I’ve found myself revisiting and relearning old truths about who I am and who God is and what this means for how I ought to spend my days. And this can be such a source of frustration for me at times, because while I understand that learning involves mistakes, I don’t like to repeat the same ones. I long for new truths, for bursting growth above ground, but God seems to keep drawing my attention back to my roots. I want to learn efficiently, but God gently guides me toward the slow and steady. I detect the not so subtle ways that our consumer driven, productivity obsessed culture is shaping…
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Quiet Moments: The Challenge of Distractions
The world has grown wildly distracted over the last decade. Though not a particularly profound observation, it is an important one because our increasingly distracted existence had all sorts of implications for our overall wellbeing. However of particular concern is the way it is the way it is diminishing our spirituality. So many of us are struggling with desperation for meaning and purpose because our energy and attention is unnecessarily scattered. When we permit distractions to become the guiding force in our lives, we surrender to a reactive life. A life that is composed of one miscellaneous decision/action after another. A distracted life needs the anchor of quiet moments to…
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Quiet Moments: The Challenge of Time
My heart has longed for many years to be more disciplined about carving out consistent spaces in my life for quiet. I’ve sometimes thought it was because I wasn’t putting forth enough effort. I believed that I simply needed to try harder. But when I asked why I was failing and why it was so hard for me, I began to notice some thought patterns that kept preventing or interrupting the daily practice of quiet moments. The first one being the belief that I don’t have the time. Quiet time has often been delayed or deleted from my days when I perceive that time is scarce. What I’ve come to…
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The Importance of Quiet Moments
All my life I had heard of how God wanted to be first in my life. And then I vividly remember a moment sitting in a college class listening to a religion professor give a lecture about how God’s desire was not to be our first priority. I remember a generic list of priorities appearing squeakily across the dry erase board. “God” filled the number one slot and the professor squeaked a line straight through it and proceeded to draw a circle around the list of priorities and told us that that was how God wanted to participate in our lives—not by being first, but by being everything. God’s desire is to consume our…
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New Year’s Eve Question Jar
For me, the ideal New Year’s Eve is one that is lighthearted, celebratory, and reflective. The reflection element is what sets it apart from all the other get togethers and with hours together waiting for the new year to arrive, it lends itself well to some deeper conversation. We chose this year to pick one question at a time and all take turns answering the same question. It would also work to have each person draw a different question. It’s all reflection. I’ve typically been drawn more to journaling my reflections and dreams for the upcoming year, and I’m still in the process of working that all out. But discussing…
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31 Questions for a New Year
Each year, I find myself a little overwhelmed in both the best and worst sense by the prospect of a New Year. I postpone any sort of new year/old year contemplation until after Christmas, which leaves me exactly one week to recenter for the upcoming year. It’s uninspired and hurried and not nearly thoughtful enough to encourage any sort of lasting change. Hence why some people have become aggressively “anti-resolutions”. And while in my experience, I have had little success with traditional resolutions, I do find that the fresh beginning of a new year provides a unique energy to reset my mind, body, and spirit. It’s important to have pillars…
