing Scripture with new eyes; and Asher Imtiaz, a documentary photographer whose art is a prayer for attention.