Day 1 #formationFOUNDATIONS | Let's Get to Know Each Other!

Today's the first day of our #formationFOUNDATIONS series. In case you're new here, you can read more about this series or start from the beginning at sacredordinarydays.com/FF. Our goal for this series is to help you...

• LEARN about different spiritual practices that you can adopt for your own walk. You will learn how to make the most of your Sacred Ordinary Days planner or the FREE Essentials Workbook you got when you joined our newsletter list, which has all the most essential pages from the planner that we don't want anyone to miss out on.
  
  
• PRACTICE these things on a daily, weekly, and seasonal basis. You will be able to lay (or bolster up) a strong spiritual formation foundation by clearing the space for your new (or revitalized) spiritual practices to deepen.
  
  
• SHARE your experience with people who speak the same language. You'll get to know the other members of our community, who are some of the wisest, most interesting, super fun, and most real people I know by following along on Instagram or Facebook or inside Common House, our ecumenical online community.
  
  

Day 1 | Let's get to know each other.

It's August! Wow. Each week of this series, we'll have a different focus. This week, we'll be focused on introductions. Begin at the beginning, right? And, we'll be starting with ourselves. Below, Hayley, Karin, Grant, and I will introduce ourselves. Will you please introduce yourself, too? You can do that in Common House and using #formationFOUNDATIONS on Instagram and Facebook. 

Sacred Ordinary Days exists to create holistic and rich resources for Christian spiritual formation. Our tools are rooted in ancient practices and rhythms, but translated with a clean aesthetic and accessible language. Ultimately, we believe that helping people grow in Christ-likeness will build the Church and, in turn, the Kingdom. The building blocks are sacred, ordinary days.

OUR VISION. This is how we want to help.
Us, too. And yet, we couldn’t find the right tools to guide us as we sought to better integrate our life and work with our faith. We kept looking for a simple solution to help us establish daily and weekly practices that were rooted in scripture and the history of the Church. The resources we found were hard to understand and harder to build our lives around. We discovered that following the liturgical year, and thus, the life of Christ, gave us the yearly framework we were searching for. Similarly, incorporating the lectionary kept us reading scripture alongside the Church throughout history and around the world, on a day-to-day basis. So, we created the Sacred Ordinary Days planner, a fresh way to use these time-honored tools for Christian spiritual formation.

JENN GILES KEMPER
Boss Lady. Founder & Creator.
Waco, Texas

Jenn is a dreamer and a dot connector. She is the founder and the heart behind Sacred Ordinary Days. Her passion for business and entrepreneurship, mixed with her heart for ministry and spiritual direction culminated to create Sacred Ordinary Days. Jenn is an idea hatcher and a user of all of the words. She leads well and works hard. We are constantly amazed by her ability to help us to be better as individuals and as a company. She values learning and seeks to do things to the best of her ability. Jenn is a lover of color, hospitality, sunshine, shared meals and shared life.  

KARIN BERGSTROM
Common House Small Group Coordinator.
East Grand Forks, Minnesota

Karin is a spiritual director and a preacher in the Evangelical Covenant and Evangelical Lutheran denomination.  She describes herself as a deeply creative soul and a natural born researcher. Originally from the Minneapolis-area, she currently lives in East Grand Forks, Minnesota--a small town on the prairies of the Minnesota-North Dakota border not so very far from Canada. Karin attended Luther Seminary in St. Paul, MN and the C. John Weborg Center for Spiritual Direction at North Park Theological Seminary in Chicago. She is interested in sustainable rhythms, women in ministry, and parenting as a spiritual practice.  She lives with her loves: her husband, two tween sons, a rescue dog, and a house packed with books and yarn. "Lots of yarn," her husband says.

GRANT KEMPER
Numbers Guy. Project Engineer.
Waco, Texas

Grant is our resident aerospace engineer who has been launching planes since 2010 and planners since 2015. He is the left brain of the Sacred Ordinary Days team and the only one of us that speaks spreadsheet (thank goodness). While an introvert at heart, we are all more because of Grant’s tinkering and consistent support. Grant is practical and logical. He takes all of our crazy hand scribbled notes, thoughts, and processes and turns them all into extremely useful information which helps us grow. We’re in awe at his ability to direct us to be more productive, streamlined and efficient. Grant loves furry animals and gets super excited about electronic sports cars (cough: Tesla) and backyard building projects. 

Now it's your turn...

Head over to Instagram or Facebook and share your introduction post using #formationfoundations and tag us @sacredordinarydays, please! Or, join the conversation inside Common House, our ecumenical online community. We hope you'll tell us a few things about yourself. Who are you? How do you spend your days? What are you excited about leaning into this season?

If you'd like to use the planner alongside us, you can order one today or get August for $4. You might even already have a planner, either the new Academic year or the previous Liturgical year. If not, today's the day to order yours since they start today on August 1st!

Psst...tomorrow we'll be introducing the Liturgical Year, which is also called the Christian Year, or the Church Year. We'll always share the latest blog post in the series at sacredordinarydays.com/FF when it's live. So, check there each day for the latest!