theo|digital

There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness.

But in that casket – safe, dark, motionless, airless – it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable…

The only place outside of Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.

~ CS Lewis from The Four Loves (in my currently reading box ->)

When we lose touch with the continuing reality of our selfishness, then forgiveness becomes something that it is good of God to do, like the newspaper carrier’s making sure the morning edition lands under the porch roof on a rainy day. We feel moved enough to remember his kindness with a generous tip the next time he collects.

Part of the problem is that we feel the reality of our wounds more than the fact of our sin. We therefore react with more passion to those things that restore a sense of personal wholeness than to our redemption.

How wrong of us to dedicate our energy to becoming whole. History is filled with the lives of godly men and women who managed to bless others in the midst of unrelieved personal struggles that left them feeling anything but whole.

~ Larry Crabb, Men & Women, p113 (italics are his)

The Christian life doesn’t begin until we see that the disease of self-centeredness (and its assumption of self-sufficiency) is fatal to our souls and so advanced that efforts at self-cure are useless. Self-centeredness is as morally wrong for an image-bearer as cancer is physically abnormal in the human body.
…
Is our self-awareness so limited that forgiveness seems more like an historical foundation than a currently needed reality?

~ Larry Crabb from Men & Women (pp53-4; italics his)

This is an example of Larry Crabb’s consistent influence in my life thinking, and why I often say that “forgiveness wins the day” – because it is the only true antidote to self-centeredness: the practical and awful identity of sin.

For the Lord God is our light and protector
He gives us grace and glory
No good thing will the Lord withhold
from those who do what is right.
O Lord Almighty
happy are those who trust in you.
[psalm 84.10-12 NLT]

Grace is glory, begun. [Matthew Henry]

Don’t pick on people, jump on their failures, criticize their faults – unless, of course, you want the same treatment. That critical spirit has a way of boomeranging. It’s easy to see a smudge on your neighbor’s face and be oblivious to the ugly sneer on your own.

Do you have the nerve to say, “Let me wash your face for you,” when your own face is distorted by contempt? It’s this whole traveling road-show mentality all over again, playing a holier-than-thou part instead of just living your part. Wipe that ugly sneer off your own face, and you might be fit to offer a washcloth to your neighbor.

~ Jesus (Matthew 7), translated sans “splinter/plank” with heart-exposing simplicity by Eugene Peterson’s The Message. This got me today.

Recently friends from a major publisher of Sunday school curriculum called me. They were researching trends in spiritual formation, they said, and they thought I might help them.

After a few warm-up questions, they got to the heart of the matter: “What would you recommend for spiritual formation in our time?”

“The monastery,” I said.

There was a long pause.

read the rest:
spiritual formation: we’ve already got a proven model, but do we want it?
Out of Ur blog

This is another reason why level-headed “emerging church” people aren’t really theologically all that scary. Emerging thought isn’t trying to re-invent the wheel. It’s often discovering what made the wheel in the first place.

One of the books that I shelved for a time and just recently got back to is Spiritual Mentoring: A Guide for Seeking and Giving Direction (see my “Currently Reading” section on the right for links). Sometimes I feel like I’ve read countless books on this topic, but I’m enjoying the time this one takes to integrate writings of classical spiritual writers throughout the history of the church.

Today I liked a quote by St. Teresa of Avila, whose first set of writings – today being read in dozens of languages – were only written in obedience to her spiritual authorities. Her feelings were of personal inadequacy… thought someone wiser than her should take the pen. I’m inclined to agree with authors Anderson and Reese that maybe this is what qualified her the most.

For the love of God, let me work at my spinning wheel and to the choir and perform the duties of religious life, like the other sisters. I am not meant to write: I have neither the health nor the intelligence for it.

The authority of persons so learned and serious as my confessors suffices for the approval of any good thing I may say, if the Lord gives me grace to say it, in which case it will not be mine but His; for I have no learning, nor have I led a good life, nor do I get my information from a learned man or from any other person whatsoever. Only those who have commanded me to write this know that I am doing so, and at the moment they are not here. I am almost stealing time for writing and that with great difficulty, for it hinders me from spinning and I am living in a poor house and have numerous things to do.

Many know that I’m a pretty big fan of the author, priest, philosopher, and spiritual director Henri Nouwen. His depth-founding thoughts regularly find that place in my spirit that I had forgotten. Today I was reminded of these quotes by him:

The great mystery of the divine revelation is that God entered into intimacy with us not only by Christ’s coming but also by his leaving.

God’s presence is so much beyond the human experience of being together that it quite easily is perceived as absence. God’s absence, on the other hand, is often so deeply felt that is leads to a new sense of God’s presence.

The experience of God’s presence is not void of pain. But the pain is so deep that you do not want to miss it since it is in this pain that the joy of God’s presence can be tasted… in which the distinction between joy and pain seems to be transcended…

~ Henri Nouwen

Recently I found myself in a room of spiritual friends and leaders, thinking together of how to define spiritual maturity.

In previous years, we’ve often used the ambiguous phrasing: who “gets” it. It’s purposely undefined, because every time we seem to start writing definitions of maturity, they become cold and robotic, or cumbersome and wordy. Or both.

Trying to define an intuitive concept.

Thinking about who “gets” it as a follower of Christ is not supposed to be a judgemental activity. It’s so much more a thoughtful inclusion: a mental and heart loop that says, “who do I want to connect with? Who is as resolved as I am to follow Jesus even on the days we both can’t find up?

So we finally came up with some sentences that help create a definition. Today I sat and refined them with my thoughts, and came up with the following:

——
Someone who “gets” it:
- describes a living relationship with God that would remain even if their community fell off the map
- in awe
- makes personal life choices under God: wants God’s way
- returns to the scriptures again and again to find God’s way
- believes that life is short and we only have one life to live; feels that Jesus’ Great Commission applies personally
- embraces personal weaknesses – knows that God shows real spiritual power in them
- emotionally understands their “lostness”; “forgiven much loves much”
- oriented towards others
- highly values “we” – community, hospitality, sharing lives and possessions
- derives sense of purpose from the bigger vision of the Kingdom of God
—–