faith-driven lifestyle
faith-driven lifestyle
He knows what the dream means. The answer is simple — almost insultingly simple. And that is exactly the problem. Simple answers do not earn fine linen. A retelling of Joseph before Pharaoh, and the moment he chooses to speak from the stripped place rather than perform from the robes.
Nobody tells you that saying no doesn't make the wanting stop. Joseph is in prison — stripped again, carrying grain in the dark — and his body still remembers the heat of her skin. This is not a story about a man who felt nothing. It's a story about a man who felt everything and still turned toward the door. Because his no was never an absence. It was always a yes, spoken too early to be understood.
They took his coat. Then his position. Then his freedom. Then even the memory of his gift — forgotten by the one man he'd helped. What Joseph carries in prison has no outside. No visible sign. No one to confirm it. Only a knowing he believes came from God.
Joseph said what he dreamed. The room changed. He is still not sure what he did wrong. Seven scenes from the aftermath — his father, his brothers, the woman who kept going back to the road. Open the one that calls you first.
Joseph is in a cell he did not deserve, walking back from two men whose dreams he has just read with unsettling accuracy. He can interpret the dreams of strangers. His own life he cannot read at all. This is where we begin.
Someone sticks a tag to your forehead, and you take it down, look at it and go very still. Not the label you would have written for yourself. Joseph carried one too — here comes the dreamer — from the fields of Canaan all the way into an Egyptian prison. This is the story of a gift that gets you into trouble. And of a God stubborn enough to follow it all the way down.
Every one of us carries a gift that has gotten us into trouble. This Easter, journey with Joseph from confusion to recognition — seven weeks, seven senses, from the cistern to Pentecost. Not a promise you won't fall again. A practice of knowing your own voice from its echoes.
We have stopped noticing our hands entirely — until something goes wrong with them. But hands carry more of a human life than almost anything else: the work, the encounters, the belonging, the prayer. This week's practice begins with simply looking at what is already there.
In my years of massage work, I learned early what shoulders don't lie about. They are the accumulation point — the place where the day settles in. Not the crises. The micro-weights. Each one, taken separately, seems like almost nothing. Together, they can make it hard to breathe. This week we listen to what they've been holding.
What is the difference between a busy car park and your heart? The greatest lie of the spiritual life is the belief in the empty slot – that we can prepare ourselves perfectly before letting God in. This week's reflection invites you into something more honest, and more restful: learning to waste time with God.
There is a moment before the day remembers to land on you. Before the list, before the phone, before the good version of you shows up for work. This week lives there. Two lines from Psalm 139. Seven practices. One honest look at what the promise sounds like when your own voice says it — and what your actual life looks like when you hold it up to the light.
Complete free Sunday toolkit for Divine Mercy Sunday, Second Sunday of Easter, Year A (April 12, 2026). This week opens the Born to Recognise series – a seven-week Easter journey through the blessing of the senses toward Pentecost. Week 1 is the ear: the Shema, Thomas’s refusal of secondhand faith, the enephysesen as second creation, and the community breathed into by the risen Christ as the body through which hearing becomes possible. Includes biblical background, three-part embodied liturgy experience, Prayer of the Faithful centred on listening, and a personal reflection from the Scattered to Whole pillar.
Biblical background for Divine Mercy Sunday Year A (April 12, 2026). Acts 2 gives us the community that has already been breathed into – their response is exultant, embodied, common. 1 Peter addresses those who have not seen, and tells them their joy exceeds description. And John gives us Thomas: the body-knower who refuses secondhand faith, and the Christ who comes back through locked doors to meet him exactly where his body is. Research and exegesis for liturgy teams, homilists, and Bible study groups.
This week’s Sunday Experience is distributed across three moments of the Mass: a thirty-second prayer before the Liturgy of the Word inviting the assembly to close their missalettes and receive the Word through the ear alone; a two-to-three minute somatic exercise after communion, placing the community in the upper room in the moment before Jesus breathes, attending to the quality of their own auditory anticipation; and at the Final Blessing, the ancient formula from the Rite of Christian Initiation – “Receive the sign of the cross on your ears, that you may hear the voice of the Lord” – spoken as the assembly traces the cross on their own ears. Full script with pacing notes for presiders and ministers.
A complete Prayer of the Faithful for Divine Mercy Sunday (Second Sunday of Easter, Year A, April 12, 2026), with celebrant introduction and conclusion. This week’s intercessions are centred on the sense of hearing: praying for the Church’s attentiveness, for leaders who must learn to listen, for all whose vocation is to receive another person’s reality, for confessors emerging from the Easter season, for those who confessed at Easter, for families, and for each person making room for the breath of God. Includes practical notes for readers and presiders.
Easter Sunday has passed. The tomb is empty. And now the real journey begins — fifty days the Church has always known it takes to grow into resurrection. Born to Recognise is a seven-week Easter season journey through the Sunday readings, following the ancient blessing of the senses from Thomas and the locked room all the way to the fire of Pentecost. For liturgy teams, for parish communities, and for anyone whose body knew something their head hadn't yet caught up with.
