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Holy Spirit disruptions: Pride and ego

Lynne Baab • Wednesday June 16 2021

Being a writer/teacher/preacher has created a form of pride or ego in me that the Holy Spirit has been disrupting pretty intensely during the pandemic. You might think the biggest form of pride or ego for writers/teachers/preachers would be the conviction that we are right. That has certainly been an issue for me for much of my life, something that my family members have mentioned dozens or even hundreds of times. It feels like I’ve learned a lot about that. Maybe I will have more to learn at another time, but that hasn’t been the pandemic pride/ego issue.

The form of pride...

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Holy Spirit disruptions: Embodiment

Lynne Baab • Wednesday June 9 2021

My mom and her mom were always very slender, and my mom at 96 still looks great in her clothes. My mom had seven aunts on her father’s side who were all plump or significantly overweight. Most of them were also mean. My mother grew up associating being overweight with being a less than admirable person.

When I hit puberty and began to get a more rounded build than my mom had ever had, she started telling me stories about my mean, overweight aunts. I became so certain, deep inside, that being slim was virtuous. As a teenager, I loved Seventeen magazine,...

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First post in a new series: Holy Spirit disruptions

Lynne Baab • Thursday June 3 2021

Ten days ago, on Pentecost Sunday, the worship leader at our church opened the service by saying she hoped we would experience Holy Spirit disruptions. In the sermon, the preacher described a disruption in his life, when he had already felt a call from God in one direction, then two years later sensed God leading him in a different direction, something he had never considered or wanted. He described the fruit of that disruption in his life. He talked about the work of the Holy Spirit that disrupt our sense of control.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, I interviewed dozens...

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Quotations I love: Knowing how to “tune in” and “tune out” of conversations

Lynne Baab • Wednesday May 26 2021

“There are many causes of ineffective listening and all of us are guilty of some of them at some time. In fact, it is almost impossible to maintain a high involvement in listening all the time. We need to ‘tune out’ to give our minds a chance to rest, but we also need to be able to ‘tune in’ when we want communication to succeed.” —Terry Mohan, Helen McGregor, Shirley Saunders, and Ray Archee, Communicating! Theory and Practice

Ten years ago this month Dave and I were getting organized for a six month sabbatical. I had already conducted interviews with church leaders in...

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