AUTHENTICITY

Authenticity is a gateway to transformation. When we are able to more fully tell the truth about our lives to God and others, we are increasingly open to change and being changed. All of us have a public, private, and secret self that we use to try and manage how others think of us through our different masks. Through authenticity we seek to grow ourselves into one coherent whole by increasing our capacity to bring all we know of ourselves before God and others.

CURIOSITY

Creativity requires curiosity. Curiosity is at the root of imagination, creativity, innovation, and discovery. Curiosity is engaging God, others, and ourselves with inquiry and wonder for the purpose of discovery. Cultivating curiosity helps us avoid more harmful responses of shame, defensiveness, judgement, and cutoff. We engage in curiosity by learning to ask good questions, listening deeply, holding ideas in the space, engaging in experimentation, and dreaming imaginatively.

INTEGRITY

Our words create worlds. We join our word with God's word in the work of restoring all things to their intended wholeness. We have integrity with our word when we do what we say, when we said we would do it, in the way it was meant to be done. When there are gaps in our integrity and we do not keep our word, we learn to honor our word through acknowledgement, asking about the impact, sincerely apologizing, and giving our word again or in a new way. The goal is not perfection, but a big life where we give our word to where God calls us and we grow through honoring it.

COURAGE

Courage is doing it scared. Courage is getting or staying in action as wholehearted children of God, regardless of fear, anxiety, shame, and real or imagined consequences. We grow our courage by being courageous, by doing hard things to the best of our ability without shame or defensiveness. We also grow our courage by increasing our capacity to remain both defined within ourselves and connected with God and others, especially in times of high anxiety.

LOVE

Love is a disposition, a way of being we can nurture within ourselves through a reflective life, in a way that is not dependent on outside people or circumstances. Love is acting for the good of others and seeking the mutual flourishing of the world. Love is not fusion, where we are tangled up in the emotions and expectations of others and give ourselves away in order to maintain relationships. Love is the ability to stay connected to another and yet fully remain defined within ourselves.