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).