Surrender is not a passive activity.  When you surrender to the intelligence of What Is, your decisions and actions will echo that intelligence.  That is where real magic begins.

Life is change.  In surrendering to life, and allowing yourself to be changed, you open yourself to be fully alive in your skin.  Often, the greater our brokenness, the greater the opportunity for transformation. 

The alternative is to pay the price of resistance.  If you know that you are being called to serve in a certain way, or to make an important shift in a relationship or to make a change in your work scenario, but you refuse to follow that inner guidance, you may be in a state of resistance.  In that state, the river cannot flow, and you may feel like you are in a dry desert with no water in sight!

My talks are informed by my own experience of a time in my mid-twenties when I traversed this territory of resistance and surrender with particular intensity.  Struggling with depression, I dropped out of my graduate studies, separated from my husband, and left New York City for rural Pennsylvania.  This journey, the subject of my book, Crazy Quilt:  Pieces of a Mennonite Life, brought many tears and also rapid personal growth.  It informed me in such a profound way, that I can only bow to the forces at work there.

I believe that personal transformation is about being completely honest with yourself and open to the messages -– no matter how painfully delivered — that lay hidden in every moment of our lives.  Life is fairly simple.  It is we humans that make it complicated!

My invitation to everyone I come in contact with is to trust what life brings your way.  Let the river of your life flow. Dance with it, let it shape you and change you.  Let it make a living canyon in your heart, vast and deep and full of the stuff dreams are made of!