40 Days with Still: Day 40, April 2

Winner lists three metaphors for the Christian life, metaphors drawn from the great saints of the Christian tradition--Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross, and Gregory of Nyssa. What metaphors would you offer for the life of your spiritual journey?

40 Days with Still: Day 39, April 1

The Arkansas woman Winner describes is someone who, at Winner's perception, has come to "a place of wisdom, of beatitude...a place of unself-consciousness," a place where "there is a lot of give in the fabric" (p. 195). Who in your life has arrived at that place of beatitude and spiritual unself-consciousness?

40 Days with Still: Day 38, March 31

Ethicist Samuel Wells has said, " A saint is just a small character in a story that's always fundamentally  about God" (p. 194). How do you notice God as the fundamental character in your story? Does this change how you live, or want to live, out the story already in motion?

40 Days with Still: Day 37, March 30

The wall that Winner had earlier stared at, been stuck next to, and fought with for so long, she now sees as "opalescent, incandescent, like the inside of a shell, like glazed porcelain" (p. 192). How does this speak to the nature of spiritual middles? Does this image of the opalescent and incandescent wall encourage you? Frustrate you? Can you think of a time in your life when a situation looked one way when you were in the middle of it and then different after some time had passed?

40 Days with Still: Day 36, March 30

Winner offers the "middle tint" as another metaphor for faithfulness, that of everyday, ordinary tasks: churchgoing, prayer, and such--action that will never get noticed and don't sing of the extraordinary but that make up the majority of your spiritual life. Is it helpful to picture spiritual acts that otherwise feel mundane in this way? What tasks would you put in the "middle tint" category, and how can you view them in a new light?

40 Days with Still: Day 35, March 28

"I want to feed people as Ellie feeds people, as I have been fed" (p. 188). For Winner, a part of inching toward wholeness is learning to leave yourself and serve other people. She begins to serve other people by baking. How can you feed the physically, emotionally, and spiritually hungry people around you? What hesitations do you have about feeding others? How does your experience of being fed allow you to turn around and feed others?

40 Days with Still: Day 34 (a day late), March 28

Winner is in a church one morning when a less-than-desirable woman sits next to her in the pew. At one point, the woman starts tapping her finger on her knee and, instinctually, Winner reaches out and holds the woman's hand to stop it. The woman isn't bothered, and in the end, the two women hold hands throughout the service. Why do you think this happened? Do you think Winner needed to connect with the woman, or sensed the woman's need to connect with her? What, in the end, did Winner discover about herself afterward?

Sacrament is defined as "an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace." Many Protestant churches would say that the only sacraments are baptism and Eucharist--but, in a sense, this hand-holding became sacramental for Winner. Have you had an experience of something other than an official sacrament that seemed sacramental?