From Pops' Workshop

Tag: god

  • Spiritual Lessons from Olive

    Spiritual Lessons from Olive

    At 66, having never raised a dog before and in a fit of (hopefully temporary) insanity, I decided that getting a puppy was a good idea. I further thought that having a “doodle” would be a great choice. All doodles are part poodle, and our Olive is mostly poodle, one of the smartest, most stubborn, and highest-energy dog breeds. So Olive came into my life last spring. I lost a fair bit of skin before she lost her puppy teeth, but she is now a fairly well-trained adolescent pup. Along the way, I have learned a lot about how to train and work with dogs, and I have also learned some new perspectives that help me think about my relationship with God in new ways.

    Not long after Olive and I started trying to train each other, I realized that I was saying the same things to Olive over and over again. As I think about the things I repeatedly say to Olive, I can easily imagine that God likely says many of the same things to me. And he likely repeats them even more often than I do. As I think about my relationship with Olive and God’s relationship with me, I find Olive teaching me some spiritual lessons.

    Don’t Think You Know What Is Best For You

    I often find myself exasperated that I can’t get Olive to believe that I know what is good for her and I want the best for her (though it may not be what she wants). I often tell her things like:

    • I am trying to help you. Why are you fighting me?
    • Why can’t you believe that I know what is best for you?
    • Why do you make everything so hard? Will you please just let me help you?
    • If you will just do what I say, you really will be happier!

    I certainly can imagine God repeating those same things to me. God loves me, knows what is good for me, and wants the best for me, but like a stubborn doodle puppy, I want what I want. He tells me in scripture, he tells me in prayer, he tells me through the Holy Spirit, and he tells me through the witness of my brothers and sisters, what is good for me, but it seems to take a terribly long time before I begin to act as if I really believe that he wants the best for me. Like my puppy is with me, I seem to have a hard time believing that God knows what is best for me.

    Stop Running Away

    Depending on her mood (and how tired she is), Olive seems to take great pleasure in running away from me. A fun game of fetch becomes a maddening game of “catch me if you can” with a twenty-pound doodle who is lightning quick. I find myself repeating:

    • Please stop running away from me
    • Can’t you just settle down?
    • See how nice it is when we just sit together!

    It is frankly embarrassing how often and how rapidly I run away from God. I know when he calls me. I know what he wants. But I am quick to dig into my bag of tricks to avoid him. Surely it would be better to check my email/social media/news feed/anything else, rather than turn to God. But that does not exhaust my bag of tricks. I can find any number of good, important, and useful “Christian” things to do to keep me from God. I can read my Bible without letting it speak to me. I can offer halfhearted prayers with no intention of hearing from God. I have a bookcase full of unread books I can use to avoid God.

    When I finally tire of running, I find that what God is calling me to is often nothing more than to be in his presence. As I say to Olive, it is quite nice to sit together. I am very glad that God is more patient with my running away than I am with Olives’.

    Stop Trying to Be “In Charge”

    Olive loves to take walks around our neighborhood. Most of the time, she remembers that the leash means she is not in control. In particular, she is not supposed to pull and strain against the leash. But because she is still a puppy, she sometimes forgets and starts pulling. When that happens, I stop. I don’t move forward again until she backs up enough for the leash to go slack. If she doesn’t respond, I slowly increase the tension on the leash, pulling her back to me, forcing her to make a U-turn. Eventually, Olive does turn back and makes eye contact with me, and I tell her she is a good puppy, and we start again to enjoy our walk together.

    If we know nothing else about God, we likely know that he is in charge; we are not. But how often do we assert our control, willfully “pulling on the leash,” determined to have things go the way we want? How do we react when we reach the end of the leash? Do we keep straining forward, determined to have it our way? How much easier it is when we, like Olive, turn around and check in with the one who is in control, relinquishing the authority we never had but were trying to assert.

    There Are Things We Cannot Understand

    One day, as I was standing at the kitchen sink washing a bunch of grapes, Olive gobbled up something off the floor at my feet. If you have a dog, you likely know that grapes, even in the smallest amount, can be very, very bad for it. Even worse, there are no external symptoms, but grapes can cause kidney failure in dogs. Not knowing what Olive had eaten, I had to assume it could have been an errant grape. So off we went to the emergency vet, where Olive was given an emetic and had her blood tested to baseline her kidney function, which had to be retested forty-eight hours later.

    Olive was suddenly thrust into a chaotic situation. One minute, she was just being her puppy self, and the next minute, she was scooped up and taken to a strange place where she was made to suffer painful indignities. She had no idea why all these things were happening to her. I couldn’t make her understand what was happening and why. She is a pretty smart pup, but she could not know what was happening and why; it was simply beyond her ability to comprehend.

    What about us? There are times when our worlds go suddenly sideways. Try as we might, we simply cannot understand what is happening and why. I do not mean to imply that when suddenly thrust into terrible situations, it must be God acting in to save us from some catastrophe, as I whisked Olive off to the vet. That would be absurd and wrong; it may be true sometimes, but certainly not always. Yet in those confusing, chaotic moments, we are tempted to think that God has abandoned us or does not care. That is equally wrong. God loves and cares for us, even when we are lost, confused, and completely unable to understand what is happening, just as I loved and cared for Olive when she was baffled by what was happening to her.

    Olive seems to simply accept that there are things she cannot understand. I can’t say the same for myself. It is hard for us to admit that we are limited and that there are things beyond our ability to comprehend. I think that when Olive was at the vet, it was easier for her because she was with me, someone she has come to trust to take care of her. Can we develop the same level of trust in God’s care, a trust that can carry us through life’s storms?

    Just Be Honest

    Olive is (mostly) guileless. When she is scared, I know it; her tail is between her legs, her ears are back, and she hides. When she wants to go outside, I know it; she aggressively rings the bells hanging off the patio door handle. When she wants to play fetch, I know it; she takes one of her toys, drops it at my feet, and sits there, looking at me and waiting. As I sit at my desk writing this, she is putting her paws on my lap, asking for attention. Olive is never shy about letting me know what she wants, even when it is something she cannot have.

    I wish I were always that honest with God. I tidy up my prayers. I make sure they sound pious enough. I don’t always ask for what I really want, thinking that it is not something to bother God with. How easy it is for us to forget that guile is pointless before God; he knows what we have done, how we are feeling, and what we want. And he wants us to bring our whole selves, our true selves, without guile, before him. He can love and save only the real us, not a fanciful version of ourselves that we think he’d prefer. Olive makes no pretense. That is a good lesson to learn.

    The gulf between Olive and me is infinitesimal compared to the gulf between God and me. My affection and care for her is nothing more than a pale shadow of the love and care my Father has for me. Nonetheless, if we pay attention to our relationship with our pets, we can see glimmers of our relationship with God. We can learn some important lessons. I wonder if I can take them to heart. Can you?




  • Extreme Makeover: Soul Edition

    Extreme Makeover: Soul Edition

    Do you remember the TV show “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition?” Or perhaps you have seen the current revival. I am most familiar with the original version which ran back in the early 2000s. When the show first started, they would fix up and renovate some deserving person’s home, making it much more livable. After a few seasons, the “renovation” had escalated to tearing down the old home and building a completely new one. That reminds me of how Jesus deals with our run-down and barely livable souls.

    It is not a far stretch to imagine the carpenter Jesus being in the home renovation business. We might call him in for some much-needed repairs. But we don’t realize that he is not content to fix the one or two things we think are the problem; he will continue the work until the whole structure is perfect.1

    In response to our request for repairs, he says, “You do know that I will find other things that need correction and I will fix those as well, don’t you? We will likely end up touching everything from the top of the roof all the way down to the foundation. Okay?”

    With cavalier bravado, we respond, “Yeah. Sure. Whatever. Listen, I just need the bathroom plumbing fixed and some new lighting in the family room. You can do that, can’t you?” We are certain that we know the extent of the repairs needed, even more than Jesus does.

    Jesus might caution us, “Of course I can do that, but you don’t really know what you are asking for.”

    If we do not stop him, our request for repaired plumbing and new lighting will lead to a new house, from the foundation up.

    New Life or Better Sin Management?

    Of course, Jesus is interested in us, not our homes. And he does not offer to improve us; he offers to make us new. We are in much worse shape than we know. He takes our wounded, damaged, malformed souls and makes them new. Not just improved, new. He said we must be born again,2 and we must start over from the beginning if we are to have a full and abundant life.3

    We don’t really know what we are asking for, especially when we first realize our brokenness and turn to God for help with our damaged natures. Jesus is in the new life business, not the life improvement business. But when we come to him, we are not looking for a new life; we are looking for an improved version of our current life. We don’t want the whole thing torn down and rebuilt from scratch; we just want him to improve the parts that are giving us trouble, or that we are starting to find odious.

    We may come to him saying, “Jesus, I get too angry too often, and I drink too much. Can you help me be less angry and get my drinking under control?”

    Knowing our deeper need, Jesus says, “Let’s work on that anger and the wounding that leads you to drink too much. Oh, hey! Here is something else I’ve noticed. You know, you’re kind of greedy and judgmental, too. That is part of what makes you angry. Let’s make you someone who loves and loves properly; someone who loves others even more than you love yourself. Then everything else resolves so much more easily.” He will make us into people for whom anger and drunkenness are simply unnatural and unattractive. We can become the kind of people for whom sin is not attractive.

    Jesus asks us to let him remake us in his image. He wants to make us perfect, as our Father in heaven is perfect.4 We can say, “no.” God will not go where he is not welcome. He may well help us with the anger and the drinking, but if we don’t let him fix the deep roots of our sinfulness, the results will almost certainly be like someone who patches up gaping drywall cracks without addressing the foundation issues that caused the cracking — the cracks soon reappear.

    Many of us approach our sinfulness like someone who puts up wallpaper to cover cracked plaster. It may look better, at least for a while, but the real problem has not been addressed. We’ve prettied things up so that the problems are not obvious, but the problems are still there. We take scripture like the fruit of the spirit in Galatians 55 as a behavioral to-do list. If we exhibit those qualities, then we will have life in the spirit. The fruit of the spirit is fruit; it is the result of or sign of a spirit-filled life; it does not make us spirit-filled. It is a description of life that is aligned with and formed by God’s spirit.

    Repentance Means Turning Around

    The Fruit of the Spirit, along with other biblical descriptions of new life, is God’s promise to us – “Invite me in, let me do my work, and this is what you’ll get.” It is an invitation to take up our crosses, to die to the world, and to live in Christ and let Christ live in us. Yes, sin is important. It can block the work of God (not because he is not omnipotent, but because sin generates shame that causes us to withdraw from God). Feeling guilty or telling God we are sorry is important, but it is just the starting point; confession (and forgiveness) is the unlocking and opening of the door of our hearts to the Father. Repentance is turning around and going back to wherever we first got off track and starting anew. For most of us, that is a process we will repeat again and again and again. But as we position ourselves to allow the Holy Spirit to re-form us from the inside out, we can and will start to bear the good fruit. We can have an extreme soul makeover.

    1. I am standing on the shoulders of giants. C. S. Lewis used this analogy in Mere Christianity, and tells us he borrowed it from George MacDonald. ↩︎
    2. John 3:3 ↩︎
    3. See John 10:10 ↩︎
    4. Matthew 5:48. ↩︎
    5. “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.”
      Galatians 5:22-23 (NIV) ↩︎
  • Becoming Resilient in a Disruptive World

    Becoming Resilient in a Disruptive World

    I recently heard a reasonably good working definition of resilience: the ability to not be affected by or quickly recover from buffeting, disturbances, and so on. That definition put me put me in mind of walking through a forest. If you have ever walked through a forest where there are no trails, you know how hard is it to walk in a straight line. We are easily affected by “buffeting and disturbances.” We start off walking due north, and before we know it, we are off in a completely different direction. A fallen tree or a boulder blocking our way nudges us subtly off course. Traversing a slope drags us off to the left or right as we walk across it. Finding a place to cross a stream leads us further away from our intended course. We put our heads down to shield our faces from a blowing rain and soon we are hopelessly lost. Our sense of direction and our ability to walk in a straight line is notoriously not resilient!

    A compass can save the day for us, but only if we use it! And we must use it nearly constantly; we must know we are off course as close as possible to when it happens. The longer we trudge ahead without checking our bearing, assuming that we are holding our course reasonably well, the more likely we are to become lost. It would be folly to set your course and then check your compass only after an obvious challenge, buffeting, or disturbance. There are too many subtle variations in our direction; you would stand very little chance of ending up where you set out for.

    For Christians, the in-dwelling spirit of Christ is our compass. We set our course to follow Jesus’ way. As John Mark Comer teaches, the true north of a disciple is to spend time with Jesus, become like him, and do what he did.1 The world around us is our primordial forest. Social media algorithms, twenty-four hour news cycles, and the constant pressure to do more and be more all buffet us and disturb our way. If we go very far at all with out consulting our “compass” we will soon be far off our intended course. We need to constantly look to God in prayer to see if we are still true to our course.

    Nearly five hundred years ago Ignatius of Loyola described a daily prayer method, the Examen, that helps us learn to consult our “compass” at least daily. You will find many descriptions of the Examen on line,2 and at its core, the Examen includes:

    1. Quieting yourself so that you can be more receptive to hearing God’s voice.
    2. Recognizing that your day is a gift, and giving thanks accordingly
    3. Allowing Holy Spirit to guide you as you reflect on your day
    4. Assessing the thoughts, moods, and actions that drew us closer God or seemed to push away from God.
    5. Asking God to help you navigate the challenges of the next day.

    Most people pray the Examen daily and many pray it twice a day. But as Jim Manney points out in his book, “A Simple, Life-Changing Prayer: Discovering the Power of St. Ignatius Loyola’s Examen,” the ultimate fruit of a consistent practice of praying the Examen is to become people who are constantly aware of how they are being subtly pulled off course. We can become like people who always have their compass in hand, always checking and knowing the way we should be going.

    We can become spiritually resilient in a disruptive world. If we learn to frequently check our spiritual compass, then when we are buffeted or disturbed in our following the way of Jesus, we can quickly get back on course.

    1. www.practicingtheway.org/ ↩︎
    2. A great starting point is: https://www.ignatianspirituality.com/ignatian-prayer/the-examen ↩︎

  • Fear Not

    Fear Not

    Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid. Jesus

    The Bible repeatedly tells us not to be fearful or anxious.

    • Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged, for the LORD your God will be with you wherever you go.1
    • The LORD is with me; I will not be afraid.2
    • And [Jesus] said to them, “Why are you afraid, O you of little faith?”3
    • So don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.4
    • Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.5
    • Do not be afraid, little flock, for your Father has been pleased to give you the kingdom.6
    • Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.7
    • Therefore do not be anxious, … but seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you. Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.8
    • Cast all your anxiety on [God] because he cares for you.9

    How do you feel reading those verses? If you skipped over them just now, go back and read them again, paying attention to how they make you feel. Are you comforted by them or are you convicted of your inability to trust God? It depends on how we are reading those verses. The lens through which we read scripture will greatly influence how we interpret what we read.

    Most of us were taught to view the Bible as a divine instruction book. If you do what it says, God will be pleased with you. If you fail to follow the instructions, God will at least be disappointed or, more likely, will be angry with you.

    If we view the Bible as a rule book, “Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth,” we will see these verses as commands to not be afraid. Then, when we are afraid or anxious, we take it a sign of spiritual weakness and a lack of faith; we are not doing what God commands. With this mindset we believe that when we are anxious and afraid, we are going against God’s commands; it is a sin to be anxious and afraid.

    I used to think that way. I believed that when I was anxious or afraid, it was as a marker of how weak my faith was, of how little I trusted God. Believing my anxiety was, at best, a sign of spiritual immaturity, I would slather on a thick layer of guilt and shame. Of course that guilt and shame would just make me more anxious, believing that I was displeasing God.

    But as I have learned about the triune God and experienced his love for me, and as I have studied spiritual formation and sat with others in spiritual direction, I am convinced that the Bible is less about following the rules and is more about understanding God’s loving desire for us. In particular, the New Testament is not laying down a new law book to proscribe our behavior. Jesus is not Moses 2.0.10

    Jesus is the full revelation of a Father who loves us and wants us to be happy and well. What if we looked at those verses on anxiety and fear as the wisest of wise advice and as encouragements from someone who loves and cares for us and wants us to be happy?

    Instead of reading “do not be afraid” as a law to be obeyed, can we hear it as comfort and encouragement from a loving God? Can we hear a father, grieved not by disobedience, but by our unnecessary fear and anxiety. Consider the story of the storm-tossed boat in Matthew chapter 8. Read it slowly, imagine the scene with your mind’s eye. Pay particular attention to how you perceive Jesus.

    And when he got into the boat, his disciples followed him. And behold, there arose a great storm on the sea, so that the boat was being swamped by the waves; but he was asleep. And they went and woke him, saying, “Save us, Lord; we are perishing.” And he said to them, “Why are you afraid, O you of little faith?” Then he rose and rebuked the winds and the sea, and there was a great calm. And the men marveled, saying, “What sort of man is this, that even winds and sea obey him?”11

    How does Jesus seem to you? Is he frustrated with his disciples? Angry perhaps? If that is the case, I invited you to sit with the passage again, this time, imagine Jesus feeling how you might feel if your child was unnecessarily frightened by a storm; not angry, but a little sad that loved ones are needlessly distressed. Can you hear “O you of little faith” as a gentle chiding? Don’t hurry; stay with this reading a while.

    How you see Jesus in this parable is likely how you expect him to be if you come to him with your fears. What we perceive about God from our scripture reading has more to do with our preconceived image of him than with the words on the page.

    If you have learned that “fear not” is a command to be obeyed, and not an encouragement to a freer life, consider this exercise. Pick two or three of the scripture passages that you read as commands to greater faithfulness. Read it over slowly. Sit with it. Chew on it. Ask Holy Spirit to help you see words of love, encouragement, and even instruction, in place of commands to be brave (or else!). The Holy Spirit loves to show us the true picture of God, the God who does not condemn but loves, saves, and restores.

    1. Joshua 1:9 (NIV) ↩︎
    2. Psalms 118:6 (NIV) ↩︎
    3. Matthew 8:26 (ESV) ↩︎
    4. Matthew 10:31 (NIV) ↩︎
    5. John 14:27 (ESV) ↩︎
    6. Luke 12:32 (NIV) ↩︎
    7. Philippians 4:6 (ESV) ↩︎
    8. Matthew 6:31(a), 33-34 (ESV) ↩︎
    9. 1 Peter 5:7 (NIV) ↩︎
    10. And neither are Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Paul. ↩︎
    11. Matthew 8:23-27 (ESV) ↩︎

  • Chapter 23: Endings And Beginnings

    My time in My Pops’ Workshop was ending. I would still see it in visions from time to time for another year or so, but those were less times of transformation and more times of illumination and encouragement. I continued, for a time to be taught and coached by the Lord through visions, but that season too came to end.

    As I reflect on all that transpired in my Pops’ Workshop and all the healing that was begun there, I am literally awestruck. Looking through the lens of spiritual formation, drawing on what I learned when studying to be director and my on-going education and reading, I see three movements in play: Identity, Healing and Purpose.

    Identity

    My time in Pops’ Workshop started with identity. Who was God to me? Who am I to God? What was Father like? What about Jesus, could I understand him as a human and not just as part of the Godhead? And just what does the Holy Spirit do? More importantly, could I find, somewhere in the trinity, love and acceptance?

    Father

    I found a Father who loves me, whether I am covered in glory or covered in shame and who was was always ready to be with me. One of the unexpected aspects of my time in my Pops’ Workshop was the exposure of hurts I did not know I carried in my soul. My earthly father was neither the best nor the worst of fathers, but I never felt anything approaching unconditional love. That I knew. I had not realized that I had also carried a belief that I was a bother and my dad would rather that I not engage with him except on his terms and timing. As I spent time with my Pops, I was surprised that he always has time for me; if he was “busy,” he always dropped what he was doing to attend to me. When I am with him, I am the only things that mattered; he thinks of nothing but me and there is nothing else he needs to attend to. This was an incredibly freeing healing. I am not loved grudgingly or out of obligation. I am a dearly beloved son of the Father.

    Son

    I had experienced Jesus’ love for me even before my time in Pops’ workshop. Yet here again my soul was marked by hurts I did not know I was carrying. Without realizing it, I had come to believe that I was too damaged and broken to ever be of much Kingdom use. But I found Jesus accepting me and inviting me to join him in his redemptive work from “day one,” before we undertook any of my much needed inner work.

    I came into Pops’ Workshop believing that while Jesus loved me, he would love me better or differently if I cleaned myself up and got my act together. Seriously, I didn’t even like myself all that much, so how could Jesus? I didn’t expect that he would stand in the slime and muck of my fouled inner life and gladly take from me all the things that were polluting my soul. And I certainly didn’t expect him to take on my sin of pride.

    Holy Spirit

    The third person of the trinity remains mysterious for me. Holy Spirit was not readily visible, and my interactions with him were the hardest to understand and to unpack. This does not surprise me. We are born of the Spirit that Jesus compares to the wind, we hear it and feel it, but we do not know where it comes from or where it is going. My encounter with Holy Spirit was healing, humbling, empowering, confusing, and enlightening all at the same time. I remain awestruck that I glimpsed the inner work of the Holy Spirit.

    Healing

    The second moment of my time in My Pops’ Workshop was healing. I was healed spiritually and emotionally. The Greek word usually translated as “save” is sozo, and means to be rescued, healed, and made whole. By that definition I was saved in my time in the Workshop.

    With a better sense of who God is and who I am to him, I was able to let myself be known more fully to God, opening the door to healing and wholeness.

    Purpose

    One of the unexpected changes that flows out of healing and wholeness is a redirection of our hearts. Before I was in my Pops’ Workshop, I was my biggest concern. How could I get what I wanted?1 My number one question was, “what about me?”

    Slowly but surely, as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were about their work of replacing my heart of stone with one of flesh and blood,2 my focus shifted to God and to others. It began a shift away from being largely indifferent to others and to genuinely caring for and about others. I moved from asking, “How can I get what I want?” to wondering how I can love others as Jesus loves them. How can I help them find their way to the healing God wants for them? How can I be a responsible subject in the Kingdom of the Heavens?

    Endless Iteration

    These movements are neither discrete nor linear. And they certainly are not a “once and done.” They frequently overlapped each other and I have iterated through each many times. I find this picture a helpful visualization.

    Three movements in my spiritual formation

    Even now, years later, I revisit my identity and my view of God. I learn anew and at a deeper level that my identity is rooted not in what I think, do, say, earn, or achieve but in in the reality that I am a dearly beloved child of the Father.

    My spiritual and emotional healing is also an ongoing project. Of all the interior ills that beset me, I cannot identify a single one that is completely cured. Those ills have been attenuated, some to a remarkable degree and some not nearly as much as I would hope, but they are all still there to some degree. I have heard testimonies from people whose particular addiction or interior corruption was instantaneously healed. I have no reason to doubt those accounts, but that experience is foreign to me. My mystic prayer experiences, profound though they were, began but did not complete inner healing. My time in my Pop’s Workshop laid a strong foundation but did not make me “all right.”

    Finally, my sense of calling and kingdom purpose continues to evolve and be refreshed. The broad outlines of what I am to be about seem to be well-established, but how I am to walk that out shifts over time. I write blog posts, not books. I preach much more often than I could have expected. I sit with others, offering them spiritual direction, but not in the numbers I thought I would. God is using the skills and knowledge I learned as a team and management coach in the information technology sector to help church leadership teams learn and grow. I am being used for kingdom purposes in ways that I would not have imagined ten years ago.

    Formation Boot Camp

    What Jesus was doing, I now know, was attending to my spiritual formation. My time in the workshop was a spiritual formation boot camp. Robert Mulholland defines Spiritual Formation as “a process of being formed in the image of Christ for the sake of others.”3 It is only after the fact, looking back that I can see that was exactly what was happening in my Pops’ Workshop. I was being lovingly restored and healed to uncover the image of Christ in me, for the sake of others. The work was not completed, but the foundations were laid. A boot camp is the beginning of training, not the end; my time in my Pops’ Workshop was intensive and extensive, and it marked a beginning. I am still learning, being healed, and made new, ever closer to the image of Christ we each carry.

    The gospels promise us a new life, one that is full and abundant; we are reborn. In Romans Paul declares that the gospel is the power of God for our salvation. We are saved from the power of sin and death, and we are rescued, restored, and healed of the ills that vex our souls. It was not until I believed these promises to the point of being dissatisfied with the shallow surface improvements I had managed to make to my old life that God could step in and offer true transformation. It was then that I could be transformed by the renewing of my mind.4

    What About You?

    What do you want? Are you unwilling to settle for a tidied up, somewhat improved version of your old life? Do you want a vibrant, spirit-filled new life? One of the hardest things for us to do is to trust that God is really who he says he is and that he really cares about and for us the way he says he does. I invite you to take the first small sip of trusting God, whatever that looks like for you. My journey began with sitting in stillness, trusting that God really did love me and would show me an expression of his love. That journey has taken me places I could not have imagined.

    How will your journey begin? Mostly likely with silence, solitude, and patient waiting. Perhaps you will be accompanied by a pastor, soul friend, or spiritual director who can help you spot the road signs along the way. One thing is certain: God has more in store for each of us than we could ever dare imagine and he is waiting for us to be with him so that he can bless us with new, full life.

    I pray that you will find the starting point of your journey. God will do the rest!

    1. Even though I didn’t know what I wanted! ↩︎
    2. Ezekiel 36:26 ↩︎
    3. M. Robert Mulholland Jr.. Invitation to a Journey: A Road Map for Spiritual Formation (Kindle Locations 158-159). Kindle Edition. ↩︎
    4. Romans 12:2 ↩︎

  • When God Breaks In

    God will break in on your life. You may not understand it, you may not recognize it for what it is, but he will break in on your life. God is an ardent lover, and, as such, he pursues us relentlessly. He never tires of making himself known, in hopes that we will turn to him and be saved. When God’s love does break into our lives, when he gets in past the noise, clutter, hurry, and anxiety of our lives, what do we do? We usually respond in one of three ways. We can ignore it and simply carry on as before, acting as if there is nothing noteworthy happening; we can recognize God and try our best to accommodate him in our lives, trying to work out what it is we are to do in response; or we can embrace God with all we have, abandon all we have and all we are in our pursuit of him.

    Ignore

    If we ignore God’s action in our lives, we are on the easiest and least disruptive track. We will also have a lot of company. Winston Churchill once said of his opponent that he would sometimes stumble over the truth, pick himself up, and hurry off as if nothing had happened. That is an apt picture of how many of us react when the power and beauty of God’s love finds a chink in our armor and breaks through to us. We can brush it off, hurrying back to our “real” lives, convinced that nothing really happened. We can rationalize or explain away what does not fit into our understanding of how the world works. We are like Ebenezer Scrooge, who attributed his experience of Marley’s ghost to indigestion: “an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato.”

    If we fail in our attempts to convince ourselves that nothing happened, we will tell ourselves that our experience of God has no lasting importance. Yes, something out of the ordinary happened, but it was a blip, an anomaly, a glitch in the matrix, if you will. Like the experience of deja vu, it is interesting and perhaps momentarily disconcerting, but it certainly has no bearing on real life.

    Our all-too-common response of hurrying past or explaining away God’s presence in our lives heads us down a dangerous path. If we repeatedly dismiss and ignore God’s invitations to us, we become numb to them over time, barely noticing them. If we do notice, we have become masters of rationalizing the experience and tossing it aside like the junk mail we don’t even bother to open. Eventually, we can become functionally blind and deaf — for all practical purposes, unable to see or hear God in any but the most extraordinary moments.

    God does not give up on us. He will continue trying to break in and break through with his love for us, no matter how often we brush him off and snub his overtures. But we may so harden ourselves that we are no longer awake to his activity.

    Accommodate

    The second choice is accommodation. When we experience God’s loving kindness, we recognize it for what it is: divine care and love breaking into our lives. We understand that this is not a flight of fancy and is not to be ignored. As we learn a bit more about God, perhaps from our friends or online resources, we realize that we have a part to play in this budding relationship. So we do our level best to accommodate God in our lives. We carve out a niche for God. Between friends and family, work and leisure, and social media and entertainment, we set aside some time for God. We work him into our busy lives as best as we can.

    This sounds like a hopeful direction, but it seldom turns out well. We give God his due, or at least we try our best. We become, as C. S. Lewis put it, like honest but reluctant taxpayers. We think of God’s call on our lives as a tax to be paid. We pay what we believe is required, and hold back everything else. We don’t want to cheat God; we will pay him what he is due and continue on with our “real” lives. We want to continue to enjoy the life we have been living. We do not realize that God is due everything.1 The divine tax rate is 100%. Our ignorance of this fact is the point on which this choice falters. We think we are on the right track, racing along to the end of the line. We may be on the right track, but we have not yet left the station.

    We acknowledge God, and we are genuinely grateful. But we continue on with our lives, consigning God to the slim margins of our overscheduled lives. Over time, our memory of what we once thought of as a life-changing God encounter fades. Any claim or call we might have felt God has on our lives becomes distant, smaller, and less important. Most of our time, passion, and energy remain devoted to the incessant demands of the world, and so any zeal or passion we may have felt fades away. God’s invitation to give ourselves to him fades into the background, drowned out by all the world demands and has to offer. At the worst, we may slip back to door number one and simply ignore what we originally sensed as important.

    However, most of the time, we end up going through the motions of honoring God, but nothing much has really changed. I used to live that way, and I was often in a cycle of being inspired, fixing my will on change, and failing. Eventually, I started to wonder if it wasn’t all a hoax. I would promise God, myself, and others that I was going to change. I was going to be a new man. I really intended to reform myself. I was that new man for weeks or sometimes only days before, without realizing that it was happening, I slipped back to my old ways. When we whip ourselves through this cycle enough times, it is easy to doubt the reality of God’s promised new, full life for those who love him.

    But there is good news here! We are not ignoring God, and he does not give up on us, even when our response to him turns out to be fleeting or half-hearted. He honors any attempt to respond to him. He does not wait for us to be perfect; perfecting us is the Holy Spirit’s job. Even as we struggle to accommodate God into our lives, the door is open for us to move from accommodating him to embracing him.

    Yet there are dangers here, too. We may be satisfied with whatever meager progress toward God we have been able to make, thinking that is all he wants of and for us. Then, when God breaks in and we again meet the love of God, we may reject it, thinking, “I go to church. I’ve (mostly) reined in (some of) my more egregious sins; I am not a bad person. I drank the Kool-Aid and said the prayer; I should now be free to live my life as I see fit.” Or, tragically, when God again breaks in, we may treat that as confirmation that we are doing “the right stuff,” and think God asks nothing more of us when, in fact, he is inviting us to go further up and farther in.

    Or, if we have been, as I was, in a sin-repent-repeat cycle, we may despair of even trying again. We have spent years trying to accommodate God in our lives, and we become frustrated by the lack of real change; we can become jaded. “I’ve been down this road before, and nothing is going to change. Yes, God. I hear you. I’ve tried and tried, but this just isn’t getting us anywhere.. Let’s just leave well enough alone and stay the course.”

    The truth is that where we are is not well enough, and God will not accept our attempts to break up with him. He loves us too much to leave us alone.

    It really isn’t possible to live with one foot in the Kingdom of the Heavens and the other in the kingdoms of the world. God’s soft and gentle call is too easily drowned out by the demanding din of the world. We can stay in this middle ground for a long, long time, or we can slip back into a “Nothing to See Here” posture.

    But there is a third way. It is both harder and easier.

    3. Embrace

    The third way is to go all in, giving up any claim to career, status, wealth, security, and even our very lives. To follow this third way, we must set aside our earthly, temporal desires and put our pursuit of God above all else. Ignatius of Loyola summed up this idea nearly five hundred years ago.

    We should not fix our desires on health or sickness, wealth or poverty, success or failure, a long life or a short one. For everything has the potential of calling forth in us a deeper response to
    our life in God. Our only desire and our one choice should be this: I want and I choose what better leads to God’s deepening his life
    in me.

    Ignatius of Loyola, First Principle and Foundation

    For those of us who nursed at the bosom of Western consumerism and self-determination, this sounds like folly. It also sounds impossible. Jesus knew how hard this would be even for his contemporaries. He used crucifixion, a horrible, brutal, shameful, and excruciating execution method, as a picture of what we must do, explaining that if we would live, we must give up our lives. He tells his followers to take up their crosses and follow him.2

    Following this way is extraordinarily hard to do, but it is also easy. It is certainly easier than trying to accommodate God while still clinging to the ways of the world and enduring the constant struggle of trying to balance between them. Imagine the difficulty of trying to keep one foot on the dock and the other on a boat that is pulling away. It is so much easier to just get both feet on the boat. It is tempting to think that the “ignore” option must be easier than casting everything aside for God, but it is not so. When we ignore God and cast our lot with the world, we find that the best the world has to offer is never enough; we are ever seeking the next thrill, the next affirmation, the next rung on the social or economic ladder. We are always seeking but never satisfied. God is the one thing that can satisfy us at the deepest levels of our being.

    This giving up of our lives is anything but a “once and done” event. It is like a lifetime commitment to regular exercise and a healthy diet, not a crash diet. And if you ever try to genuinely change, to “put to death” the old life to take up the new, you will find it all but impossible. And by our own strength, cunning, and will, it is impossible. But with God, it is not only possible, it is all but certain, as long as we do what we can and trust in God for the real change. If we press into the Ignatian First Principle and Foundation, asking God to make it so with us, he will.

    Coda

    It was only after I was about half way through with this piece that I realized I was really just riffing on the Parable of the Sower (Mark 4:1-20): The seed that falls on the path is “Ignore;” the seed on stony soil and the seed among the thorns is “Accomodate;” land the seed in good soil is “Embrace.” If I am inspired (even without realizing it) by Jesus’ teaching, that can’t be a bad thing! “He who has ears, let him hear.”

    1. Neither do we realize that when we abandon our “old” life, we are given a life that is better in every dimension that matters. ↩︎
    2. Luke 9:23-24 ↩︎
  • Chapter 21: Grace and Peace

    Chapter 21: Grace and Peace

    “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you”
    John 14:27

    The LORD passed before him and proclaimed, “The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness
    Exodus 34:6

    Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
    Romans 1:7

    As I sift through my remaining journal entries from my time in my Pops’ Workshop, I find some entries that don’t “move the story along” but are nonetheless important to understanding how God was moving in my life at that time. Sometimes I see themes that grow in importance over time. Two Hebrew words fall into that category

    When I experienced visions of “My Place,” I came to know that the Hebrew words shalom (שָׁלוֹם) and hesed (חֶסֶד) are foundational to it, and therefore to my offering of spiritual direction. When I would see My Place while praying or thinking about it and pondering what the Lord might have in store for me, those words would come to mind and demand my attention. God was once again trading on my innate (and sometimes obsessive) curiosity. I spent a lot of time wondering about these words. Exactly how the words are significant took a while to unpack.  

    One day, my regular Bible reading took me to 1 Kings 7, where, as part of building the temple, Solomon constructs two towering pillars which he named Boaz (in him is strength) and Jachin (he will establish). The instant I read that passage, it dropped into my mind that shalom and hesed would be the doorposts for My Place. I have never understood how Solomon’s towering pillars triggered a thought about what frames the entry to My Place, but understanding hesed and shalom helps me understand God’s character. That, in turn, helps to understand and anchor the healing and restoration I experienced in my Pops’ Workshop, and it grounds my practice of spiritual direction. It makes perfect sense that hesed and shalom, or grace and peace, should be the hallmarks of my ministry of spiritual direction.

    Grace

    The first of those two words, hesed (חֶסֶד), had come to my attention years before my time in my Pops’ Workshop. I was reading in the Psalms and kept seeing “steadfast love” pop up over and over again. Why did those words in particular catch my attention? The only explanation I can offer is that it was a nudge from the Holy Spirit. God reaches each of us in whatever way He can; He uses my natural curiosity to get me to think about something important that I should pay attention to. In this case, he nudged me toward learning about hesed.

    The meaning of hesed is multi-faceted and nuanced; it does not readily translate directly into English. Depending on the translation you use, you will find hesed rendered as lovingkindness, mercy, love, steadfast love, faithful love, or loyal love. Yet none of those fully capture the meaning of this word that God uses to describe himself. The meaning of hesed is so deep and rich that Michael Card spent ten years writing a book about this one word. In the aptly titled “Inexpressible,” Card gives us his working definition of hesed: “When the person from whom I have a right to expect nothing gives me everything.”1

    Hesed is foundational to who God is. When he passes before Moses on Mount Sinai, God declares that he is “a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in [hesed] and faithfulness, keeping [hesed] for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin…”2 Hesed overflows the Psalms, often highlighting God’s hesed as something that makes him different from any other god; He is love, and he cannot not love, that is the nature of his hesed. Other gods may (temporarily) be pleased with us or with our actions, but the God of heaven loves us. Our thoughts or actions do not enter into a worthiness calculation. In fact, there is no calculation; we are loved and nothing we say, or think, or do can change that.

    The Hebrew word “hesed” is, of course, absent from the New Testament, which was written in Greek, but that does not mean that we cannot see God’s hesed there. Scholars tell us that the closest to hesed we get in the New Testament is “Charis,” nearly always translated as “Grace,” meaning unmerited favor. That is an awful lot like Card’s summary of hesed: “When the person from whom I have a right to expect nothing gives me everything.” When Luther translated the Bible into German, he used the German word for “grace” to translate both “hesed” and “charis”, explicitly linking them.

    The gospel, the central message of Christianity, turns on God’s hesed. Jesus’s life and sacrificial, redemptive death are the ultimate expression of hesed. We are saved, redeemed, and brought into new life even though we have done nothing to deserve it. (And most of us have done a LOT that should disqualify us from receiving it!)

    When my children were young, my wife and I wanted to give them a concrete understanding of Grace. We had fairly early on taken away the option of dessert following dinner; we were exhausted from arguing with them about whether or not they had eaten enough of their meal to merit or “earn” dessert. Then it struck us: Sunday became Grace day. You got dessert even if you didn’t eat a single bite of your dinner; you got dessert on Sunday by grace, by charis, by hesed.

    Peace

    We have already met Shalom (שָׁלוֹם) in Chapter 8, when the Lord invited (or commanded3) me to “speak peace” over a seeming multitude. Shalom is usually translated as “peace,” but like hesed, its meaning is much richer and more profound than can be expressed in a single English word. We usually think of peace as a freedom from hostilities, either earthly strife or between God and man. Shalom can mean that, but it also conveys prosperity, well-being, health, and completeness. To wish someone shalom is to wish them all those things.

    Living in God’s Peace

    We are intended to live our lives in the embrace of God’s shalom. It is what we are designed for and what we are meant to experience. If you have hung around many churches, you have likely heard this blessing many times: “The LORD bless you and keep you; the LORD make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you; the LORD lift up his countenance upon you and give you [shalom].”4,5 That blessing is prescribed by God; he commands the priests to bless the people with that particular blessing, calling forth God’s shalom for the people.

    God plans for us to live in his shalom: “For I know the plans I have for you, declares the LORD, plans for [shalom] and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.”6 God wants us to experience his peace, and he is delighted when we do. “Great is the LORD, who delights in the [shalom] of his servant!”7

    We have a dysfunctional relationship with God’s rules for his people. We approach his instruction as if it were the criminal code, which we must obey or face punishment; that is not the case. He gives his people instructions for living, not because he wants to force compliance with his way, not because he is the consummate micromanager or a control freak, but because he wants us to experience his shalom. “Oh that you had paid attention to my commandments! Then your [shalom] would have been like a river, and your righteousness like the waves of the sea.”8

    Following God’s commandments yields shalom like a well-tended tree yields fruit; not as a payment or reward, but as a natural consequence. C. S. Lewis reminds us that we are meant to “run on” God.9 Following God’s instruction is then just common sense.

    When we understand the fullness of shalom, we glimpse the beauty of life in God’s kingdom. As is the case with hesed, we do not find shalom in the New Testament. But shalom’s Greek counterpart, eirēnē, is there some ninety-two times. This should hardly surprise us. The prophet Isaiah declared that one of the names of the messiah would be “Prince of Peace.”10

    The Prince of Peace

    From beginning to end, peace accompanies Jesus. An angelic declaration of peace heralds Christ’s birth: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased!”11 At the close of his earthly ministry, Jesus bestows his peace on his followers: “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.”12 And the resurrected Jesus blesses his followers with peace: “On the evening of that day, the first day of the week, the doors being locked where the disciples were for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said to them, ‘Peace be with you.’”13

    Paul, Peter, John, and Jude all greet or bless their readers with the Peace of Christ. To experience the peace of God, which Paul reminds us “surpasses all understanding,”14 and to live in his shalom, is to partake of the life we were designed to enjoy.

    Grace and Peace, Hesed and Shalom: whether in Hebrew or English, those words are central to understanding who God is and how he thinks and feels about us. Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection are enactments of God’s hesed and shalom. It is little wonder that God would impress upon me the need to frame my ministry of spiritual direction with grace and peace; hesed and shalom.

    1. Card, Michael. Inexpressible: Hesed and the Mystery of God’s Lovingkindness (p. 5). InterVarsity Press. Kindle Edition. ↩︎
    2. Exodus 34:6-7 (ESV) ↩︎
    3. Invited or commanded? I like to think it was an invitation – something I could accept or not. But I know in my heart that it was a command and that command is something I still struggle with nearly a decade later. ↩︎
    4. Depending on the translation you use, you will find shalom behind words other than peace. Here, and in what follows, I have taken the liberty of replacing the translator’s choice with the Hebrew shalom. ↩︎
    5. Numbers 6:24-26 ↩︎
    6. Jeremiah 29:11 ↩︎
    7. Psalms 35:27 ↩︎
    8. Isaiah 48:18 ↩︎
    9. See Lewis, C. S.. Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics) (p. 50). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition. ↩︎
    10. Isaiah 9:6 ↩︎
    11. Luke 2:14 ↩︎
    12. John 14:27 ↩︎
    13. John 20:19 ↩︎
    14. Philippians 4:7 ↩︎

  • Chapter 20: The Mother of All Sin

    Chapter 20: The Mother of All Sin

    Pride, on the other hand, is the mother of all sins, and the original sin of lucifer…. An instrument strung, but preferring to play itself because it thinks it knows the tune better than the Musician.

    C.S. Lewis: Family letters 1905-1931 (ed. 2000)

    It had not been very long since I had encountered Pride Rock; only a few weeks had passed. I was content, knowing that my pride was well and properly dealt with and was now safely part of the foundation of my place. I was also wrong. The Lord was far from done with me and my pride.

    Another Side of Pride: Selfishness

    During my time in Pops’ Workshop, I noticed a pattern of God speaking to me through corporate confession in church. At my church, like at many other churches around the world, we often have a liturgy of corporate confession that includes time for silent reflection. It was during those times that I would hear from the Lord.

    It makes sense that we would hear more readily in those times. He is always speaking. When we are full of ourselves and our ideas, we crowd our minds with our grand thoughts and don’t leave much space for other voices, making it harder to hear what the Lord is speaking. When we confess our sinful thoughts, actions, and desires, we empty ourselves or ourselves, making it easier for the voice of God to break through.

    During a Sunday worship service, as we paused for silent reflection during our corporate confession, I heard the word “Selfish.” More than just hearing that word, it was being thrust upon me. There was no gentle suggestion or Holy Spirit “nudge.” It was more of a siren than a word, an in-my-face, insistent, almost shrill voice repeating over and over again, “Selfish, Selfish, Selfish!” That got my attention. It could not be ignored any more than a ten-foot-tall flashing neon sign placed directly in your path could be ignored. As I sat with that “word,” I became aware of several areas of my life where I was being very selfish indeed.

    I had been in a funk because things were not turning out the way I wanted. I was in an in-between space. I was being healed but not whole, being called to ministry but still in a grueling “day job,” seeing how much I had changed and was changing but having those closest to me tell me I must be “faking it.” I wanted to be on the other side of healing. I wanted to be able to focus on ministry. I wanted my loved ones to acknowledge the depth of the change God was working in me.

    Those are reasonable frustrations and reasonable wants. It was not selfish of me to want those things. However, I wanted what I wanted without considering what others might want or need. I was thinking about only one person: myself! And, to make it worse, I was sulking and withdrawing when I didn’t get my way. That is why the warning klaxon, “Selfish,” sounded for me that Sunday morning.

    I wasn’t thinking about Pride or even the Workshop, but unexpectedly, my thoughts jumped back to Pride Rock. I saw it once again standing upright. As I watched, it was lifted up, and I could see its underside. Carved there, where it was otherwise invisible, was the word “Selfish.” The Lord was directing me to recognize my selfishness as another side of Pride.

    I am sure that many readers are right now saying, “Well, duh!” of course, they are related. But I hadn’t ever thought about that,1 and it makes sense. What, besides Pride, thinking we are really something special, leads us to believe that we should have whatever we decide we want. What, aside from a pride-fueled sense of entitlement, makes us think we should have our wishes granted as soon as we wish them? What, besides Pride and conceit, leads us to believe that our needs, wants, and desires are, without question, more important than anyone and everyone else’s needs, wants, and desires?

    Pride need not look boastful and preening. It can also appear selfish and demanding. Clearly, God was not yet done with me and my pride. My pride was more pernicious and more toxic than I had imagined, and I was about to learn yet another lesson about pride and selfishness.

    Even Another Side of Pride: Discontent

    The more time you spend being attentive to what God may be saying, the more often you’ll find him “breaking in” to your everyday activities. That can lead to getting revelation in the oddest times. I was still a road warrior, flying across the country most weeks of the year. While boarding a flight to Virginia, I thought about how hard it was for me to exercise and tend to my diet while on the road. Suddenly, an image of the exterior of my Pops’ Workshop flashed in my mind. It was as if the Lord was saying, “Pay attention, this is me.” Instantly, I saw with bitter clarity that not exercising and eating poorly were other manifestations of selfishness.

    They really had nothing to do with my travel schedule; they had to do with me wanting to eat what I wanted and to do (or not do) what I wanted and when I wanted to do it. If I didn’t feel like exercising, I shouldn’t have to. I deserved to spend my time the way wanted to, not how I “should.” If I wanted to have a seconds at dinner or have fries instead of a vegetable, why shouldn’t I have it? I deserved to have what I wanted!2

    The hits just kept on coming, and next, the Lord spoke to me about dissatisfaction. Earlier that morning, as I was walking from my car to the airport terminal, I was feeling a bit depressed at having to leave home again after a very short weekend home. I had returned home on Friday, a day later than usual, and on Sunday, I was already headed back to the airport. I felt stuck, despising my life on the road, and feeling anything but contented.

    Back on the jet bridge, waiting to get on the plane for Virginia, I realized that my discontent was yet another side of pride. Discontent: a “lack of satisfaction with one’s possessions, status, or situation; a sense of grievance; dissatisfaction.”3 Pride-born selfishness is the progenitor of discontent and the enemy of contentment. It says, “I should have my life how I want it. It is unfair, unjust, and unacceptable for me not to have things my way.” How dare the world not deliver life on my terms? But as a Christian, am I not really saying, “God, not your will be done, but mine?” In my discontent, I am, in effect, saying to God, “I know what is needed in my life better than you do.”

    To put a little icing on the cake of discontentment, my Bible reading for that day included Philippians 4. Paul, writing to the church at Philippi, says:

    I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. I can do everything through him who gives me strength.
    Philippians 4:11-13 NIV

    If anyone had reason to be discontented, Paul certainly did. Scholars tell us that his letter to the Philippian church was written after he had been, at various times, threatened, arrested, beaten, stoned and left for dead, imprisoned, and shipwrecked, with most of those calamities happening more than once. Yet he was content. I was seriously put out that I had to travel for my job. I think I was missing something important.

    An Object Lesson in Selfishness

    On that travel day, now aboard the plane and en route to Virginia, I was journaling some of my reflections on selfishness and discontent when I was suddenly convicted of yet another instance of selfishness.

    I was seated next to an older woman who was traveling by herself. She had accidentally left all her reading material in her checked bag and had nothing to do except peruse the in-flight magazine.4 It was obvious that she wanted to talk to somebody. I did not want it to be me. Usually, when on a plane I was quick to put on my noise-canceling headphones and immerse myself in a book, a movie, a game, or almost anything besides engaging a seatmate in conversation. So, knowing that my neighbor was bored and wanted to talk and knowing that she was left with nothing else to do, I did what you would expect. Put on my headphones and piously and pointedly spent my time catching up on my Bible reading and praying.

    As I ended my prayer time and started journaling, with my seatmate sitting silently beside me, I finally woke up and stopped analyzing what God was saying and started actually listening to it. I put my things away and engaged my seatmate in conversation for the next two and a half hours. I had to set aside my selfish desire for solitude to ease someone else’s anxiety and boredom. I had to put a stranger’s ill-defined needs above my needs. Incidentally, but not surprisingly, it was a very pleasant conversation with a caring woman who had led a very interesting life.

    Pride: The Mother of All Sins

    Self-glorifying pride has been the mother of all manner of sin in my life. Pride births selfishness, greed, anger, discontent, impatience, jealousy, lying and deceit. That list gives us a pretty fair start on Paul’s enumeration of the works of the flesh in Galatians 5.5

    We should not be surprised by the destructive power and malignancy of Pride. It is the first sin the enemy taught our Mother and Father in the Garden of Eden. “God is holding out on you. You deserve better. Why should you be kept from having what you want? Go ahead, take it!”

    The antidote to Pride is Jesus. By knowing him and spending time with him, we begin to learn that we have been chasing the wrong things. Joy and contentment, so much greater than our desires and happiness, are ours when we know that we are known and loved by he, who is the beginning, center, and end of all things. In him, we find what our souls long for. Then, we can become lovers of others instead of prideful lovers of self.

    1. I wonder how much our spiritual health could be improved by spending time thinking about how our sin patterns overlap and intersect. ↩︎
    2. Full disclosure: Years later, I am retired, and I still struggle with getting enough exercise and eating properly. The problem was not traveling! ↩︎
    3. “Discontent.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/discontent. Accessed 14 Nov. 2024. ↩︎
    4. It may seem strange to think of it, but there was no on-board WiFi at this time, and many flights had no on-board entertainment. They did have airline magazines, which most people read only as a last resort. ↩︎
    5. “Now the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.” Galatians 5:19-21, ESV ↩︎
  • Chapter 19: A Place of My Own

    Chapter 19: A Place of My Own

    The rain fell, the rivers rose, and the winds blew and pounded that house. Yet it didn’t collapse, because its foundation was on the rock.
    Matthew 7:25

    Not long after my lessons on pride and selfishness, sitting with my director in prayer, I once again found myself in the Workshop. As usual, I had not sought the workshop and so had no agenda. My Pops was, as usual, working near the door. No sooner had I entered than he turned to me and said, “Shouldn’t you be building your own workshop?” My Pop’s abrupt question was a surprise but wasn’t completely unexpected. I had been picking up clues that the workshop was a place of healing, growing, and learning but not a place to dwell. It is a workshop, not a home.

    Of course, I was not to be banished from the presence of the Trinity. God makes his home in us, and he invites us to make our home him. But my particular experience of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in my Pops’ Workshop was ending. It was an intensive — a boot camp of sorts. A boot camp is not a place to dwell. We learn the basics, albeit intensely. The foundation is laid, and then it is time to move on to put into practice what we have learned while we continue to learn and grow.

    Me? Really?

    Even though I knew deep down inside that I would not always remain in the Workshop, the idea that I would build my own workshop took me aback. It seemed a very unlikely thing for me to do. I quickly came up with any number of reasons I could not “build my own workshop.” What would it even mean for me to build a workshop? After all, my Pops’s Workshop does not have a physical location. (At least I don’t think it does!) My Pops’ Workshop is his, created by him. I can’t create something on par with God. My workshop could be at best a faint shadow of his.

    Even if I figured out what it would mean to build “my place,” what would be the point? In my Pops’ Workshop, I encountered the loving, healing, and transformative presence of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. If I built a workshop, anyone who showed up hoping for something similar would be sorely disappointed. The only person they would meet in my workshop would be me! God was doing remarkable and wonderful things for me. What could I do for anyone in “my place?” Even though Jesus had directly invited me to participate in his work of restoring beauty to souls, I certainly didn’t feel up to the task.

    I had (and still have) a long way to go in trusting Jesus. He would not send me out on an impossible mission. If he calls me to something, there must be a way to accomplish it. Critically, I was forgetting that Jesus had invited me to work with him. He was not subcontracting work to me. I would not be on my own; he would be there with me.

    But don’t judge my lack of trust too harshly. I had not yet started my studies to become a spiritual director and so I had not learned that people cannot bring peace, healing, wholeness, or anything really worth something to anyone. The best we can do is hold space, listen well, and prayerfully support people as they come into the presence of the Lord. We can assist, but without Jesus, nothing happens.

    Nonetheless, at that moment, I was doubtful of building a place of my own. How often do we hear an invitation from God, and then, believing that we must do everything in our own strength, we rush for the exit, knowing that, left to our own devices, we will fail? But we are not left to our own devices and we don’t have to do everything in our own strength.

    We are invited to join God in the work he is doing, not to brush him aside and take over. He doesn’t need our help; really, he doesn’t. He is capable of doing whatever he wants without us. He does not need us, but he wants us. He wants us involved in the ongoing work of revealing his kingdom of the heavens here on Earth. By myself, I can do very little; working in alignment with God’s plans, I can let his love and power flow through me to accomplish his purposes. I don’t need to do it all, and I certainly don’t need to do it alone.

    To underscore that I don’t need to do everything, during a time of further silence, Jesus showed me that I would not have to build my workshop myself.  I saw people coming with tools and armloads of lumber to help me build my workshop.  By this time I had decided to pursue training as a director, but that training was still months off. Nonetheless, I was certain that some of the help would be from the School of Direction.1  I also believed, with my director, that there would be other help that I didn’t know about now and couldn’t foresee or expect.2 

    A Foundation God Can Build On

    A few days later, I saw a vision of my workshop “under construction.” At first, I didn’t know what I was seeing.  My Pop’s Workshop is deep in a forest, surrounded by dense woods. I had assumed that mine would be similarly situated, but I saw the top of a wind-swept knoll or hill covered with long, dry grass like you find in the high desert of Northern Arizona.  The forest around my Pops’ Workshop is lush and inviting. What I was being shown seemed dry, desolate, and lonely. It did not look inviting, like a place anyone would want to go.

    At first, I thought the hill was topped with a patch of bare dirt.  However, as I continued to look at it I could see that there was a foundation in the ground.  My natural mind assumed it would be a cement slab, but I soon knew that wasn’t right. Instead of a poured concrete slab, the foundation was made of stacked stones.  That difference was only mildly interesting until I noticed something surprising. “Pride” rock, that huge, imposing, fearsome rock that I could not shift from the stream below Pops’ Workshop, was there as part of the stone foundation.  It was laying on its side, its triangular shape helping to level the foundation where it met the slope of the hill.  The word “pride” was facing out, now written horizontally. I soon realized that, in addition to pride rock, all the other rocks I had pulled out of the well and given to Jesus were being used as the foundation of my workshop.  The entire stacked-stone foundation seemed to be made up of stones I had given to Jesus in the stream below the Workshop.

    I was puzzled. There were many more stones in the foundation than I had given to Jesus; at least more than I was aware of giving him. As I sat with that puzzle, I came to see that the foundation stones are the fruit of surrender.  Any time I have surrendered to Jesus, allowing him to know me more fully, he has added to the foundation. For many years, not just the few months I had been experiencing the Workshop, Jesus been preparing the foundation of my workshop, waiting for me to discover it and be ready for me to build on it.

    Jesus can build on the foundation of our surrender; I am confident that he can build on no other. But this feels counterintuitive to the modern, Western mind. We value strength and pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps. We look down on weakness and surrender or giving up. Giving up and giving Jesus the rocks of my sinfulness and brokenness is weakness.  It is an admission that I can’t do it. To be whole, I have to give up all of myself, especially the parts that my pride would rather withhold.  We must surrender our desire to be the gods of our own puny and ineffectual kingdoms if we are to enter Jesus’ kingdom of the heavens.

    Being weak to be strong is no surprise to one who reads the Bible.

    • To cling to our lives is to lose them; to find our lives we must lose them for Jesus’ sake.3
    • The first will be last and the last will be first.4
    • We must receive the kingdom like little children.5
    • Our weakness reveals God’s strength.6

    My surrender, self-exposure, and admission that I can’t do it became the place where Jesus can be strong in and through me.  Surrender is the perfect building material for a foundation.

    If you want to grow deeper in your faith, to have a personal, impactful relationship with Jesus, but can’t seem to find your way to that, it may be a good idea to spend some time with Jesus, asking about your foundation. What are you holding on to that he needs to complete the foundation he can build on? It may be a sin, shame, guilt, anger, pride, or something else. Whatever it is, pray for the strength to be weak, to let Jesus have all of it, especially the nasty and unpleasant parts. He already knows about them, you lose nothing by bringing them to him and you have everything gain.

    1. That assurance was well placed. ↩︎
    2. This proved to be true. I have found unexpected help and support from organizations like the ESDA, Mosaic Formation, the Arizona Spiritual Formation Society, and the Apprentice Institute and people associated with them. ↩︎
    3. Mt 10:39, 16:25; Mk 8:35; Luke 9:24; Jn 12:25 ↩︎
    4. Mt 19:30, 20:16; Mk 9:35, 10:31; Lk 13:30 ↩︎
    5. Mt 18:2-4; Mk 10:15; Lk 18:17 ↩︎
    6. 1Co 2:3-5; 2Co 12:9 ↩︎