A Place For The God-Hungry

This afternoon I watched basketball.  It was not the NBA playoffs.  Teams from the "Church Under the Bridge" and our own church played in our Community Center.  The afternoon was spent watching high school kids as well as some of our adults play basketball (with referees and awards at the end).  It was a great afternoon and was fun to see groups from these two churches play and get acquainted with one another.  God has a way of working through playing basketball together, eating hot dogs together, and having conversations with people like the guys I talked with this afternoon.

 
In order to see the potential of ordinary moments, I have found that I must regularly focus my attention on God.  Practicing some of the spiritual disciplines helps me do just that.  These disciplines have a way of cultivating the soul.  Like a garden, my soul must be cultivated. 

 
I like John Wesley’s insights at this point.  He once wrote about his own discipline before the Lord.  He wrote: "Here then I am, far from the busy ways of men.  I sit down alone; only God is here, in his presence I open, I read his book; for this end, to find the way to heaven."  Wesley saw the value of spending time alone with God, living in his presence, and listening to his voice in Scripture.

 
Wesley once received a note from a minister who was complaining that he was too busy to find time for prayer and reflection.  Wesley replied, "O begin!  Fix some time each day for prayer and Scripture.  Do it; whether you like it or not.  It is for your life!  Else you will be a triter all your days."  (Wesley, Standard Sermons)

 
Wesley is right.  Nurturing my heart is not a luxury.  It is a necessity.  Otherwise, I will not see life through the eyes of Jesus.  Nor will I be attentive to what he is doing or wishes to do through me.

 
Brother Lawrence (17th century) spoke of "the practice of the presence of God."  While cooking and washing dishes in a kitchen for forty years, he learned that he could "talk to the God of pots and pans."  In his book Seekers After Mature Faith, Glenn Hinson writes concerning Brother Lawrence:

 
"The longer I have studied his conversations and letters, the more convinced I have become that his secret was simply to fall head over heels in love with God and let that transfuse and transform everything he was doing."

 
I will be away from my blog until the weekend.  See you then. 

Have you seen "YouVersion" of the Bible?  This is worth a look.  A variety of translations are available.  Comes with the capacity to include your notes and observations of various texts.

 
An interesting interview with N.T. Wright by Trevin Wax.

 
An audio interview with Tim Keller (Manhattan, NY) and author of NY Times Best Seller, The Reason for God.

 
A fine post by Terry Rush on grief.

 
Scot McKnight linked to a wonderful post written by a Dawn Husnick, a nurse.  Very good.

 
A nice post by Bobby Valentine in which he discusses what he is reading. 

 
William Willimon on Thinking about the Resurrection.

If there was an image that describes many of us, it would be that of a tired man or woman on a treadmill.  The treadmill that began rather slowly has begun to move faster and faster.  What had been a challenging speed has now become overwhelming.  If you are like many, you are doing well just to keep from falling down.  You wonder at times how much longer you can hold on.

 
Many of us live each day as if we are on a never-ending treadmill.  The treadmill goes faster and faster as we scurry from one appointment to the next.  We move from one child’s piano lesson to the other child’s basketball practice.  On and on it goes.  Life becomes a blur punctuated by birth and death with a flurry of exhausting activity in between.  Cell phones ring.  E-mail piles up.  Meanwhile, we wonder whether we are really living or just existing.

 
If you are like many people, the days, the weeks, and the months seem to pass by so quickly.  Yet, there are those moments when you step off the treadmill long enough to think, to feel, or to pray.  You remember again the crushing burden you are carrying.  You think about the failed relationship with your daughter or son.  You contemplate the business failure that eats away at your sense of self-worth.

 
"Does anyone else feel like me?" you wonder.  After all, many people don’t seem to struggle at all — at least that is the way it appears.  When you look at some of your friends, it seems that they have everything going for them.  Yet, life is going fast and can get so complicated; you wonder if things will ever really be any better than this for you.  Maybe part of the problem is the pace of life.  Yet, I wonder if it is not much more.  I wonder if life on the treadmill has a way of disguising what is at the core of the soul.  

 
I suspect that for a lot of people being on the treadmill is one way of avoiding looking at one’s own life honestly.  It keeps everything at a superficial level.  They just don’t deal with their issues.  Richard Foster has said:

 
"Superficiality is the curse of our age.  The doctrine of instant satisfaction is a primary spiritual problem.  The desperate need today is not for a greater number of intelligent people or gifted people, but for deep people."

 
Unfortunately for many of us, we have just stopped growing, maturing, developing, etc.  Instead we have grown stale and our rut just keeps getting deeper.

 
John Gardner, former Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, spoke at the commencement ceremony of Stanford University on June 16, 1991.  Gardner said:

I explored the question of why civilizations die and how they sometimes renew themselves, and the puzzle of why some men and women go to seed while others remain vital all of their lives . . . I’m talking about people who have stopped learning, or growing, or trying .  .  . I do worry about men and women functioning far below the level of their possibilities . . . As you settle into your adult lives, you cannot write off the danger of complacency, boredom, and growing rigidity, imprisoned by your own comfortable habits and opinions.  A famous French writer once said, "There are people whose clocks stop at a certain point in their lives."  

This morning I was skimming through my newest copy of Conversations (a journal that is focused on spiritual transformation).  I began reading an article entitled C. S. Lewis and "The Region of Awe" (David C. Downing).  This paragraph caught my attention:

 
Lewis defined the basic Christian walk not in terms of striving after ethical ideals but in terms of mystical transformation.  In Mere Christianity he explained succinctly that "every Christian is to become a little Christ."  He added that "putting on Christ" is "not one among many jobs a Christian has to do; it is not a sort of special exercise for the top class.  It is the whole of Christianity."  (Lewis, Mere Christianity, p. 120)

 
There is this sense in which Christ is being formed in me.  Yes, I am imitating Christ in the sense that I want my life to be a reflection of his.  I want to take on his values.  I want to take on his sense of priority (as in seeking first the kingdom).  I want to look at the way he handled himself in various situations and take my cues from him.

 
Yet, this is more than the kind of imitation that I did in second grade.  I can vaguely remember holding a Big Mo pencil in my left hand and trying to trace the letters of the alphabet.  Underneath the sheet of paper on which I was writing, each letter had been printed.  Now, I was to place my paper over these letters and trace each one of them.  There is something to be said for this, but living the Christlike life is even more than this.  

 
Something is happening in me.  I am a "new creation."  There is a newness that I am experiencing in Christ.  In other words, while on one level I am intentionally trying to live like Jesus, there is something else at work here.  The Holy Spirit is at work in me forming and shaping me into someone new — like Christ.

 
So what does all of this really mean?

 
1.  It means that the "new me" doesn’t depend upon how well I can perform or how good I can be.  The Christlike life is not based on who can perform the best.

 
2.  It means that while there are ethical mandates, the Christlike life is centered around something that is happening inside me that results in an outside expression.

 
3.  It means I should not resort to saying, "That’s just the way I am."  Rather, we should think in terms of how God wishes to change us and re-create us.