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“You are going to feel like hell if you never write the stuff that is tugging on the sleeves of your heart — your stories, visions, memories, visions and songs. Your truth, your version of things, your own voice. That is really all you have to offer us. And that’s also why you were born.”
Anne Lamott

“You are going to feel like hell if you never write the stuff that is tugging on the sleeves of your heart — your stories, visions, memories, visions and songs. Your truth, your version of things, your own voice. That is really all you have to offer us. And that’s also why you were born.”
Anne Lamott

Category: The Journey

Family Christmas

George

Yesterday evening we had a family Christmas celebration. Not all the children could make it this year but we had a great time. Melissa and Ryan, Kyle, Tyler and Madison; Scott and Alison; and Tanya and Daniel and Jerod, Meredith, Blake and Grayson gathered for food and fun. We started out with dinner at La Casa de Jose’s restaurant in downtown Wilmore. Returning to our house, we opened gifts and had lots of goodies. We played games. The weather was warm enough for the kids to play outside. We continued our tradition of exchanging gag gifts. The grandkids really get into it (everyone else, too).

What are you suppose to think when one of the gag gifts is your framed 11×14 senior high picture? Here’s a video and some pictures.

Upside Down – Inside Out

George

As I continue to read Shaped By the Word, It becomes more and more apparent how misguided I have been in my efforts to make myself into the person that I perceive God would have me to be. Consider these two quotes:

Let me give you something to meditate on. Take it and work through it for the rest of your life! It is possible for us to will the will of God but not surrender our heart. I can will the will of God for my life, but I can will to do it at my convenience, when it suits me, how it suits me, in the context that suits me. I can honestly and sincerely will to do the will of God without surrendering my heart. This is why there is one more level of being beyond the soul, or will. There is the “me” that wills.

Here we come to the central point of spiritual formation. Our acculturation tends to move us into both perceptual and experiential modes of being that operate on the principle that all we need for wholeness is simply to bring something more to where we are, which will move us to where we want to be. If we acquire more information to process, more technique to function with, more “doing” to do, we will move ourselves into a higher level of wholeness. We tend to look for some piece of information, some technique or method of spiritual formation that will take us from where we are to where we want to be with a minimum of inconvenience, pain, or suffering. We have so emphasized the Life dimension of the New Testament that we have avoided coming to grips with its death dimension. We have avoided the fact that in the gospel, Life comes out of death, not out of life. Trying to bring Life out of life attempts to escape the necessity of dying to the old parameters of our existence, the necessity of relinquishing the brokenness of our being, the necessity of letting go of those things that warp and misshape and distort who we are. The emphasis upon informational, functional, “doing” is our attempt to bring Life out of life. But formational, relational “being” enables God to lead us to that death from which Life emerges.

Spiritual Discipline

George

I continue to read Robert Mulholland’s Shaped By the Word. Today’s reading included a section regarding spiritual discipline which I found relevant as I continue to struggle with spiritual discipline.

Ultimately spiritual disciplines are not something we choose for ourselves. This is another problem we have in our individualized, privatized form of religion in our culture. We think spiritual disciplines are something we take on.We decide we need to grow in some particular area of our spiritual life, so we set to work in this area to develop some spiritual disciplines.” The only problem is that when we develop our own spiritual disciplines, they have a way of being compatible with who we are and what we do. I don’t mind taking up the cross and following God as long as I can choose when I’m going to take it up and who see it and praise me for it. Even though such disciplines may not be easy, I can handle them as long as I’m getting those kinds of ego boosts by being allowed to do it my own way.

Genuine spiritual disciplines intrude into our lives at points where we are in bondage to something that diminishes the word God speaks us forth to be. These disciplines occur in our bondage to our own brokenness from which God is seeking to liberate us. At this level, spiritual disciplines are not comfortable. Spiritual disciplines are a grace that comes to us from God. We may not initially see them as coming from God’s hand; but once we have submitted ourselves humbly to them, have become responsive to the disciplines, and have begun to experience the growth and wholeness they bring, we begin to realize they are a gift of God. They are God’s doing all along-not our own.