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let’s retreat together for Epiphany

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Happy New Year!

We’re on the cusp of change, one of my favorite places to be.

While turning the calendar to 2021 won’t miraculously bring peace or healing, I do love fresh starts and new beginnings. So I pray this new year will bring true goodness and lasting joy in the days and weeks to come.

Because I’m a lover of New Year’s, I always want to spend this time in prayer and reflection. Like many of you, I’m craving connection and conversation in the midst of life at home. So as I prepared for what January might bring, I dreamt up the idea of a virtual retreat.

Epiphany: A New Year’s Retreat will come to you in the comfort of your own home from January 7-10, 2021. Find out more here.

Together we’ll explore the beginning of the Gospel of Matthew: surprising dreams, unexpected visitors, turbulent times, and life-changing callings. These Scripture stories will come alive in new ways as we bring them to prayer, reflecting on our own lives, questions, and challenges. 

The retreat is virtual, designed to fit into your schedule. We’ll meet on Zoom once each day (and sessions will be recorded for later viewing if you can’t join live). The 40-page Epiphany e-book will guide your prayer and reflection throughout the rest of the week.

I’ve been hard at work on the retreat as 2020 draws to a close, and I’m amazed at the epiphanies waiting to be discovered in these Scripture. You might think you know these familiar stories, but trust me: surprising truth is waiting for you.

Epiphany will help you enter into the new year in deeper prayer. Whether you’re discerning changes within your callings or need encouragement to keep going in the daily work of your vocation, this retreat is for you.

A virtual retreat is great for people who can’t get away to a traditional retreat (which is many of us right now!): working parents, caregivers, busy professionals, college students, retirees, or anyone who simply craves peace and quiet.

You can give the retreat as a gift to a loved one. Scholarships/sliding scale fees are also available for those who need it.

Together let’s embrace the New Year as a chance to enter into discernment about what God is asking of each of us in this time.

I hope you’ll join me next week!

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About Laura

I’m Laura Kelly Fanucci. Mother, writer, wonderer. This space is where I explore mothering through writing. It’s where I celebrate how God shows up in the chaos of raising children. It’s where I love to build community with readers like you. Read More…

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thismessygrace

Mother, writer, wonderer.
Seeker of God in chaos & life with kids.
Author of Everyday Sacrament & Grieving Together.
Glimpses of grace & gratitude.

thismessygrace
The baby is learning how to move in a new way. Wai The baby is learning how to move in a new way. Wait—don’t scroll past. He has truth to teach at the end of his small hands.

Watch him rock back and forth, cusp of crawling, practicing and testing, a seeker and a skeptic—wondering is this safe? Am I strong enough?

If he does not stretch to move and learn and change, he will stay safer. I have watched 5 babies now, and I know what comes next: bumps, bruises, wails, the first piercing cut into smooth skin.

But nature drives him forward. He must both trust his instinct (the desire to move, reach, explore) and overcome it (the fear of unknown, the unpredictable fall). Watch him lean and learn, stretching further each day.

We are cusping on change, too. You can feel the tense stretch, the uncertain lean, the frantic push back to what was safer (for a few, far from all). We are testing and probing, flailing and falling, pushing back up and trying to figure out: how did we get here? Where do we go next?

At least once a day, don’t you want to sit back and holler at the top of your lungs, frustrated and fearful, yet driven to keep going?

And we have to go, have to grow and move and change. It is the only way forward, with lunging arms and knobby knees and bruised foreheads from where we’ll meet sharp edges. This is the sweaty work of change: uncertain, costly, but demanded. Deep-down right, but hard and humbling all the way.

Watch him as he goes. It will take a long time—a lifetime of trying and falling. But he is determined. He is pushing me, too.
True confession: I never noticed Epiphany. We thr True confession: I never noticed Epiphany.

We three kings, endless rounds at church. Gold, frankincense, and myrrh; got it. Magi made it to the manger; let’s clean up now.

I mistook it for a child’s story, a charming end to Christmas. I missed all the angles of light it waited to shine.

Scripture offers a thousand doors by which to enter any story. If you think you’ve got it All Figured Out, turn around and try another. The Word holds infinite mysteries we have not yet uncovered.

You might discover truth you never expected—an epiphany waiting for you.

(And if you want to dig deeper, I’d love for you to join us on retreat this week!)
Spent the second day of the year staring at these Spent the second day of the year staring at these two hard, glorious truths. Winter makes the most beauty from the coldest nights, and what looks like death is often the beginning.

I stared up into frozen trees for five full minutes, looking like a fool, and I stared into tiny roots of the dying seed for even longer.

Here was God whispering the same truth, with wind blown ice crystals and wheat stalk seeds. You can only glimpse a sliver of the creation you are becoming. Just wait till the wild full bloom is born.

#newyearprayer #catechesisofthegoodshepherd
A viral poem. A premature baby. Birth and death, m A viral poem. A premature baby. Birth and death, masks and murder, a jarring jumble—like nearly every day in 2020.

But still the joy of new life at the center, even with the hard world edging all around.

I expected none of it, all the news that turned the year upside down.

But neither did I expect the truth and hope I found from so many here.

I tagged a few of the friends and voices I have been grateful to listen and learn from this year, changing from what they are teaching me.

Let their words & work & witness encourage you.

Drop your favorite accounts in the comments below, so we can follow them, too?

Here’s to hope, brimming on the horizon. The new year won’t change everything, but it will change us—and we can change each other.
Reminding myself today, to bear light & hope into Reminding myself today, to bear light & hope into a weary world. 🕯
It took all of Advent for me to notice us behind t It took all of Advent for me to notice us behind them.

Beholding in our own exhausted joy.

We never could have prepared for the suffering surrounding that birth. We had no idea how much harder everything was about to turn, on the cusp of the world about to change.

It took all year for me to see that they were showing us that way, too.

Through the impossible.
Through the dark.
Trusting together.
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