The Christian tradition has a word for the slower, more demanding work of sitting with a question long enough for the noise to settle and something truer to become audible: discernment. Our strongest feelings in moments of pressure and pain carry the weight of our unprocessed history along with the current reality. The decisions made from the most acute point of pain aren't always the ones that, looked back on later, seem wisest.

Over time, communities shaped by fear tend to gather a long list of departures. Some are obvious. Many aren't. Often people simply seem to drift. A family disappears. A leader moves on. A voice goes quiet and eventually finds somewhere else to speak. What rarely gets asked is the challenging but important question: what were they carrying that we couldn't receive?

I’ve found that fear in leadership doesn't usually feel like fear. It often feels more like responsibility. Like needing to hold things together. Like being responsible to protect something that really matters. That's genuinely part of the story. But somewhere along the way, the care for something can morph into something else, it can become the need to control it. Control is a strong word. It might present like the need to manage everything well, to keep it all in good order. But when that becomes an undue weight of responsibility, even a holy commission, voices that might potentially help can start to feel like threats.

Every healthy community needs people who can see it from the inside and say, with care, what they see. Not to criticise or destabilise, but because a community that struggles to receive honest reflection on itself may gradually lose its capacity to grow, to correct its course, and become more fully what it's meant to be. The Hebrew prophets seemed to understand this role deeply. The prophet wasn't primarily a predictor of the future but a truth-teller in the present. Someone who could name the gap between what the community said it was and what it was actually living, then hold that up in a way that gave the community a genuine opportunity to respond.

You don't need a theology textbook to understand this next dynamic. You just need to have been to school. Most of us can remember, with uncomfortable clarity, the ‘in group’ and the one who somehow ended up outside. Whatever form their difference took, it became the thing the group organised itself around, not through any formal process, more like the way weather happens. And alongside whatever discomfort or compassion we may have felt for the outsider, we also welcomed the warmth, sense of cohesion, an almost physical relief that the group had found its edges, and we were ‘in’.

We are deeply and fundamentally wired for love and belonging. This is not a sign of weakness or immaturity. Right at the centre of what it means to be human is the need to be genuinely loved, to belong somewhere, to be received rather than merely tolerated, and know that what we bring matters. These genuine needs are not peripheral to how we function - they-re closer to the ground we stand on.

I'll be honest. I nearly didn't share the articles coming up soon. Partly because writing it means putting my head above the parapet, and awkwardness can follow :-) But also because my own story is tangled up in all of this in ways that are not entirely flattering to me. But something kept niggling at me. That persistent, won't-quite-go-away kind of prompting that I have learned, over the years, to take seriously - even when I'd rather not. So here we are.

In everyday life, discernment involves learning to listen well: to God, to our own inner movements, and to the realities of our circumstances (James 1:5).

Engaging with the arts can support the kind of attentiveness needed in listening to and responding to God.

God equips people with gifts, but gifts alone do not make a life or a ministry sustainable. Callings develop in relationship—with God, with self, and with the communities we serve (Ephesians 4:11-13).

Art-making allows people to externalise inner experience, to see, shape, and relate to what they are carrying.

Personhood (our capacity for self-awareness, humility, emotional maturity, and relational integrity) is foundational. Without it, gifts and callings can become distorted: prideful, misused, or misdirected. Peter’s letters, for example, repeatedly link leadership and service with character and faithfulness (1 Peter 5:2-3).

The prophetic is often associated with strong words or dramatic moments, but at its core it is a practice of attention (Amos 3:7).

Healthy leadership grows from an integrated inner life, where emotions, beliefs, calling, and limits are acknowledged rather than denied (Proverbs 4:23).

In the Gospels, Jesus frequently engages people in conversation before healing occurs. He asks questions. He notices faith, fear, resistance, and hope. Healing happens within relationship, not apart from it (Luke 8:43-48).

God Is Present: Learning to Live from Availability, Not Absence

One of the quiet struggles many Christians carry is the sense that God is distant, available at certain moments, but largely absent from the texture of everyday life. We pray, we believe, and yet we often live as if God must be summoned or persuaded to show up.

The Christian story tells a different truth. From the opening lines of Scripture, God is portrayed as present, engaged, and relational, walking in the garden, speaking, responding, and making space for relationship (Genesis 3:8). In Jesus, this presence becomes embodied and local. God does not remain abstract or removed, but steps into ordinary life, sharing meals, emotions, conflict, and joy (Matthew 1:23, John 1:14).

God’s presence is not fragile. It does not depend on our intensity, our words, or our spiritual competence. What often does need attention is our capacity to notice (Psalm 46:10).

Faith, in this sense, is less about generating belief and more about learning attentiveness. Jesus regularly speaks about those who have eyes but do not see, ears but do not hear, not as a rebuke, but as an invitation (Matthew 13:13-15). God is already near; the work is learning how to be present ourselves.

This kind of attentiveness takes time. It grows through patience, practice, and willingness to slow down. It is shaped in prayer, but also in the ordinary, in work, relationships, creativity, grief, laughter, and rest (Luke 10:38-42). God is not confined to sacred spaces. The earth itself is described as full of God’s glory, if we are willing to notice (Psalm 19:1).

Living from God’s availability rather than God’s absence changes the tone of faith. It softens anxiety, reduces striving, and makes room for trust. Over time, it helps us live less driven lives grounded in relationship rather than performance (John 15:4-5).

Attention develops with training over time.

God desires our freedom, health and wellbeing.

Engaging in the arts helps humans flourish.