So much of what shapes our perceived distress or joy in life is related to how we transition from one state of mind to another. Our willingness to place ourselves in the path of oncoming beauty does many things, not least slowing our pace in life, such that we become much more aware of when and how we are making a transition from one to another state of mind.

This slowing of our pace makes it possible for us to be aware of so much more that is going on in that very transition—and respond to it in the ways we want to, even if those states are distressing.

Listen in as Pepper and Curt explore how our willingness to practice encountering beauty can help us regulate our affect, and so strengthen our transitions from one state of mind to another—and thereby see the potential for the creation of beauty in situations that would otherwise leave us unable to do so.

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Episode Links and References

• Artistic Offering discussed today: Meditation Breathing Exercise

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Special Thanks for our Season Sponsor - Compassion International

The world is currently facing a devastating global food crisis caused from numerous variables: the war in Ukraine, fertilizer shortages, effects of COVID-19, and extreme weather, just to name a few. Couple any of these with the fact that food prices are climbing, and hunger and malnutrition in vulnerable children intensify.

During this Being Known Podcast season, we invite you to join us in sponsoring a child with Compassion International. Just $43 a month provides a sponsored child with all their basic needs and the hope for a brighter future.

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During Curt and Pepper’s recent trip to El Salvador, they each found themselves surprised by beauty in various ways. Surprise can lead to any number of emotional reactions, depending on what, exactly, it is that surprises us. When it is beauty that is doing the surprising, we are opened to joy, goodness and even greater beauty than we would expect out of life.

Join Pepper and Curt as they explore surprising stories of beauty, and along the way introduce you to Shaun Groves, a pastor and Compassion International ambassador, whose compelling story of his own surprise with beauty has had him involved with the ministry since 2005.  

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Episode Links and References

• Artistic Offering discussed today: Pepper Sweeney's Driftwood Beach photos

. . . . .

Special Thanks for our Season Sponsor - Compassion International

The world is currently facing a devastating global food crisis caused from numerous variables: the war in Ukraine, fertilizer shortages, effects of COVID-19, and extreme weather, just to name a few. Couple any of these with the fact that food prices are climbing, and hunger and malnutrition in vulnerable children intensify.

During this Being Known Podcast season, we invite you to join us in sponsoring a child with Compassion International. Just $43 a month provides a sponsored child with all their basic needs and the hope for a brighter future.

 . . . . .

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Like no other creatures, humans are storytellers. Moreover, our stories all have a beginning, a middle and an end. And the way we tell stories has to do with the end in mind.

So, think of it: the stories we tell about our lives—not least the parts that we hate the most—will be governed by where the story is ultimately going. Despite the carnage that we see all around us, the God of the bible is intent upon telling a story of beauty. He does not intend to have us waiting until the very end for that beauty to find us. He intends for us to experience it now, if only in the hints of what are the harbingers of the deep weight of beauty that is coming.

Join Curt and Pepper as we discover how beauty is shaping who we are becoming as storytellers, as well as the stories we tell.

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Episode Links and References

• Artistic Offering discussed today: Dave Wilcox: "How Did You Find Me Here?"

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Special Thanks for our Season Sponsor - Compassion International

The world is currently facing a devastating global food crisis caused from numerous variables: the war in Ukraine, fertilizer shortages, effects of COVID-19, and extreme weather, just to name a few. Couple any of these with the fact that food prices are climbing, and hunger and malnutrition in vulnerable children intensify.

During this Being Known Podcast season, we invite you to join us in sponsoring a child with Compassion International. Just $43 a month provides a sponsored child with all their basic needs and the hope for a brighter future.

 . . . . .

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Pepper and Curt had the privilege of spending five days in El Salvador as part of a Compassion International team of visitors. Join us as we share about the extraordinarily durable beauty that is emerging in some of the hardest stories we could imagine—and how all of this is pointing to the emerging kingdom of God.

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Episode Links and References

• Artistic Offering discussed today: Gustav Holst; "Jupiter, The Bringer of Jollity"

. . . . .

Special Thanks for our Season Sponsor - Compassion International

The world is currently facing a devastating global food crisis caused from numerous variables: the war in Ukraine, fertilizer shortages, effects of COVID-19, and extreme weather, just to name a few. Couple any of these with the fact that food prices are climbing, and hunger and malnutrition in vulnerable children intensify.

During this Being Known Podcast season, we invite you to join us in sponsoring a child with Compassion International. Just $43 a month provides a sponsored child with all their basic needs and the hope for a brighter future.

 . . . . .

Stay connected:

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It is easy to be amazed, even astonished in the presence of beauty. But it is just as easy to forget it, given how easily distracted we are by so many things. If it is true that what we pay attention to, we remember; and what we remember becomes our anticipated future, then we don’t just recall beauty for the sake of itself, we do so in order to shape the futures of our lives that we anticipate. And this is as much true for the parts of our stories that are traumatized as those for which we have fond memories.

Listen in as Pepper and Curt wade into how committing beauty to memory doesn’t just remind us of a past we love; it transforms our past traumas into futures we would otherwise find hard to imagine.

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Episode Links and References

• Artistic Offering discussed today: Shawshank Redemption movie

. . . . .

Special Thanks for our Season Sponsor - Compassion International

The world is currently facing a devastating global food crisis caused from numerous variables: the war in Ukraine, fertilizer shortages, effects of COVID-19, and extreme weather, just to name a few. Couple any of these with the fact that food prices are climbing, and hunger and malnutrition in vulnerable children intensify.

During this Being Known Podcast season, we invite you to join us in sponsoring a child with Compassion International. Just $43 a month provides a sponsored child with all their basic needs and the hope for a brighter future.

 . . . . .

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Once we sense beauty, we begin to tell a story about it. We make sense of it. We pay attention to it. We sometimes analyze it. But beauty often reveals things about us. In sensing things, we become aware of feelings and memories that before we were unaware of. In this way, we are enabled to tell our stories more truly. And all of this employs the horizontal domain of integration—the relationship between the right and left hemispheres of the brain.

Listen in as Curt and Pepper explore how the differences between our right and our left enable beauty to assist us in making better sense of our lives.

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Episode Links and References

• Artistic Offering discussed today: Take Five by Dave Brubeck

. . . . .

Special Thanks for our Season Sponsor - Compassion International

The world is currently facing a devastating global food crisis caused from numerous variables: the war in Ukraine, fertilizer shortages, effects of COVID-19, and extreme weather, just to name a few. Couple any of these with the fact that food prices are climbing, and hunger and malnutrition in vulnerable children intensify.

During this Being Known Podcast season, we invite you to join us in sponsoring a child with Compassion International. Just $43 a month provides a sponsored child with all their basic needs and the hope for a brighter future.

 . . . . .

Stay connected:

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First, we sense. And then we make sense of what we sense. Beauty is not first something we think about. It is first something we behold with our senses. And our senses necessarily involve our bodies. For indeed, even when we imagine beauty in our mind, we use our brains to do so. This follows the sequence of creation in Genesis 2 when God first formed a body, and then breathed life into it.

Join Pepper and Curt as they explore the role of the body in encountering beauty, and how paying attention to the vertical domain of integration leads to greater awareness of beauty in our world, and in ourselves.

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Episode Links and References

• Artistic Offering discussed today: architecture by Frank Lloyd Wright

. . . . .

Special Thanks for our Season Sponsor - Compassion International

The world is currently facing a devastating global food crisis caused from numerous variables: the war in Ukraine, fertilizer shortages, effects of COVID-19, and extreme weather, just to name a few. Couple any of these with the fact that food prices are climbing, and hunger and malnutrition in vulnerable children intensify.

During this Being Known Podcast season, we invite you to join us in sponsoring a child with Compassion International. Just $43 a month provides a sponsored child with all their basic needs and the hope for a brighter future.

 . . . . .

Stay connected:

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In the path of oncoming beauty. Given that we are wired to pay attention to danger for the sake of protection, purposefully attuning to beauty can at times feel risky. But when we make it our intended purpose to create space for beauty, we find ourselves seeing any number of things that we didn’t before. Some of those things include our wounds that we have covered for longer than we know. But that only gives us the chance to imagine the emergence of beauty from parts of our lives that heretofore we could only imagine carnage.

Listen in as Curt and Pepper explore what it means to awaken, become alert and attuned to beauty, and how that can chart a course for a new direction of renewal in our lives.

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Episode Links and References

• Artistic Offering discussed today: Ansel Adams art

. . . . .

Special Thanks for our Season Sponsor - Compassion International

The world is currently facing a devastating global food crisis caused from numerous variables: the war in Ukraine, fertilizer shortages, effects of COVID-19, and extreme weather, just to name a few. Couple any of these with the fact that food prices are climbing, and hunger and malnutrition in vulnerable children intensify.

During this Being Known Podcast season, we invite you to join us in sponsoring a child with Compassion International. Just $43 a month provides a sponsored child with all their basic needs and the hope for a brighter future.

 . . . . .

Stay connected:

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In the path of oncoming beauty. Sure, we have talked about this notion over many seasons of The Being Known Podcast. But of what practical value is it?

• How does it speak to our longings, our grief or the renewal of our relationships, communities and institutions?

Join Pepper and Curt as they answer with a resounding, “No!” Instead, journey with them into the deeper recesses of what it means, exactly, to place yourself in the path of oncoming beauty, and discover how God’s resounding “Yes!” to beauty begins where we can’t see it, and ends with the new creation that is surely coming. 

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Episode Links and References

• Roger Scruton book: Beauty

. . . . .

Special Thanks for our Season Sponsor - Compassion International

The world is currently facing a devastating global food crisis caused from numerous variables: the war in Ukraine, fertilizer shortages, effects of COVID-19, and extreme weather, just to name a few. Couple any of these with the fact that food prices are climbing, and hunger and malnutrition in vulnerable children intensify.

During this Being Known Podcast season, we invite you to join us in sponsoring a child with Compassion International. Just $43 a month provides a sponsored child with all their basic needs and the hope for a brighter future.

 . . . . .

Stay connected:

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Thank you for joining us this season to learn about confessional communities. In this final season episode, Curt, Pepper and Amy answer listener questions to draw you closer to finding and creating your own community.

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Episode Links and References

• The Center for Being Known

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Special Thanks for our Season Sponsor - Compassion International

The world is currently facing a devastating global food crisis caused from numerous variables: the war in Ukraine, fertilizer shortages, effects of COVID-19, and extreme weather, just to name a few. Couple any of these with the fact that food prices are climbing, and hunger and malnutrition in vulnerable children intensify.

During this season of Being Known Podcast you can support Compassion International with a one time gift of $50 and you'll feed a family of five for a month. We are all part of a global community and hope you will consider giving.

 . . . . .

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