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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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Quotations I love: A primary task of listening

Lynne Baab • Saturday May 22 2021

“One of the primary tasks of the listener is to stay out of the other’s way so the listener can discover how the speaker views his situation.” —Robert Bolton, “Listening Is More Than Hearing” [1]

Can you think of a conversation where you started talking about a topic, and after you talked about it for a while, your perspective changed? Certainly our perspective can change from hearing another person’s opinion, but sometimes, in one of those rare and beautiful conversations with a good listener, we find that our views on something change as we talk through it.

You’re probably familiar with the concept of...

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