must decrease

Opening Prayer: O God, help me avoid pandering to accolades and applause, and willingly disappear into you instead.  (A Heart Exposed by Steven James)

Scripture: John 3:29-30

Journal: What does decreasing look like for you these days?  How are you trying to increase?

Reflection: The bride belongs to the bridegroom.  The friend who attends the bridegroom waits and listens for him, and is full of joy when he hears the bridegroom's voice.  That joy is mine, and it is now complete.  He must increase and I must decrease. ~John 3:29-30

    There is just no way around it.  As much as I might like to increase, life with God is about me decreasing.  Just ask John the Baptist, he had it all in perspective.  Although I'm sure it was hard, even for him, to keep it that way.  The rule of the Kingdom is simple: I must decrease.  It is not an option, it is a must.  Otherwise I will just be in his way.

    My desire for attention must decrease, that I might cast all the attention on him.  My desire to be great must decrease, that I might make him great.  My desire for affirmation and acclaim must decrease, that he might be affirmed and lifted up above all.  My desire to have impact must decrease, that he might actually have eternal impact.  He is the one who is essential here, not me.

    You see, the bride does not belong to me (any more than she belonged to John), she belongs to Jesus. He is her groom.  He is her lover.  Her desire must be for Him, not for me.  I am just the one waiting and watching and listening for him to come, so that I might help join their hands in an eternal embrace of love.  And then I must step aside.

Prayer

Closing Prayer: Forgive me, O God, when I get this backwards.  Help me to work to make you great, not myself.  Teach me what it means that I must decrease, for it is so against my nature.  Amen.

being led

Opening Prayer: Thank you, O God, for meeting me here in ways far beyond my knowing.  I thank you for working in me in ways far deeper than my awareness.  I thank you for your love.  It enfolds me even when I am most resistant to your presence.  I thank you for your grace.  It offers yourself to me even when my back is turned.  I thank you, as I come to you this day, for the infinite variety of your creative power in my life.  I thank you for the infinite diversity that you have crafted into me.  It makes me a unique person.  As I think upon this, I pray that you will enable me to be truly thankful for the creation gifts you have given me.  Enable me to offer myself to you in them for the work you want to do in me and through me in my life and in the world. (Invitation to a Journey by M. Robert Mulholland) 

Scripture: John 21:15-19

Journal: How is Jesus calling you to give your life away in loving service to him?

Reflection: Do you ever wonder what all Jesus was trying to teach Simon Peter as they walked together on the beach only days after the resurrection?  Of course He was offering him a beautiful restoration, giving him three opportunities to profess his love after the three denials only days before.  And of course He was trying to teach Peter that the most important question in all of the spiritual life is "Do you truly love me more than these?"  Whatever our these may be.  And of course He was trying to show Peter that in the days and weeks—and even years—ahead that undying, passionate love for Jesus is the only way to truly feed the sheep without feeding on the sheep.

     But I also wonder if one of the main things He was really trying to teach Peter was that until our lives are ordered and determined by Jesus' love and His kingdom, then we really aren't following Him at all, but only following ourselves.  I think that's why He makes that disturbing statement in verses 18-19.  Almost as if to say, Okay, okay, when you were younger you called your own shots and determined your own agenda.  But when you get older, when your life of faith grows and matures, you must put yourself completely under my control.  That's what this life of faith is really all about.  You must stretch out your empty hands and let me do all the leading.  You must operate by my plans and my agenda.  I must be the one that determines how and where you spend your days, even if it means going to places that you'd rather not go.  That's what following me really looks like.  There is a shift that must take place deep within you; a shift from leading to being led.  First you are led (by Me) and then, and only then, you lead.  True service always involves following before it involves leading. 

Prayer

Closing Prayer: My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going.  I do not see the road ahead of me.  I cannot know for certain where it will end.  Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so.  But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you.  And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing.  I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire.  And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it.  Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem lost and in the shadow of death.  I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone. (Thoughts in Solitude by Thomas Merton)

reorientation

Opening Prayer: Set my feet on the rock, O Lord, and give me a frim place to stand.  Put a new song in my mouth, a hymn of praise to you, my God.  Amen.

Scripture: Psalm 40:1-4

Journal: What word best describes life for you right now: orientation, disorientation, or reorientation?  What do you think God is to in that?  How does this Psalm offer you perspective or hope?

Reflection: I waited patiently on the Lord; he turned to me and heard my cry.  He lifted me out of the slimy pit, out of the mud and mire; he set my feet on a rock and gave me a firm place to stand.  He put a new song in my mouth; a hymn of praise to our God.  Many will see and fear and put their trust in the Lord.  Blessed is the man who makes the Lord his trust. . ." (Psalm 40:1-4)

     It is a pattern woven into the story of faith: order, disorder, reorder; birth, death, rebirth; orientation, disorientation, reorientation.  It happens over and over and over again.  It makes me wonder, when seasons of chaos or disorder come, how in the world we can possibly be surprised.  But we are.  The life of faith is seasonal, but there is a reliable pattern to it all.  After all, he has made everything beautiful in its own time. (Ecclesiastes 2:11)  And that truth, and this pattern, should help us to be able to navigate the seasons of chaos whenever they come.

    At the core of all chaos lies the question, "Can God really be trusted?"  What do I really believe about him?  Is he always at work (the way Jesus claims in John 5:17) and is his heart for me good?  If so, then even in the midst of the anxiety and uncertainty of disorder and chaos, I can rely on the fact that he us ultimately going to bring about something new and beautiful, both within and around me, that could come about in no other way.  So even when I find myself at the bottom of the slimy pit (which is often), wallowing in the mud and mire, I can rest assured that ultimately he will come.  He will come, he will lift me up, he will set my feet on a rock, and he will put a new and beautiful song in my mouth.  Therefore, I can actually wait patiently on him.  That is the hope that life with God offers.  That is the hope of this pattern of life and faith: disorder is always followed by reorder, death by rebirth, disorientation by reorientation.  Something new and beautiful is being born that I cannot yet see.  Thanks be to God.

Prayer

Closing Prayer: Help us to trust you, O Lord, even in the midst of the chaos and disorder this life can sometimes throw at us.  Help us to realize that you are way bigger than the circumstances of this life and can use all things to accomplish your good and beautiful purposes in us.  Help us to have faith in you, even when we can’t see beyond the pain and disorientation of our current circumstances.  We pray in the name and power of Jesus.  Amen.  

the heart of god

Opening Prayer: Lord Jesus, thank you for showing us the heart of the Father.  Thank you for making a way for us to rejoin the intimacy of the Trinity.  Truly, in you we have indeed received grace upon grace.  Thank you.  Amen.

Scripture: John 1:16-18

Journal: How have you received grace upon grace from Jesus these days?  What is the life he is inviting you into?  What does he show you about the heart of God?

Reflection: No one has ever seen God, but God the One and Only, who is at the Father’s side, has made him known.  What extraordinary words!  We were born out of the love, joy, and laughter of the Trinity.  And through Jesus we get a little peek into the depth of love and intimacy that exists in the heart of the Godhead.  And we, of all things, are invited to join in that Dance of endless delight.  It is what we were created for.  It is the deepest longing of our hearts.  It seems too good to be true—grace upon grace upon grace upon grace.  What we see of God through the eyes (and the life) of his Son should change everything about us.  It should capture our hearts with such love that everything in our hearts and souls should be seized by the power of his great affection.  Thanks be to God!

Prayer

Closing Prayer: To the one who is three; to the three who are one.  I know of only one way to make sense of my senseless life: disappear into the love flowing from your words.  Your story tells me all that needs to be said, fills all that needs to be filled, restores all that has fallen apart, and heals all that has been infected with selfishness and greed.  The world is confusing and even though my questions pester me, I see that everything will make final, perfect sense, but only when I look into the laughing, illuminating light of your eyes.  Mystery. (A Heart Exposed by Steven James)

kingdom life

Opening Prayer: O God of peoples, nations and history; you who became incarnate in the midst of economic, social and political injustice; you who call us to incarnate the reality of your kingdom in the midst of the world’s destructive values, structures and dynamics; we confess that we would much rather limit our relationship with you to the comfortable confines of our own insulated world.  We are prone to withdraw and create islands of security within which we can live in some degree of peace and comfort without having to see the pain and anguish of the world outside.  We are tempted to limit our spirituality to the narrow boundaries of our self-circumscribed world.  O God of justice and mercy, help us to see that to be conformed to the image of Christ is to be thrust out into the world as agents of your redeeming, healing, liberating, transforming grace.  Help us to see that our growth toward wholeness in Christ cannot move toward its fruition apart from our life in the world.  Guide us in our consideration of this reality and help us to be open and responsive to what you are saying to us. (Invitation to a Journey by M. Robert Mulholland)

Scripture: Mark 10:35-45

Journal: What do the verses today do within you?  Where do they cause to come alive?  And where do they disturb or disrupt you?  What are the words of Mark 10 calling you to today? 

Reflection: A Christian leader is not a leader because he announced a new idea and tries to convince others of its worth; he is a leader because he faces the world with eyes full of expectation, with the expertise to take away the veil that covers its hidden potential.  Christian leadership is called ministry precisely to express that in the service of others new life can be brought about.  It is this service which gives eyes to see the flower breaking through the cracks in the street, ears to hear a word of forgiveness muted by hatred and hostility, and hands to feel new life under the cover of death and destruction. ~Henri Nouwen

 

Prayer

Closing Prayer: God of our creation and re-creation, you who are constantly at work to shape me in the wholeness of Christ, you know the hardness of the structures of my being that resist your shaping touch.  You know the deep inner rigidities of my being that reject your changing grace.  By your grace soften my hardness and rigidity; help me to become pliable in your hands.  Even as I pray this, may there be a melting of my innate resistance to your transforming love.  Amen. (Invitation to a Journey by M. Robert Mulholland Jr.)

jars of clay

Opening Prayer:

Dear Potter,

The lump of clay that I am

keeps crying for some form

day by day

I yearn for you to mold me.

This is a trust-song, Lord

I am in your hands like clay

I am ready to be transformed:

I expect

     to be molded

I expect

     to be beautiful

I expect

     to be loved.

And if by chance

someone should drop me

as your apprentices sometimes do,

I expect

     to be hurt.

I’m just trying to say

I have surrendered

     to your dream for me

I am in your hands

     like clay. 

—Seasons of Your Heart by Macrina Wiederkehr

Scripture: 2 Corinthians 4:6-7

Journal: How aware are you of the treasure that lies within you?  How does that humble you?  How does it make you grateful?  

Reflection: The older I get, the more appropriate the words “treasure in jars of clay” have become, and I don’t just mean physically.  Oh sure, my body is indeed getting older and “wasting away” little by little, but what I am talking about is more on the inside.  Seeing the all-surpassing beauty of this priceless treasure sheds light on everything that is around it, and shows it all for what it really is.  I am amazed at how much angst and anxiety and fear and insecurity still dwells in my heart.  I thought by now I would have been past all of that.  But it seems that the older I get the more pronounced it has become, or the more noticeable, it is hard to say which.  

     Either way, it ends me up in the same place—both humble and grateful.  Humble at what a flawed and imperfect container I am, and grateful that God would somehow see fit to place himself within me.  As Evelyn Underhill once put it, I am “a created dwelling place or sanctuary of the uncreated and invisible Divine Life.”  Simply amazing.

Prayer

Closing Prayer: Thank you, O God, that you have deposited the treasure of yourself in this old, broken jar of clay.

voices

Opening Prayer: Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good, and you will delight in the richest of fare.  Give ear and come to me; hear me, that your soul may live. (Isaiah 55:2-3)

Scripture: Isaiah 55:1-3

Journal: What voices are loudest within you these days?  Do they give life to your soul of deplete your soul?  How will you listen and hear that your soul may live?

Reflection: I am full of voices.  So full in fact that it is often hard to discern one voice from another.  The voices of my anxieties, insecurities, and fears are loud and demand constant attention.  And to be honest, when I listen to them they completely drain and deplete my soul.

     God’s voice, on the other hand, is quiet and soft and nonintrusive.  It, by design, can only be heard when my soul is still and silent and at rest.  Which can make hearing it a bit of a challenge.  But when I am finally at a place, and in a space, where I can come to stillness and hear his voice, it has the direct opposite effect on my soul.  God’s voice produces life within me, and peace.  It nourishes and nurtures, it guides and directs, it creates joy and delight.

     My challenge, then, is to listen, listen to him and not allow the more obvious voices to overwhelm and control me.  My job is to give ear, come to him, and hear.  It is a process that will not just happen on its own.  It will not just fall on my head.  It means that I must be intentional.  I must make time and space to quiet all of the voices that negate life, and to listen the still, soft voice of God that nourishes and creates it.  The only question is: “How will I do that today?”

Prayer

Closing Prayer: Lord, teach me to listen.  The times are noisy and my ears are weary with the thousand raucous sounds which continuously assault them.  Give me the spirit of the boy Samuel when he said to Thee, “Speak, for thy servant heareth.”  Let me hear Thee speaking in my heart.  Let me get used to the sound of Thy voice, that its tones may be familiar when the sounds of earth die away and the only sound will be the music of Thy speaking voice.  Amen.  (The Pursuit of God by A. W. Tozer)