The Thread

Learning to trust the stories we'll untangle together

I once stood in front of a faith community and invited someone to untangle a ball of yarn. They grinned and started pulling the string. To be fair, it was a brand new spool of yarn so this task was comically easy.

But a deeper truth awaited us inside that easy to unspool yarn.

We talked about curiosity. Why it matters that we’re invited to explore our lives — to unspool, untangle, unravel the stories that live inside each of us.

Where will a thread lead?
What new realities and stories will come to light?
What is hiding inside that knot?
What do I do with my fear and desire to control?

There are millions of understandable reasons we don’t explore the painful or confusing parts of our individual and communal stories.

Photo by Philip Estrada on Unsplash

But life is teaching me the deepest beauty and healing lies inside the tangled mess of string. As is life shimmers inside our knots. Shining when we turn it to the light. Sparkling with something our soul longs to explore.

And some days?

Our curiosity outweighs the fear.
Our longing beats our apathy.
Our humanity takes the hand of our control.

We choose a frayed thread sticking out from the tangled mess.

We ask a question we haven’t asked before.
We feel a tiny slice of openness and curiosity.
We wonder what we don’t yet know.

Thread-pulling takes time. Intention. Patience. Creativity. Community. Trust.

That’s what we’ll do here. Together.

Photo by Kimson Doan on Unsplash

As I write and reflect on the threads in my life, I’ll invite you to pull a few threads in your life. Some threads will unravel easier than we think. Others will lead to things we never imagined. Others may challenge our patience and persistence. We’ll curse the knots and throw it across the room for a day. Or a year. Then one day, we’ll pick it up and try again.

Why do this work?

We get one chance to live this life. We’re not going to miss it. We want to love honestly. Deeply. Authentically.

We want to explore our full self. We want to live from a place inside us that feels real.

We want a sense of ease in our life. We want to know why we do what we do and how our tangled unexplored stories throw us off track more than we want to admit.

We want to feel fully alive.

Like any experiment, I’m wildly curious to see what we’ll uncover. What we’ll learn. How we’ll grow. Who will join us.

To be honest…

Hitting publish on this first post feels ridiculously vulnerable. Part of me wants to control the process. To tell you everything we’ll do together. To summarize everything that brought me here. To arrange my tangled mess of yarn so it I know what’s ahead. To give you clues so you’re not surprised by your story.

But we don’t get that, do we? I hate that about life sometimes.

There’s beauty in the unknown. Even if every part of our brain wants to know.

So old and new friends — let’s journey together. One string at a time.

Leave a comment and introduce yourself! We’re so grateful you’re here.

Welcome to The Thread.

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