Welcome to Soulful Joy Work
We’re spending nine weeks together reading my book with an exclusive workbook full of fabulous prompts to embrace fierce love!
Each week, you’ll receive a personal email from me with our workbook prompt and a link to an even more in-depth offering right here! Because we are a fierce posse, you’ll have an opportunity to share with each other on my Instagram and Facebook every Wednesday with a midweek check-in prompt. On Fridays, I’ll share your stories and reflections on how we’re growing together on my socials.
Here are action steps you can take to join us:
- Get a copy of Fierce Love at your local bookstore or here.
- Find a journal that really speaks to you.
- Invite a friend to journey with you.
- Write goals for yourself.
- DIVE IN!
Welcome to Fierce Love.
xoxo
– Jacqui
Week 1 – Our Stories Liberate
We do not have time to waste. Our world is shattered and we are hurting. This journey we’re sojourning will transform our lives. The only thing I ask of us is to stay honest and open to Fierce Love. This work won’t be easy and, at times, it may be uncomfortable. Lean in. Stay open. Together we can heal the world, our souls and one another.
Our Journey Starts Here
Week 2 – Tell the Truth
“Be truthful,” was my mother’s most important commandment. She would say if you lied once, you’d have to keep lying and you might forget what the truth sounds like.
Do we know what the truth sounds like for such a time as this?
Let’s find out, together!
Tell the Truth
Week 3: Downsizing Our Burdens
It’s hard work being human, especially in these hot mess times. It’s hard to be a pastor, a teacher, an activist, a therapist, a grocery store clerk, a librarian – you name it – it’s just hard!!
I’m wondering if we collectively know just how much these last few years have added tiny bricks to our body, mind and spirit. These burdens may start small and snowball into large mountains we are scared to climb. Either way, they weigh us down from accessing the Fierce Love that lives inside of us.
Downsizing Our Burdens
Week 4: Making Fierce Love Real
For the last three weeks we’ve been interrogating so that we can start imagining what Fierce Love in action looks like. As I preached Sunday at Middle Church, peace starts with us. And peace comes from within.
You are here on this journey because you desire to see love cross borders and boundaries. Are you ready to to make Fierce Love real?
Make Fierce Love Real
Week 5: Confronting with Love
Inside our families and circles of friends there can be intense pressure to keep our mouths shut and just go along to keep the “peace.”
But after a while, as we’ve learned on our journey, we store up a trunk load of micro-aggressions, hurt, and shame.
Fierce love requires loving confrontation. Change becomes possible when we confront our issues. This action is what real love looks like.
Confronting with Love
Week 6: Thinking Inclusively
This Sunday Middle Church will celebrate the birth of Jesus, a tender babe born in a dirty manager. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it means to love another person like God adores this babe in a manager? And what that love means for us when we look toward justice.
Victor Hugo writes, “to love another person is to see the face of God.”
Fierce Love desires for us to see the face of God in those who sleep on the street corner, wait for justice in an unjust prison system, seek asylum from violence, and those who are uniquely different from us.
Thinking Inclusively
Week 7: Live Justly
Today (Tuesday, Dec. 27th) is the second day of Kwanzaa which focuses on Kujichaguli (meaning self-determination in Swahili). This principle of Kwanzaa focuses on an inner commitment to practice and develop ourselves instead of letting the world do that for us. And this principle leads us into Week 7 of our journey as we navigate the commitment of living justly.
You’ve probably heard me say before, “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for!”
Live Justly
Week 8: Finding Joy Daily
The world can be a hard place – especially right now. Everyday there’s a new headline of a mass shooting, our human rights being threatened and grief. Joy can feel fleeting. Now more than ever it’s so important we identify and uplift things that give us joy. Things that will sustain us when the world appears grim.
When we can find spaces to hold grateful heart, we can access our joy.
Thinking Inclusively
Week 9: Have Faith in Love
Believing is seeing our connection to one another. I want to convert you, to convince you – I want you to believe with me in our shared capacity to make a better life and world together. I hope you’ll leave this 9-week journey believing assiduously in love – in the fiercest love of all.
Thinking Inclusively
Embrace Fierce Love
We are living in what I call “hot mess times”: a world divided by politics, race, intolerance, fear, and rancor. But my experiences—of of being a woman in a traditionally male domain, of being in an interracial marriage, of making peace with childhood abuse—demonstrates that our human capacity for empathy, compassion, and forgiveness is the key to reversing these ugly trends.
When I wrote Fierce Love, I had YOU in mind. It’s a collection of stories that illustrate how fierce love has shaped my own life: how it transforms relationships, helps us know and celebrate ourselves, and how it can revolutionize our public life together.
Purchase Your Copy Today