Christian spiritual discipline comes with challenges. In the practice of these disciplines, we encounter the truest parts of ourselves, however beautiful or ugly they may be, and do it all in the living and loving presence of God.
Disciplines are a means of living a Jesus-like life.
Every piece of our lives is telling God’s story, the Gospel. Are we learning to listen, understand, and live into it?
I know I’m learning this a lot more slowly and brokenly (Is that a word?) than I want to. I wonder if it’s because I’m not paying attention to the narrative the Lord is telling. Instead, I often still cling to an old story with a terrible ending, featuring me as the main character.
When we begin with curiosity, an infinite world of discovery and exploration becomes available to us. But if we don’t have a strong desire to know or learn something, we could spend all the time in the world reading about it, being taught about it, experiencing it, yet never understand it. It would never reach us in our interior worlds and never be the catalyst for the growth and transformation we’re hoping for.
Even before we are at the limits of our strength, our charge is not to let go of him.
A weary mind is a mind that raises itself as the authority. The ultimate decider of good and right, should and shouldn’t. Some minds may be able to bear up under that burden longer, or subscribe to the idea of the hive mind to reach balanced conclusions, but all will fall eventually. The burden of trying is too much. Because our minds were never made to be God’s mind. The mind of Christ (which is God’s mind) is the one that can bear all information across all time and beyond and come to the right conclusions without faltering or breaking. His mind is never weary and always able and always good.
The work of spiritual investment is taking what is not right to the one who can make it right. It’s not about bringing guilt and shame, but about being exposed before him, finding that place perfectly safe and perfectly good. And the comfort of knowing that he will not just smooth our egos or tell us it’s fine when it’s not fine. He sits with our soul and he guides, and he has hard conversations with us, and gives us his power to be healed.
Regarding time and spiritual investment, let’s begin with expectations. We can have a lot of assumptions about what time spent in spiritual investment can look like. If you’ve grown up in a religious setting, you may have been taught that a proper period of time spent in spiritual investment consists of at least an hour devoutly sitting in a quiet corner, reading your Bible, and praying off of note cards for all the illnesses and traveling mercies of the ladies in your women’s bible study group. That is certainly one way to invest spiritually. But it is not the only way. And it may not even be the best way for you.
I think sometimes we can believe that our being ashamed of how inadequate we are is the same as humility. It’s not. Shame makes us feel unfix-able. Shame makes us feel not good enough, yet expecting ourselves to be good enough. How can we measure up to those kind of expectations? We can’t.
But a gift sitting untouched on a shelf is still a gift. Letting it sit there is not the same as its absence. Perhaps we have to start looking in its direction to see it. To remember it….To let the Peace of Christ settle our hearts and minds and souls.
When I’m trying to do it myself, it’s because I believe I “should”. Like I owe someone something.
I don’t. And you don’t. All that we owe has already been paid.
