I wrote in my prayer journal last week: “The God of majesty is our God. Not mine, not yours, but ours.” I think when we worship or pray our flesh leads us to subtly twist the words “our God” to be a sign of division, as in he is mine, not yours, or he is [...]
Anxiety is a source of worry that creeps into our lives during small moments, but it can overwhelm us. Soon, a little chard of worry turns into millions of pieces of worry that cut and bruise everything we do. Anxiety, if left to grow, turns into a thorn that entangles us and refuses to let [...]
I took the day off of work today and am going to a Mets vs. Dodgers game with my wife. It’s an exciting little date we have snuck into our schedules, and we’re going to have a lot of fun. The only problem is that the Dodgers haven’t been doing so well. It’s perplexing really. [...]
During our community group time last night this passage from 2nd Peter really stuck out to me: For this very reason, make every effort to add to your faith goodness; and to goodness, knowledge; and to knowledge, self-control; and to self-control, perseverance; and to perseverance, godliness; and to godliness, brotherly kindness; and to brotherly kindness, [...]
Naming is a spiritual act. It confers a sense of love, dominion, or power over something or someone else. To be able to name is to be able to know something. When something is unknown, it is unnamed. Something that has been lost from our lexicon is the word acedia. It means, a state of [...]
1. Move to Kentucky. 2. Buy a farm. 3. Watch Office Space to learn how to destroy technology. 4. Beat your computer, DVD Player, and TV mercilessly with baseball bats. 5. Grow Food. 6. Cut Firewood. Your occupation is now to farm, to write, and to send letters trying to convince your friends to move [...]
People like to talk a lot about how to discern God’s will for your life. What to eat? to wear? to buy? to drive? to crave? to do? to be?
People spend time and money contemplating these things endlessly.
If that is you, your toil is over. Because I know two rock solid ways to know God’s will for your life.
1) Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength. Love your neighbor as yourself.
2) Do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God.
Those are the two ways you know God’s will for your life. If you seek to do these things, you are doing God’s will.
I shared on Wednesday about praying lamentations with a shrug and a sigh, sharing a prayer at the end that was a model of what I view as a prayerful lament, one prayed full of doubt yet knowing that there will be a turn of hope and joy. I wanted to share how I think laments turn by sharing the final stanza of that prayer poem and how doubt and a feeling of absence is closer to faith and fullness than we sometimes realize–lament and praise form a tension that is appropriately called life.
And yet hope be not lost
(we cannot afford it)
For the absence of light
Is the memory of light
Permeating the minds of all
And stirring the pollen
Of plums, and peaches,
And the prairie grasses.
Part of my growth in spirituality is a return to the very things that I was taught were not spiritual, things like silence, gardening, doodling, journaling, being creative, hospitality—in essence living and enjoying oneself. I worked diligently for a while to make it to the top of the intellectual and academic pinnacle of spirituality and quickly realized that having Strongs numbers memorized and being able to recite the books of the Bible in order (things that I had to do for grades in a college course!) had zero spiritual value. As I descended the pinnacle and realized I had left a lush valley that I just wasn’t cultivating, so to it is easy for those without an informed spirituality to simply neglect the presence of mystery in everyday life:
It’s easy for a liberal farmer at Yale University to dismiss the
spiritual implications of farming. We work in the soil, we believe what
we can touch, and the whole reason we came up to the farm was to take a
break from that exhaustive intellectual nonsense that occupies the rest
of our lives anyway. But our philosophy of organic farming is to work
with nature rather than attempt to quantify it, and to allow ourselves
to become a part of the natural system rather than to stand separate
from it. It is an attempt to give up and become a part of something
larger than ourselves, something that we may not fully understand. That
thing might be a balance of soil microbes and nutrients, but it also
might be God.
-The Atlantic‘s Sustainability blog
I don’t want to knock knowledge as a facet of our spirituality, for it is, and I think what is the bigger picture is that when we are spiritual novices we flock to what comes most easy to us. For me that is anything that involves books and learning. True spirituality, a living, breathing, incarnational spirituality is a journey beyond what is easy onto unkonwn and hard paths. True spirituality begins to change us and form us from cracked icons into something more and more whole. And that first begins in recognized that every step on our journey to deeper spirituality and communion with each other and God comes from "becoming a part of something larger than ourselves, something that we may not fully understand."
Guest Blogger Evan Curry——I have increasingly
become aware (throughout my own worship and interpretation of
Scripture) of the difficulty of sola scriptura, that is,
Scripture alone is authoritative for the Church. As a Protestant I
know that it is one of the foundations of Martin Luther’s
theology. In my church-life, every time I’ve come to question
sola scriptura, I am quickly reminded that it is what makes
Protestantism “great,” and so we can now remove ourselves
from dead rituals and traditions that have for so long “plagued
the Church” prior to Martin Luther.
However, I’m not
so sure what sola scriptura has evolved into is what Luther
ever intended.
I think Protestants
have forgotten that the Church had no “scriptura” in
canonical-form until the early 300s CE. How did they handle issues of
the faith for 300 years? You guessed it – tradition. How did
they determine how to live as the Church through those times?
Modeling the faith through…tradition. For the early church,
tradition was part of their story. It’s explained who they
were. Tradition is what brought life to the writings they had
received from the apostles.
