A Thanksgiving Relaunch

Fifteen years ago on Thanksgiving, I posted my first tentative blogpost on GivensCreative.com.

That year, 2009, was still the early days of blogging and social media and much has changed in the ensuing years. Some of those changes have not been healthy and creative, of course, not to mention good for our souls, spirits, lives of faith. But I continue to believe God is and can be at work in the simple creative acts we send out to the world, so I’m going to start again. I’ve been offline for the past six months due to some technical issues but am hoping with today’s post I am back and will be posting more regularly. So thanks for reading, subscribing and spreading the word.

In fact, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what this site can become. Beyond all the changes in the world and technology, many other aspects of my life have shifted in the past 15 years, including retirement from my job at the university, full recovery from a rare blood disease, a full life of working and creating at the intersection of creativity and spirituality, and the addition to my family of a daughter-in-law, a son-in-law, and five grandkids, aged 11, 9, 7, 4 and 4!

In short, I can see this as a site that represents the creativity and faith of where I am in my life right now (about to celebrate my 65th birthday in January), as well as contributions from others in the Givens clan and in my extended creative family.

An example: I recently produced a roughly ten-minute audio story for a great new site called Jesuit Media Lab, which featured the story on its AMDG podcast. The story is about an imaginary game of baseball I played as a young boy and its connection to the practice of Ignatian imaginative prayer that is an important part of my present-day spirituality. The story features music by my friends and frequent collaborators John Caravelli and Phil Cooper, and voice acting by John, my father-in-law Phil, my wife Sue, and my 11-year-old grandson, Noah. It was a fun, creative and collaborative effort, and you can listen to it at the link below. See you again soon!

[Note: Because of some of the technical problems I had, you may be receiving this even though you once unsubscribed. If that’s the case, I apologize. Please do so again if that’s your wish.]