Good morning…

Last Monday morning, Rev. Catherine Boothe Olson and I prepared the space for our noontime Enneagram class. As people began slowly trickling into the sacred chapel, I felt like a “welcome” greeter in heaven. I joyfully hugged women I love from book studies in our living room and women I adore from mission trips, outreach experiences, and Bible studies at church. I excitedly reconnected with women I have led on retreats, I have cherished on walked-and-talks, I have shaped and been shaped by over the past sixteen years. I fully enjoyed seeing women who raised their kids with our four kids, women with whom I bond with each morning through our blog (some I had never met face to face until that day), and a few women I have yet to get to know. As the pews began bursting with over sixty people, I thought to myself, “I think this is what heaven is going to feel like.”

For 90 minutes we discussed the Enneagram, a sacred circle of nine numbers discovered by Christian mystics over the centuries, nine numbers helping us to discern how God has wired us each uniquely. Embracing our own number and respecting those wired differently, we can track the growth of our True Self as the qualities of Christ bloom in us.

Today at noon, we will be moving our class to the Fellowship Hall at Northside Church (2799 Northside Dr NW, Atlanta, GA 30305) to better accommodate the surprising size of our class. Please consider joining us for one or more of the Mondays in August, as we meet from 12:00 to 1:30 pm to learn together about deeply loving God, genuinely loving our True Self, and loving all others in a more holistic way.

And when they had prayed, the place where they were meeting together was shaken [a sign of God’s presence]; and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak the word of God with boldness and courage. Now the company of believers was of one heart and soul, and not one [of them] claimed that anything belonging to him was [exclusively] his own, but everything was common property and for the use of all (Acts 4:31-32, AMP).

…Sue…

P.S. After Catherine sent a follow up letter indicating our need to move to the Fellowship Hall, I shared the following email, encouraging interested women to take the Enneagram test, paving our shared pathway to the blessing of self-discovery.

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There are two extra details to add to Catherine’s informative email, preparing us for Week 2 of our Enneagram class.

1) As Catherine mentioned, on Monday we will have tables set up in Fellowship Hall with the triads of our Enneagram numbers: 8-9-1, 2-3-4, and 5-6-7. If you know your number, you can sit at a table corresponding to your number. Just so you know, we will also have tables set up for people who do not yet know their numbers. Discerning our core number can be a long, self-reflective process, so please know there will be many of you who do not confidently know your number by next Monday. We will have tables set up to welcome you who are just learning about the Enneagram.

2) Several of you asked for a link to Enneagram test so you can dive into discovering your own core number. I wrote a blog about this recently which includes a link to a free Enneagram test. If you are interested in the blog post and/or want to take the online test, I have embedded the information below.

Hope to see you next Monday at noon,

Sue Allen

Text: 404-401-8317

How Has God Wired You?

Good morning…

“Beneath or inside the life we lead every day is another life,” says the John Tarrant quote in the notes I borrowed from our 93-year-old friend, Christian mystic Betty Skinner. For years Betty used these notes to facilitate spiritual retreats on the Enneagram, the ancient study of the nine basic types of personality styles. Now as I co-teach a class on the Enneagram, we wade into the stream where Betty’s soul has been swimming for years.

“This unseen life runs like a river beneath the city, beneath work, family, ambition,” continues Tarrant in The Light Inside the Dark. “In the helper-skelter, in the rush to get an education, to make a career, to make a family, to find material success, to hurry, to do, to survive, this interior life is often subjugated or paved over… But as we awaken and grow accustom to the grace of gradual illumination, the interior life is unstoppable; it comes up in loveliness like jonquils out of fallen snow.”

If you would like to “awaken and grow accustom to the grace of gradual illumination” within your own interior life, please consider taking this free Enneagram test and ponder which of the nine personality types most resonates with the unique way our Creator has purposefully wired you.

May He grant you out of the riches of His glory, to be strengthened and spiritually energized with power through His Spirit in your inner self, [indwelling your innermost being and personality] (Ephesians 3:16, AMP).

…Sue…