I’m so glad you’re here.

Welcome to Keeping Company

If you are here…you are welcome here!

Maybe you have arrived longing to be heard and seen and known and loved just as you are…

Maybe you are wondering when you will experience the abundant life you were promised…

Maybe you are tired, worn out, burned out on religion…

Maybe you seeking a safe place to still grieve…

Maybe you are wondering why God seems so far away and silent…

Maybe you want freedom to stop and rest and play and not be so responsible…

Maybe you are wondering why the path to wholeness and love you were taught is not working…

Maybe you are wondering who your true self really is and how to live in freedom…

Maybe your wondering why the Church is so complicated and messy….

For all these reasons and more… you are welcome here… as you really are…

Hi, I’m Kim! Let me tell you a little about why I am here…

I grew up in the golden prairies of southern Manitoba, Canada. As a child I often found myself laying on the grass, gazing up at the expansive blue sky above and wondering if God saw me – if God knew me – if God loved me.

Along the way, these questions must have fueled my own desire to know God. By my early 30’s, after years of pain-filled grief, I began to wonder why all this accumulated knowledge of God and the Scriptures was not translating into a sense of being known and loved. In that time, I was offered an invitation to meet with a spiritual director – a concept completely foreign to me then.

In spiritual direction, my own sacred stories were met with interest, respect, gentleness and compassion. There was no advice or scripture verse to make it all better - no rushing to fix my thoughts or feelings – just pure companionship with them.

As I continued meeting with a spiritual director and attending retreats, I was guided in praying through the Scriptures with Jesus in what is formally known as the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. In the gospels and through my prayer, I encountered Jesus in ways that brought love, grace, healing and hope. I still return often to this way of praying with Jesus. Along the way I began to discover that he was treating me much more compassionately and empathically than I was treating myself. By this time, I knew that shaming and criticizing myself was not a path to healing, wholeness, transformation or integration.

It was in my spiritual direction supervision training that I noticed my supervisor continually invite me to pause and sense freshly how my whole body was holding a situation. This began a journey into coming to listen more deeply to my whole self. This opened up a new depth of transparency and intimacy between God and me. I already knew that Jesus was welcoming of everything inside of me - that nothing was excluded from his love. Soon I began to discover all the parts of me that I was intentionally and or unintentionally excluding from my awareness. As I learned to keep company, in a friendly sort of way, with all that arose within me, I discovered a new level of freedom, truth-telling and trust forming inside of me.

Day by day I am living more and more authentically from my true self – not because I’m trying harder but because I’ve listened long to the stories my false selves carry within my body. And I’m still listening.

Currently, I serve as a spiritual director, spiritual direction supervisor and pastor at Restoration Ministries, which I helped establish in 2007. I graduated with a Master’s in Spiritual Formation and Leadership from Spring Arbor University, a degree program founded by Dallas Willard and Richard Foster. I have a certificate in spiritual direction from Restoration Ministries and completed spiritual direction supervision training from Together in the Mystery. I participated in a 9-month clinical pastoral education unit at the Good Samaritan Society in Robbinsdale, MN where I learned how to companion the dying and those who love them. I am a certified Inner Relationship Focusing Teacher and Professional. All that to say, many wise and gracious people have companioned me towards greater authenticity, wholeness and life.

I have a special interest in grief, loss, trauma, wholeness and the body so that we can hear and tell stories in ways that heal and lead us forward towards newness of life.

I’ve been a listener and a companion my entire life. A vocation (life) of prayerful listening and companionship brings me tremendous joy. I’d love to companion you on your journey as you learn to be friended by God and by your own true self.

Come, let’s listen together.

Meet Linus - if we are meeting long distance, he is likely at my feet

A few commonly asked questions —

  • I was introduced to spiritual direction through a testimony of a pastor who was also a spiritual director. She was sharing things which resonated deeply inside of me – one thing she described was the day she was crying on her floor and realized that God loved her, even if she could do no thing for God. I reached out to her and she invited me to meet with her.

    Honestly, I had never experienced that kind of gentle, compassionate listening where my story and the fumbling to find the right words were met with interest, respect and compassion. She did not try to fix me or talk me out of how I was feeling, or set me straight with a bible verse which I likely already knew. I remember thinking in that first session, “this is love, and I want to know a God who loves like this”. I began to meet monthly with her and eventually heard my own call to offer this kind of holy listening to others.

  • Spiritual direction is a process where people set their intention to listen, one person listening to another, and noticing the movements of the Holy Spirit within the conversation.

    It’s a way of keeping company together with the God who is always keeping company with us.

    We are welcomed to be just as we are. We grow in trust that the Spirit is right here with us now and in the stuff of our lives. There might be pauses to be quiet and listen together. For me, when I am listening to another, I am listening for the Christ in them. I reflect back their own words to them and they check inside. They notice when the Holy Spirit within them resonates with their spirit.

    Spiritual direction is a gentle, patient, unhurried process where people have space to find their own words to describe the mystery of God in their life – a spiritual director will facilitate a deepening in their experience of God as mystery

    The spiritual director trusts that the journey being explored belongs to the one telling it. The spiritual director does not tell the other what they should or should not do. The person learns to discern God’s voice and call and from there hear the invitations of how to be and what to do.

  • We are listening for how God’s desires for our lives are showing up in our desires.

    We savor the gifts that come – like unconditional love, receiving of grace, permission to rest and the sense of God’s presence with us together.

    What fruit might we notice after meeting in spiritual direction?

    Sense of being heard, known, seen, understood, accepted, loved which leads to inner healing and life transformation.

    We come to know both ourselves and God more intimately, a sense that we are in partnership in all of life together.

    We live more present to life and the real life before us with greater compassion. We live more and more from our true self.

    We grow in discernment and have a sense of ‘rightness’ about our actions.

    Greater hope, peace, freedom, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, self-control, humility – fruit of the Spirit.

  • We are beautifully, wonderfully and complexly created. We know that our bodies hold memory and are hard wired to continually sense if we are safe in our current environment.

    We often find ourselves knowing more than we can put words to. Often we might also say, “I know something in my head but not in my heart”.

    Our bodies are intricate. We are comprised of needs, wants, desires, aversions, emotions, feelings and feelings about feelings.

    We know that we cannot force our bodies to feel a certain way and yet many of us have lived with a cognitive-spiritual approach to transformation and change. Many live by the assumption that if they know and believe the right things, transformation and healing will follow. This approach seems to lead to spiritual bypassing and an exiling of our needs, desires, and authentic experience.

    By pausing, slowing down and beginning to pay attention to our body, we can learn to sense freshly and describe our experience - which on the surface is often murky, unclear, and even mysterious.

    This patient welcoming and being with our body as it is can help us become more aware of our authentic needs, desires and presence of the Spirit within us.

    The body can help us show up as our true and authentic self alive and open to the Spirit within.