HELP!
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How’s your to-do list? If you are like most people, it is full of commitments, requirements, obligations, desires, and demands of all sorts. It comes with the territory of, well, caring about stuff. Including your own well-being! Have you tried asking for help? Have you noticed that not all help is actually all that…helpful? We’re taking three weeks to look at the surprising power - and the challenges - of help. Both asking for and offering it. Good basic healthy reminders for all of us.
January 28: Help! What if asking for help is the most honest and important thing you do every day? Right next to offering it? Jesus said “Ask and it will be given...” If it was that easy, he wouldn’t have gone on about it and we wouldn’t have to talk about it. Join us for three weeks to look at what makes reaching out for help so hard and so healthy. LIVESTREAM | PODCAST | SUNDAY PAPER | GROUP GUIDE
February 4: Help Isn’t Fair. The kind of help that’s really helpful seems to come with one big difficulty. It’s not fair! Let’s take a good look at how our tendencies to compare and keep score get in the way of giving and receiving the help that is so needed. And what we can try instead! PODCAST | SUNDAY PAPER | GROUP GUIDE
February 11: Help Never Runs Out. Like our breath, help becomes scarce when we stop letting it flow freely in and out. Wouldn’t it be great if the healthy giving and receiving of help became as instinctive as breathing? Unconditional love in action takes practice. A wonderful way to understand Fabric is as a community where we get to do just that! LIVESTREAM | PODCAST | SUNDAY PAPER | GROUP GUIDE
Photos and reflections by Jeanette Mayo
The turn of the calendar tempts us with promises of newness—fresh starts, better habits, upgraded versions of ourselves. But what if, instead of charging ahead with self-improvement schemes, we took a cue from winter’s stillness? What if we let go of the relentless hustle and embraced the radical idea that we are already enough?
Fabric’s January series, “Give Up,” has invited us into this counterintuitive wisdom—the grace of resting, receiving, and recognizing our inherent worth. Nature doesn’t demand that a hibernating bear emerge as a “better” bear. Spring’s renewal is not about striving but about unfolding what has been there all along.
In Wintering, Katherine May reminds us that transformation often happens in the quiet, unseen spaces. And in Belonging, Toko-pa Turner challenges us to strengthen our “receiving muscle,” to accept the support woven into our interconnected lives. “You are the receiver of too many generosities to count,” she writes. “Count them anyway.”
So, what if we stopped trying to earn our existence? What if we acknowledged the trees, the friendships, the small kindnesses that hold us? What if, instead of striving, we surrendered to belonging?
You are the gift. That’s enough. May it be so.
-Ian