Come What May - Take 2

I’ve been thinking about my Come What May entry for a while after a comment an agnostic friend gave me about that entry. I completely paraphrase and butcher the actual quote, but the essence of the comment was “the reason Christian’s dont turn to God is not that they don’t believe, it’s that God isn’t real to them in their everyday lives.”

Strangely enough I think he is right. We go to church on Sundays, mid-week if we have time. We might pick up and read our Bible’s during the week if we have time. In truth how many of us take time everyday, without exception, to spend time with God.

To “Practice the Presence of God” as Brother Lawrence would put it.

I began pondering how we as Christians can go about that. The most common is to set time aside everyday to read the Bible and pray. While it is a good and worthy exercise that I truly believe every Christian must be doing, in truth I have to admit, in my life that at times that becomes just another routine activity I do.

And with that thought in mind I picked up a book I purchased a while back and began thumbing through it. The book is Spiritual Disciplines Handbook by Adele Ahlberg Calhoun. It’s not a book that one sits down and reads cover to cover. It truly is a handbook that takes 3-5 pages per discipline and describes the discipline, gives scripture and advice on how to practice it. There are almost 70 disciples that it discusses.

While I may not try all of them, there are some that I have tried in the past and am looking at incorporating in to my spiritual life again. Some new ones I have found that seem to me that they would be beneficial.

The amazing thing is, every human is different. Not every discipline will work for every person. But God in His creativity has led men and women throughout the ages to create different ways of practicing His presence so that everyone would have the opportunity to experience the fullness of God in their lives.

So my encouragement to you would be to take time to learn God’s ‘unforced rhythms of grace.’ Take the time everyday to make God real to your everyday life. So that when the time comes you turn to Him first (and not last).

Unknown Destinations

Mark 11:1-11 

Take a moment and imagine the irony imbedded in Holy Week.  Nothing seems to happen as it should. First, on Palm Sunday Jesus enters Jerusalem in triumph.  The people are praising Jesus and waving palms, greeting Jesus as a victorious king.  But less than a week later those same people condemn Jesus and by Good Friday he is dying on a cross.

Then on Holy Saturday, as Jesus is lying in the tomb, it appears that evil has won.  Satan has succeeded in killing God.  Imagine the fear and disillusionment the disciples must have felt.  But then on Sunday morning it is all reversed as Jesus rises from the dead, the victorious king he was praised to be only a week earlier. 

The same is true of our lives.  We may never understand where God is leading, or what is happening.  We may feel like God has failed at being God.  However, as Holy Week proves, God is a God of unpredictability.  God will always surprise with the best possible outcome from any situation, good or bad.

Wake Up

For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Live as children of light (for the fruit of the light consists in all goodness, righteousness and truth) and find out what pleases the Lord. Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them. For it is shameful even to mention what the disobedient do in secret. But everything exposed by the light becomes visible, for it is light that makes everything visible. This is why it is said:  “Wake up, O sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.”  Ephesians 5:8-14

It is very easy as we go about our daily lives to fall asleep.  We get run down by the monotony of life.  Get up, go to work, come home, go to bed...and tomorrow do it all again.  Occasionally we will do something special, go on vacation, go to a concert have a special evening with friends and family.  However, for the most part, life is just a continuing succession of repetition.

One of the things about the Lenten season we are in right now, is that it is a call to wake up.  It is a reminder that this life has a purpose.  We are not just supposed to go through the motions of life.  We are to live life to its fullest potential.

Yet, because of sin we often do not live life to its fullest potential.  We get distracted by it.  It wears us down.  And in many cases causes the continuing succession of repetition that life can so easily become, to be the thing that most separates us from God.  Not because we want to separate ourselves from God, but because we loose focus and put life on ‘auto-pilot.’

Take the opportunity this Lenten season provides to examine your life.  See those areas you need to work on.  See the sin that separates you from God.  Remember that life has a purpose.