There is more hope in honest brokenness than in the pretense of false wholeness.
~Jamie Arpin Ricci~*
This website, Beyond These Shores, is a rebranding of the work Don and I have lived all our adult lives. It emerges from our fractured and wounded souls. Loss of job, loss of parents, loss of confidence, loss of relationships; all these shredded our hearts. Early on in this season of dismantling, doubt shrouded every piece we ever wrote. The violence of false accusation and shame stole a sense of our glory as humans created in the image of God.
Yet, in all that diminishment and distortion, despondence and depression, God’s “enhancing grace” never stopped seeking our weary souls. Serene Jones introduced us to the term, enhancing grace. She writes in Trauma and Grace, Theology in a Ruptured World, “it is a power that moves deep within our being, sharing our plight, conforming to our reality, and in that identification, opening up new avenues of experience and hope.” (P123.)
Enhancing grace pushes down the walls of our imagination limited by what we believe possible and opens us to more than we plan for or expect, and initiates us into a world of wonder. What you see here on these web pages is a product of God’s love for us that is greater than the trauma we experienced. Beyond These Shores testifies to the replenishing grace of God’s desire to liberate us from fear and defeat. The words and images reclaim who we are, what work God has called us to and how we can live generatively; all of this to be faithful to co-create with the Holy Three, the Kingdom of God in our unique way.
We hope to encourage, challenge and strengthen all who linger here long enough to sense our hearts and to glimpse how much God delights in you.
Thank you, Amie and J.P. of Forest Design.
Your creative and technical genius wooed the inarticulate desires of our hearts into the world of flesh and blood, color and design, words and images permeated with the poems hidden beneath the sand of our hesitation and brokenness.
*Vulnerable Faith