Viewing entries tagged
spiritual direction
We need a “rule of life" to steward vision from God so we don’t get distracted. It is a fact of life that maturity, in any form, does not happen to us spontaneously. The life of the Spirit we are called to live into sees both our passions (what makes our hearts come alive) and our discipline (what we commit to regardless of how we feel) as gifts meant for our liberation.
Knowing God as “Abba”, as Jesus does, is the goal of the spiritual life. What we believe about God, and how we attach to God, shapes our understanding of everything around us and within us. Even the version of God we may no longer believe in still has a grip on the deepest recesses of our minds. Part of the work of developing intimacy is parsing through our stories and gaining language for our subconscious attachments, so we might find healing and hope. Our new series ABBA, FATHER will help us to identify how we connect with God now, and how we can repair our attachment so we might lay claim to the beautiful vision Jesus gives us of Who God ultimately is.
To be in Christ is to be in love. It is to receive grace that reminds us of who we truly are. From that unshakeable, eternal place our energies and contributions to the world flow as a product of love. In grace, we find what the deepest part of us desires from love: acceptance, security, empowerment. We must capture a vision of the destination Jesus beckons us to, and the specific obstacles in our way that are a result of our ego, if we want to steward well the gifts God has given us.
Recognizing that we all have different personalities opens us up to two things. First, we realize that not everyone thinks, feels, and acts the way we do, and that’s okay. It’s actually a relief, because we need other ways of seeing the world to broaden our own. This means we can be more graceful to others in how they function. Secondly, our vision of the God-revealed-in-Jesus broadens as we realize Christ is transcendent enough to encompass and redeem all our personalities.
