MARVELING
A Guide to Be Present, Reduce Stress, and Cultivate Intimacy with God
Welcome.
Thanks for checking out our new e-course, MARVELING. Do you need to take a breath now that school has started and you’re rushing kids everywhere? Are you a home educator and would like something to inspire and breathe life into you? Are you seeking a mini-course that takes you deeper in your walk with God? Then read on, my friend, MARVELING is for you.
Marveling is about seeing the world through the spiritual lens of fellowship.
What is the Marveling course?
It is a Christian mindfulness approach to the desecration of culture.
When you become a MARVELING participant, you get the “why.” Why does beauty matter in our personal lives and the home? Why should we nourish our imaginations on the beautiful, good, and true? Why does wonder matter in a culture of chaos? Why should we cultivate intimacy with God?
We want to explain the thinking behind these questions and provide practical guides on discussing them with your family and church community.
People often ask me—
“Tim, how can beauty and wonder help me in my daily life? What’s the secret?
“There is no secret,” I tell them. “Just purposeful spiritual practices, limiting my calendar, and a commitment to living counter-culturally. This is what the MARVELING course is all about. My wife Christine and I designed it to give you inspiration and tools to create healthy, God-centered rhythms for personal spiritual formation and your home environment.
Who is Marveling for?
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The practice of marveling acts as an entry point to spiritual enrichment. When we chose to partiipate in God's creation we create pathways to deeper spiritual understanding. Marveling represents intentionality in our relationship with God. By marveling we say to him that we care about his creation and desire to know the Creator better. Spiritual disciplines like silence and solitude begin in the quiet spaces of God's creation. Marveling invites us into intimacy.
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The heart behind Marveling is about nourishing the soul. The act of Marveling is about getting out into the natural world, reducing stress, and infusing our lives with joy.
It is an excuse to pause, reflect, and find yourself again.
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We're all about exploring new ideas that bring life to our family and home. Whether we're single, newly married, or right in the thick of parenting older kids, we all need resources that inspire us down new paths of learning.
Marveling is for those of us who want a shot in the arm, an espresso for the soul, a new angle on seeing the world again for the first time.
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You see the world spiraling into a mass of digital chaos. So many people are glued to their phones and shows. But you know there's another way—a path less traveled.
The Marveling course will give you permission to think differently about how we engage in culture and practical insight into how to establish new rhythms of living deeply in a surface society.
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Christine and I contribute to homeschooling our girls, and beauty and wonder play a central role. This course was created with other homeschool parents in mind. We know how homeschool parents look for ways to incorporate beauty, goodness, and truth into their curriculum. This course will give you fodder for conversations, ideas for getting into nature, and inspiration for how to talk to your children about wonder and why beauty is important in our daily lives.
We need to revive our spirits. We must step out of the busyness and wonder-smashing digital world and breathe again. The Marveling course will help you if you are looking for …
Transformative learning.
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Everything is set against you. The world says go, go, go. But the Marveling mindset says stay, stay, stay.
In this course, we will help you transform your thinking and actions from chaotic to thoughtful.
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If "mindfulness" is being aware of your surroundings in the present moment, then Christian mindfulness adds personal presence of mind to practicing the presence of God.
Marveling is more than just walking a park trail. It's living intentionally with the outside world in order to understand God more and deepen your relationship with him.
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Marveling engages our senses with God's created order. And being in the natural world alone reduces physical stress.
But Marveling goes further. This course will give you tools for countering stress proactively, like establishing spiritual disciplines and participating in God's creation with intention.
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Christian discipileship is at an all time low. There are many reasons for this, but this course focuses on contributing to the solution to this problem.
The Marveling Mindset will help revive your passion for God and dive deep into how we can practice the presence of God daily.
Marveling gives you three chapters of learning.
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Chapter 1 - The Brilliance of Seeing
At its core, MARVELING is about seeing. But not just seeing the world with the eyes in our heads. It’s about seeing the world through the eyes of our hearts. Culture bombards us and our children with a barrage of images every day. We’re conditioned to see images designed to click, buy, comment, and heart. But this is surface-seeing. God gave us the natural world and the world of art to speak to us in deep and profound ways—this is our inheritance as learners and worshippers.
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Chapter 2 - Tending to Heart & Home
MARVELING is a mindset and an action. It’s a mindset first because it reveals our perspective of the world. If we live life viewing the world through a digital lens, we’ll be robbed of wonder. When we live and act as marvelers, our way of life changes. The home is the best place to establish a foundation of beauty and wonder. We’ll explore the importance of our home environment and how creating beautiful spaces fuels our learning and sets our imaginations soaring.
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Chapter 3 - Cultivating Intimacy with God
Cultivating intimacy with God begins with transformative learning that relates to God’s view of living versus the world's values. True holistic transformation of a person's thinking and acting begins in quiet moments of contemplation. It takes work to think and act, but that’s okay; we’re here to do the work. The MARVELING course challenges our thinking first. We believe that when our thinking changes—or is transformed—then our actions will follow.
The Marveling course release dates.
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Chapter 1—The Brilliance of Seeing is available immediately upon purchase. The chapter contains seven sessions. We encourage you to take the first month, work through the material, and apply what you have learned.
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Chapter 2, Tending to Heart & Home, will be released on October 1st and will discuss how the marveling mindset affects family rhythms and the home environment.
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The final chapter of Marveling will delve deeper into the spiritual formation side of the marveling mindset. It will give you the why and the how of cultivating spiritual intimacy with God.
Our cultural need for beauty.
Marveling as an antidote to a world bent on desecration.
When our family lived in Oxford, England, we learned some rich lessons about the presence and value of beauty in our daily rhythms. These lessons came from simple decisions that profoundly impacted how we approached life in the twenty-first century.
We don’t have all the answers about how to live a life of peace in a world of chaos, but we do enjoy sharing what we’ve learned as fellow pilgrims.
One cultural commentator said we live in an era of postmodern desecration. He meant that our culture's profane nature is ruining what we hold sacred. He said we live as if beauty didn’t matter. What can be done? Do we let all that is precious be defamed?
We believe that the simple philosophy and act of MARVELING can preserve our spiritual tenderness and enliven our relationship with God.
The source of MARVELING.
The concept of MARVELING originated in my book, The Beauty Chasers: Recapturing the Wonder of the Divine. Marveling is one way that we, as parents and families, can chase beauty. C.S. Lewis considered himself a beauty chaser. The shaping power of beauty weaves through many of his works of fiction and nonfiction.
This course expands upon the principles discussed in my book and inspires you and your family to make marveling a central rhythm of your home.
Beauty can change you if you let it. Chasing beauty is about pursuing a lifestyle that goes against the cultural grain of busyness, loudness, and naked ambition—the kind of ambition we’re told we must have to succeed in this cutthroat world.
Beauty Chasers are thinkers and listeners. They see when the world goes blind. Beauty Chasers live their lives to a different cadence. They walk the path less traveled. Beauty Chasers are everyday MARVELERS.
A Christian Guide to Reduce Stress, Be Present, and Invigorate Your Imagination
Testimonials about Dr. Tim’s writing & teaching on beauty.
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"What Tim teaches about beauty is for all of us. His teaching nourishes, uplifts, and challenges.
—Leah Boden, author of Modern Miss Mason and Homeschooler.
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Tim is an expert for our times; a student of beauty and its power to revive the human soul.
Sara Hagerty, Homeschooler and bestselling author of Every Bitter Thing Is Sweet,
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Tim masterfully guides us to reexamine beauty with fresh perspective and imagination.
—Bethany Douglas, Writer, Mother, Homeschooler, and founder of Cloistered Away.
Meet your instructors.
Dr. Tim & Christine Willard
Dr. Tim studied beauty in C.S. Lewis's works for a PhD at King’s College London under the supervision of Alister McGrath and has published four books on topics of spiritual formation, faith and culture, and recapturing the beauty and wonder of the Divine in our daily lives.
Christine studied theological languages and earned her Master's in Theology at Grace College Seminary. Married for 23 years, Dr. Tim and Christine Willard love inspiring families to pursue beauty in their lives. They live with their three daughters, Lyric, Brielle, and Zion, in Waxhaw, North Carolina.
FAQs
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This course contains three chapters. 1) Learning to See, 2) Tending to Heart & Home, and 3) Cultivating Spiritual Intimacy with God. We will release the chapters over three months, along with bonus curated content, on the following dates:
September 3, 2024 - Chapter 1 - Learning to See
October 1, 2014 - Chapter 2 - Tending to Heart & Home
November 5, 2024 - Chapter 3 - Cultivating Spiritual Intimacy
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When you purchase the course you will create a login account on Dr. Tim's website. This will be a home base for accessing the MARVELING course and any other courses you purchase from Dr. Tim. You will have unlimited access to course materials.
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Yes! We have designed multiple types of PDF downloads for personal use and family and group discussions. There will be full color PDFs you can use on your various devices, but also black and white printable sheets such as journaling prompts and discussion questions.
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We cannot offer refunds.
Still have Questions?
