Category: Spiritual Formation
Meeting God in the Text
Often one of our New Year (or mid-year) resolutions is to be more consistent in reading our Bible. The good news is there a lot of helpful Bible reading plans out there. Unfortunately, too soon our resolve falls by the way side and we chide ourselves for not being faithful or diligent enough. Next year, ...
The Place In Between
This is just too good not to re-post. I wish I'd written it. If you are struggling in waiting, wanting to be anywhere but where you are, grab a cup of coffee, curl up in a comfy chair and read on. It's a long piece and you will be tempted to skim through it just ...
Embodying our Faith
“The spiritual life if first of all a life. It is not merely something to be known and studied. It is to be lived.” Thomas Merton I often remind the groups of women I mentor that the strength of our group and the basis of our own transformation is in living out our faith. Our ...
Love Will Decide Everything
Nothing is more practical than finding God, this is, than falling in Love in a quite absolute, final way. What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination, will affect everything. It will decide what will get you out of bed in the morning, what you do with your evenings, how you spend your ...
Releasing the Old
In his book, When God Interrupts: Finding New Life Through Unwanted Change, Craig Barnes writes, “It is impossible to follow Jesus and not be led away from something. That journey away from the former place and toward the new place is what converts us. Conversion is not simply the acceptance of a theological formula for ...
Defined by Relationship
“In solitude, at last we're able to let the Lord define us the way we are always supposed to be defined: by relationship, the I-thou relationship, in relation to a Presence that demands nothing of us but presence. If we've never lived in the realm of pure presence without our world of achieving, we don't ...
God is the Subject
“Christian spirituality is not a life-project for becoming a better person. It is not about developing a so-called deeper life. We are in on it, to be sure, but we are not the subject. Nor are we the action. We get included by means of a few prepositions: God with us (Matt. 1:23), Christ in ...
Sacred Rhythms
“We are blessed with inner rhythms that tell us where we are, and where we are going. No matter, then, our fifty and sixty hour work weeks, the refusing to stop for lunch, the bypassing sleep and working deep into the darkness. If we stop, if we return to rest, our natural state reasserts itself. ...
Finding Our Way Home
“God is at home. It is we who have gone out for a walk.” Meister Eckhart I didn’t recognize my own symptoms. After three weeks of summer travel and a jam-packed schedule I finally had a morning at home alone. After a three week hit-and-miss pattern of morning devotions, I plopped in my chair to ...
Losing Our Lives
“As long as we cling to life as we understand it, we cling to a pinched and deadly image of things, an image heavily conditioned by our egos, our social programming, our limited knowledge of the options. But when we are willing to let go of life as we want it to be and allow ...
Gail Johnsen 