Practicing Faith: Introduction

Hey friends, welcome to the Pastor Talk podcast.
Good to see you,
thank you for being with us as we again join together to have some
discussions that we very much hope are a benefit to you as we seek to be faithful to Jesus
Christ together.
Today we start a new series,
an interesting one, Practicing the Faith.
To be honest,
this is a kind of renewal of a thing that we had started in recharge before
COVID cut things short.
Remember, those initial conversations went well and I think generated some interesting
ideas and some interesting conversations.
So we hope that expanding it in this format will be helpful to you as well.
Michael, big title,
Spiritual Practices.
Yeah, it is Clint.
And you know, in some senses,
I think starting this off right really matters.
I think lots of people come to the idea of spiritual practices with lots of different ideas,
whether you grew up in church or not,
what kind of church you grew up in.
You know, I think lots of us do carry with us in our Christian life some assumptions
about what things a Christian ought to do.
Some of us have very strong feelings about that and others sort of carry around the kind
of latent guilt of maybe where you don’t feel like you meet expectations that you have,
even if you don’t have those expectations for others.
And so Clint, I think as we really come to this conversation,
I think it’s an important
pivot in the Pastor Talk podcast.
We’ve spent some time talking about Presbyterianism,
our history.
We’ve talked a little bit about what maybe the future of that church looks like and that
is both a big conversation in terms of its effect on the nation and congregations.
But I think as we turn to this conversation,
it’s intentionally a much more individual
focused sort of lens that we’re bringing to it.
And let’s be honest,
we live in a moment where anxiety is surrounding us,
where people are living through stress, whether or not you find yourself on one side or another or trapped
in the middle of lots of different opposing forces in this moment,
how we could name a one of them.
This is a good time to slow down,
to pause and to remind ourselves of the calling that
we have as Christians to turn our eyes to Jesus,
to be aware of His work in our lives.
And Clint, you know,
the church throughout history and certainly within our scriptures,
we have a lot of resources and tools and reminders as Christians of things that we can really
implement and practice that I think will be sources of life and a place of grounding
in our discipleship and faith in this season.
And I think, Michael, that the word “spiritual” can be loaded for people on probably one of
two sides.
On one side, it means this sort of amorphous,
vague sense of “I’m a “spiritual” person.”
And people apply it to themselves.
They’ll say, “I’m spiritual, but I’m not religious.
I’m a “spiritual” this or that.”
And I think for those of us who practice the faith within the Christian confines,
that can also be a little confusing,
maybe even a little off-putting.
On the other side of the fence,
you have this sort of classical idea of spiritualism.
The monks and those desert fathers and some of that very strict discipline, spirituality.
And what I think we hope to do in this study is to aim for people something in the middle.
And what I mean by that is not to give you,
“Hey, follow these 10 steps and you’ll become
spiritual,” but to try to point out the mountaintops that have to do with a spiritual
kind of life.
And yes, we may attach some suggestions of specific ways that we think those themes can
be incorporated into our life,
but what we really hope here is to provide a pretty large
overview of some of the major themes that should be part of the Christian experience
as we follow Jesus together.
And that’s what we mean,
and we’ll talk a little bit more about this word “spiritual”
in a moment.
But it is a tricky word for people full of some negative connotations and,
I would say, some question marks.
Yeah, Clint, I’ve mentioned this before,
so if you’re with us in the conversation,
and this sounds familiar, I apologize,
but it’s really captured my attention now for a few years.
When I once read about Benjamin Franklin and his journaling that he did,
I don’t remember the exact number, but it was a reasonable list of what he called moral virtues.
And his idea was that every week he would journal,
at least one time,
I think his goal was daily,
he would journal about how he was doing meeting his moral virtues.
And I think one way that you could really commit to this conversation,
to this study that we’re going to do with one another for the next few weeks,
would be to say, you know,
I’m going to take this week’s conversation point,
and I’m going to consider it a touchstone,
an opportunity for me to reflect on how am I doing in this place of my life.
We’re going to talk about things like, naturally,
prayer.
We’re going to talk about confession as a practice of Christianity.
We’re going to talk about what we can do to learn and to grow,
right?
There’s lots of things we’ll talk about,
but you could very easily make this a sort of
practical sort of practice.
And I think that’s maybe the place to start here, Clint,
is to start a new one thing a
little bit about what we mean by that word,
practicing, because that was a carefully chosen
out word as we’re thinking about this study.
Yeah.
And I think in some ways,
Michael, that’s the easier of the two words and it makes sense
to handle it first.
You know,
historically,
spiritual practices was often called spiritual disciplines,
and discipline has a kind of off-putting sound to it.
The idea of discipline is, unfortunately,
sometimes connected to the idea that our spiritual life is drudgery,
that it is, you know, getting up early and doing hard things over and over
again.
And there are moments when we have to practice our life in spite of not wanting to.
There are moments where it demands discipline.
In fact, I would say it often calls for discipline.
But I like the gentler idea of practice.
A practice is something we work on.
You know, we go to football practice each day and we try to acquire new skills and we
try to polish the skills we already have and continue to make them better.
And that idea of working on something repeatedly over time with the hope of improving it,
I think, is actually a very good paradigm to bring to our spiritual life.
And so for me,
the word “practices” seems both more invitational and in some ways more
attainable than the old language of discipline.
Yeah, I think this conversation really does have a different sort of track,
depending upon what church family you maybe came from.
Clint, you know,
I did some studying in my undergraduate days on some of religion in
America, the early religion.
And you know, the Puritans as a group felt very strongly that there needs to be a strong
divide between what we might call the sacred and the secular.
And when they thought about spiritual disciplines,
they very much thought about those buffering
us against the evil of the world that surrounded us.
And if you’re in the Reformed tradition,
if you’re part of the Presbyterian faith,
one of the things we’ve carried with us as a theological idea,
really a conviction,
is that the line
between what we might call sacred and secular or the line between the things that we’re
called to practice and the normal common things of life may be much more blurred than what
you might think.
So, you know, it’s interesting what might be for one person,
the process of getting
into their car to drive somewhere might be for another,
the practice of praying or for
someone else, the idea of hopping into the shower to get cleaned quick could be a thing
you need to do as a person,
or it could be an invitation for you to focus on God’s presence
with you in that day.
And so there’s a really beautiful connection here in the word practicing.
I think you lose with the idea of discipline.
I think each of us does things in a day that may seem to us to be the common or the normal
or the non-spiritual.
But those things can provide opportunities with the right motivation and the right intention.
These things can become practices of spiritual faith.
Yeah, and another reason I like the word practice,
Michael, is because we sometimes think of
spiritual as a thing you are or you aren’t.
And I think practice invites us to understand it much more as a journey.
You know, the first day of basketball practice,
you are not going to dunk a basketball.
That’s not the skill set.
And the first day of prayer,
you’re not going to hunker down on your knees in your closet
for two hours.
That’s simply not a realistic,
nor is it even a commendable kind of goal.
There is a progress that happens in our spiritual life.
And hopefully through the years,
there will be areas of our life in which we are better
able to live them out according to Christ’s grace than we used to be.
There are some areas we will probably always struggle.
They will always be a battle for us.
But there should be some places where we’re able to say,
“I’ve really made some progress in this.
I’m more forgiving.
I’m more generous.
I spend more time studying than I used to.
I’ve gotten more familiar with the Scripture than I used to.”
And so again, what we want to do is paint these with the broadest brush possible to allow you
the freedom to practice your way into them.
And so we’re going to spend less time talking about,
“repeat this, do this formula,” than we are,
“think about this goal of the faith,
and how is it that you might incorporate that into your
life?
How might you incorporate prayer in your world,
in your experience?
How might you incorporate
simplicity?” And we hope in that that the freedom to explore will allow each of us the opportunity to, A,
discern where we are starting from, and B,
discern what progress looks like and what it might
take to move that direction.
That’s well said, Clint.
And I do think that you’re illuminating actually the weakness of the model that we’re taking in this
conversation together.
And that is,
on one hand,
it’s great when in the Presby talk series when we were doing the Presby What,
it’s easy to tune into that and to listen.
And there might be something that’s new or engaging that you might think about.
And that might be what you take away.
This study is only going to open to you if you are willing to open yourself to it.
The freedom to explore is also the responsibility to dig into some questions of reflection.
And I’ll be honest,
I think the reason why this makes sense for me now to return to this
as a conversation instead of waiting until recharge starts again or something like that is, quite frankly,
a lot of us are making non-conscious choices about how we’re spending
our time and what we’re thinking about and what we’re engaging with in this moment.
And to be frank,
a lot of those things are adding anxiety to our lives and fear to our life.
So the invitation, I think, is simple.
To practice these things will require opening yourself to them.
And it’s going to require some commitment in that.
But if you’re willing to do that,
I think what this series will offer is more than just information.
It may actually offer an invitation to transformation.
And the only way that that will happen is if we’re willing to be humble enough to be self-reflective.
And if we’re willing to maybe re-examine for a moment what we’ve taken spiritual to mean.
Because if we’re going to practice something,
let’s practice the right thing.
So I think it’s good then to sort of turn to that idea.
Let’s talk about what we have in mind,
Clint, about this idea of the spiritual life.
Yeah. And understand that as we make that invitation,
we very much hope this will be
more than a discussion.
If seven, eight weeks from now,
all we’ve done is view topics on the computer,
listen to talks on Facebook.
If you haven’t felt the invitation to incorporate some
of these things and try to use them in ways that help you grow,
that help you cope,
that help you discern,
then we really feel like that’s been an opportunity missed.
And Michael and I aren’t
claiming in that to be any kind of mentors or experts.
There’s not a thing that we’re going
to see on this list that I don’t struggle with day in and day out.
And some that I’m absolutely
terrible at and always have been.
But what this is for all of us, I think,
is a chance to say,
“Where am I and where would I like to be?
Where are those sort of discordant or those kind of
non-harmony spots in my life?
And is there anything that might help me in those moments and in those
areas?
Can I be more generous?
Can I be more peace-filled?
Can I be more joyous?
And how do we move there?” And really,
there’s a wonderful quote that one pastor said, an author,
“There is no spiritual
life, there’s only life.” And what he meant by that is what we call spiritual is just Christians
living out the faith.
The spiritual person would never refer to themselves as spiritual,
they would refer to themselves as Christian.
And so all of these things are simply tools at our disposal.
Many of them hone through centuries of the faith of deeply faithful men and women.
And we have the ability to try and make use of them in our day for our purposes in
seeking to be faithful to Jesus Christ.
And so I think what we’d like to say,
we are going to
impact the word spiritual,
but please don’t think of it as something other than the life
you already live.
The idea for any Christian is simply to let more of God’s presence in and
through our life.
And we hope that these might be some tunnels and some avenues and some doorways
by which that can happen.
You know, Clint, when I was younger,
I read voraciously some of Frank
Peretti’s books, some of his fictional books.
And he has a series in which he describes
sort of this spiritual angelic fight,
good versus evil demons and angels fighting and Christians
in our sort of perceived reality being caught in this battle between the two.
And on one hand,
I think that’s a really sort of gripping image,
this idea of this spiritual battle.
I think what is maybe possibly a thing that we should be aware of in tellings like that
is that we miss the spiritual reality of living.
And a historical illustration of that actually
comes to us from Jesus himself.
You may be surprised to know that the early Christians
who were grappling with the full meaning of who Jesus was,
Jesus had died, he was resurrected, and the early church was trying to figure out what does this all mean and how can we be Christian
and what does that require of me.
You might be surprised to know that some of the greatest
controversies in the early church was how Jesus could be fully human.
The idea that God,
a spiritual creator of all things,
would be able to eat fish and walk on the beach and leave footprints.
The idea that Jesus would live a human life like we do just seemed irreconcilable to people who truly
understood the majesty of God,
the separateness of the creator from the creation.
Now that sounds kind of heady and theological,
I’m sorry, but the point that I’m trying to make is that Jesus
was fully human and that he was fully God.
And there’s something about being fully human
with all of the weaknesses that we must confess of ourselves and also the common
normalness of stuff that most of us would rather get away from.
That stuff isn’t anti-spiritual,
needing to make food for our families,
needing to pay the bills,
needing to make sure the lawn gets
mowed.
That doesn’t feel like a spiritual practice,
but yet there’s a sense in which God
is glorified when we’re faithful to the work that we’re called as creatures.
And there’s a connection
to Jesus that if he was fully human,
then as best as we can live into our humanness,
we are therefore participating in what God wants for us in Jesus Christ.
Yeah, and you and I will suggest
at many times in this study,
Michael, in this series of conversations,
that whenever we make
room for God in our life,
whether it’s mowing the yard and reflecting,
if not even in prayer,
perhaps just on the beauty of growth,
of what it means that God designed a world in which soil
and seed produce growth and beauty and the softness of the grass,
any kind of awareness
that we have, maybe we’re making dinner and we’re being grateful for the food that we get to serve our family.
Our contention will be over and over and over again that it is not simply things labeled
churchy or spiritual that are in fact spiritual,
but any moment in which we make some space to
recognize the God who is already with us and the goodness of what God has already done in the world
and in our lives.
And as we do that,
Michael, I think this is the best sense of the word spiritual.
It’s not to become something else,
it is to acknowledge and recognize the something else
that is already happening around us and in us.
And I think this is most helpful from our spiritual
fathers and mothers, not the idea that we have to go on some long pilgrimage to find God.
There’s nothing wrong with that,
but for most of us it’s not realistic.
The general, the genuine truth that
is much more exciting is that God has taken the pilgrimage to find us.
And if we will open our eyes to that,
we will begin to see that we find God around us constantly.
We find God present with us continually.
And it’s in that moment I think that we open the door to spirituality as we hope
to describe it here.
Yeah, and for some joining us in this conversation,
maybe that simple word
is the thing that you need to leave with today,
is that there is more than what you’re aware of.
That if you’re trapped in sort of a small circle right now of negativity and the contrarian moment
in our culture, in our general climate,
if that’s sort of where you’re stuck and you just sort of feel that oppressively,
the great good news is there is more that surrounds you than you could possibly know.
And the prayer that we pray is, “Lord, God,
open our eyes so that we can see it.”
And that can be very sophisticated and theologically beautiful and it can also be simple.
And let me illustrate that.
I had a funny moment last night,
Clint, we were putting our girls to
bed and we had just watched a thing on YouTube together.
A YouTuber by the name of Mark Rober,
he does some really cool science things.
He had thrown a really big birthday party for a child
who had just been treated for brain cancer.
And it was a beautiful party.
It was a great celebration
of this young man’s life.
And so we enjoyed this together as a family.
The girls go upstairs for
bed.
We’re tucking them in.
And they both said, “Mom and Dad,
why don’t we ever have a cool birthday
party like that?” And it strikes you how in a moment of seeing someone else’s celebration and
a great wonderful thing happened for them,
you can either be aware of the goodness of that,
or you can see what you would much prefer for yourself.
I would prefer a flash of your
birthday party with big science experiments and things that could only happen on YouTube.
Well, that might be what you prefer.
And of course, there’s a childishness to that, Clint.
But yet that’s how practical spiritual practices can be.
Are we creating in our day moments of
intentional opportunity for us to reframe from,
“That’s a thing I have to do,” or,
“It’s a thing I’m doing out of habit or drudgery,” to,
“This is an invitation to thank God for God’s generosity or
God’s presence or God’s creative ability in my life.” And friends,
if that sounds foreign to you,
stick with us because we’re not experts and I haven’t claimed to be,
but yet the church has
given us throughout thousands of years and with very many faithful men and women some tools and
some starting places where we can really set out from.
Yeah. And Michael, that’s a good word.
And I think the appropriate word as we try to think about
spirituality together over the next several weeks,
awareness, that the goal of these practices,
the goal of practicing,
is to become increasingly aware of God,
to be more able to see God at work.
We’ve all had those moments where we wondered what God was doing.
We wondered if God was with us.
And what the spiritual life invites us to is a deeper understanding of who God is,
how God is, and where God is,
which creates in us this growing sense of awareness that we now realize
not only that God is with us now,
but always has been.
Your story reminded me of one far more
embarrassing, Michael.
When I was a seminary student,
I was in a hurry.
I had to get to
my church placement.
I was running behind.
I had just had my car keys and I couldn’t find them.
And so I’m rushing around the house.
I’m knocking things over.
I’m picking up books.
I’m kicking around shoes.
I have no idea where I could have possibly put my keys when
I hear something,
a kind of jangling sound.
And the moment of realization is still fairly painful.
In my flusteredness, I had not somehow noticed that I had them in my mouth
and they were hanging between my teeth.
And I spent five frantic minutes looking for something
that was with me the whole time.
And we do it all the time when it comes to God.
We run around like headless chickens,
wondering why things aren’t better,
wondering why we’re afraid,
wondering why God doesn’t fix these moments that bring us
anxiety or anger or fear or uncertainty.
And what spiritual practice does is allows us that
moment to pause and say,
“Oh,
been here the whole time.
I already had the thing that I thought was
lost.
I already possessed the thing I thought I was searching for.
It’s always been with me and
I didn’t know it.” And I think that’s the beautiful invitation that words like spirituality
and practice and even discipline give us in our tradition is that they invite us to that
ultimately deeper point of knowing that God is always with us and always at work.
And to become aware of that is our ultimate goal.
I’m sorry, not just to become aware of it,
but ultimately then to participate in it.
Right.
And if the goal is awareness,
I think there’s a particular group of people
who maybe need to bring a little bit of caution to the conversation.
I think it’s intentional.
It’s certainly on purpose.
And it’s very telling in both Matthew and Luke when we have the
attitudes that Jesus names the poor,
the grieving,
the lost,
the people who are experiencing some of
life’s most difficult moments.
These Jesus says are blessed.
And I think one of the reasons among
many, many, one reason is because awareness is something that is, I think,
more easily accessible when you’re in those difficult places.
It’s sometimes easier when you’re at rock bottom
to see God at work around you because there’s really no other choice.
There’s nothing else that you can put up to convince yourself that you’re doing it under your own strength or your own agency.
And so the word of caution then is to those people who might be joining us for these
conversations, whose life is going really well,
who in this moment,
maybe you felt like you’ve
been able to keep things together.
People that you know are relatively healthy and lives are put
together and and you generally feel good about life.
Well,
that is actually a very sort of
difficult place to start a conversation about spiritual practices,
because oftentimes that’s the place of complacency.
It’s the place of life that says, you know,
I relatively have things put
together and I’m glad that God’s there,
but I’m sure I can take him off the shelf again should things get worse.
And, you know, no one thinks that consciously,
Clint, but I do think it’s
worth starting the conversation to say,
if you maybe find yourself in a place where you feel pretty good,
you may have to commit and really truly be intentional to evaluate these things
because they may not come as natural.
I recently wrote on my whiteboard a quote,
and I can’t remember who originally said it,
but it was something along the lines of,
“It is impossible for one to find the answers that they think they already have.” And I’ve also heard it said that
the most dangerous prayer we can offer is, “Lord,
I’m ready to know your will.” And we must then be careful.
And I think for that very reason,
Michael, when we meet God in the places where the barriers
are thin, where we’ve been knocked down,
where we’ve been anxious,
where we’ve been fearful,
where we’ve struggled, where we have to admit that we do not have it all figured out,
we are closer to our ability to surrender.
When things are going well and we really would not like them to
change very much, it becomes a much harder conversation to say,
“I now am ready to give
this up and follow God instead.” And I think all of us,
I suspect most of us at least,
have been on both sides of that fence.
One is perhaps more comfortable,
but I would say it is also
less “spiritual.” It is the moments in which we are looking,
needing even God’s help,
that we are probably best able to make progress,
to move forward in our spiritual life.
And it is perhaps on the other end,
the moments that we feel most comfortable and least willing to change,
that we are least able to move forward in our faith.
And we will have an opportunity to see that, I think,
as we go through our list here of things that we hope to cover.
Yeah, very much.
Well, let’s just a quick breeze through a few of the topics that we’re going to have here.
We’re going to talk,
of course, about, it’s going to be no surprise to anyone,
we’ll talk about prayer.
But I hope in a way that is bigger than you’re thinking of right now.
Very much so.
Yeah, that’s going to be,
I think, our first conversation.
And some of that is because
we’ve got to get that addressed right away.
I think most people,
when you think of spiritual practices,
prayer is probably going to be very close to the top of that list.
And yeah, I think that’s going to be a broader conversation than you might expect next week.
We’re also going to talk about a confession.
Yeah, telling the truth,
a life of honesty,
a life of forgiveness and being
forgiven, the sort of moments where we have to say real things about ourselves to God and make some
admissions, confessions is the historic language.
We’re going to talk a little bit about a movement.
You know, it may surprise you how long the church has really incorporated the idea of
our bodies moving as a form of prayer and awareness.
There’s some really interesting
things in that and certainly applicable for our current moment.
Yeah, and there’s also some fascinating modern research about the connection between
physical activity and clarity, focus,
the ability to discern and think clearly.
I think that should
be…
I think that will be new ground for lots of folks.
Then we’ll also move on to really the idea
of what in another realm we might have called study or reading,
journaling, directed readings, really is going to have to do with a wide range of things that are connected to reading and writing.
And again, I hope you’ll join us for that one because I think it will be bigger than you might
imagine when I say a word like study.
There’s really far more to it than that word can hold.
And I think it will be…
I think it’ll be some helpful stuff in there.
That’s sort of the Presbyterian spiritual superpower there a little bit.
Then we’ll be talking about gratitude.
And we, I think,
underestimate how vast gratitude is.
And so I’m really looking forward to that conversation.
Gratitude is something that
can pervade a life and it can also be incredibly practical.
Following that, and I think specifically in the right order,
we will move to generosity because
I don’t think generosity is possible pre-gratitude.
I think gratitude always gives birth to generosity,
not the other way.
We’ll also include in that praise and joy.
I think that will be a pretty
upbeat kind of week.
And then we’re turning to some simplicity,
some fasting, some beauty.
You might know that the scriptural tradition has a lot of references to things like fasting.
And if you’re a 21st century Presbyterian,
you may not entirely know what to make of that.
What does that mean?
And what would that look like as part of a modern spiritual practice?
So we’ll address that.
And I’ll just warn you ahead of time that I think it would be virtually impossible for most
American Christians to not feel a little challenged by a conversation about simplicity.
We live in a
culture that is not,
I would say, motivated by simplicity in the sense that we’ll talk about it.
Yeah,
another thing like fasting,
we’re going to have a hard time differentiating between the
spiritual practice of fasting and what we might think of as dieting.
There’s a lot of nuance in
that conversation that I do think culturally we bring some handicaps to.
Yeah, the next week we
will look possibly as an ending topic at relationships in the broader context of hospitality.
How do we care for one another?
How do we take care of one another?
How do we extend
welcome and compassion to those that we come in contact with or to those that we are around?
And how do we welcome well,
how do we live a welcoming kind of life?
And I think that will be,
I think that will also be a powerful conversation.
That’s what we have planned.
There may be a
follow-up week as we work our way through this.
We may very well think of something we haven’t
thought of yet.
Maybe one of you will inspire that conversation.
If not, we’ll probably have a wrap-up session toward the end.
But those are some of the topics that we anticipate.
And again, we hope that they will be,
at this point, we hope that you’ll be surprised by the breadth of them
because from our tradition and from our history,
we do have a lot to put in each of those weeks.
I think my final note on this,
Clint, is if you knew me,
you would know that talking about
awareness in the largest sense and spiritual practices in the specific sense is probably
Michael Goecke’s kryptonite.
I mean, realistically,
some of these topics about awareness,
I am just constitutionally bad at and return to over and over and over again with a posture of sort of
hands outstretched saying, “Lord, help me.” And, you know,
I once was talking with a spiritual
mentor of mine, Clint, just recently.
And he mentioned something that has really stuck with
me.
He mentioned, you know, that the Lord remembers that we are dust.
And God always sees our dustiness.
And if you come to this conversation with a spirit of judgmentalness,
if you come to it with a real lack of grace for yourself,
then you’re going to miss what’s the
invitation here.
It’s not to become some super Christian.
That’s not what this is about.
This is about us coming to the throne of grace,
to a God who knows us better than we know ourselves,
to be able to see ways in which we can grow in our faith in practical ways,
and also to see that,
you know what, it’s not about earning God’s love or earning Christian stripes.
It’s rather about us being able to live into the best of what God intends for us as his people,
and therefore to glorify him with our lives.
Yeah, if you imagine that eight or nine weeks from now,
we are all going to be wearing cotton robes and swinging censures with semi-balled heads as we chant Latin
and birds fly to us,
and we are in total harmony with the world.
I’m just going to warn you,
you’re going to be disappointed.
But if you want to have real conversations about how can I,
with all of my faults,
with all of my successes,
with my best and my worst,
find room to follow
Jesus Christ in my life,
with my particular gifts and talents,
and who I am as I bring who I am to
God and allow God to use that,
how can I open more opportunities to be aware of the goodness
of God in me and around me?
If that’s a thing that at all interests you,
I think that’s very much the
kind of conversation we hope for.
I think there’ll be room in it for growth for all of us,
for every trying hopefully to get better,
and we hope these conversations can play some role in that for each of you.
I think last logistical note of this conversation,
if you wanted to go all in on this
study with us, you might want to find a notebook or a pad of paper of some kind.
I think our goal
is going to be to offer some sort of reflection question at the end of each one of these different
topics, with the idea being that that gives you a week to do a little bit of journaling, some reflecting,
maybe write down a Bible passage that connects to you.
That would be a great thing to
carry with you into the conversation that you might want to take notes that you’ll return to
in the coming week.
Of course, you don’t need to do that.
You just join us for the conversation,
listen in, and hopefully find some inspiration in it.
But if you want to engage with us,
we’re going to try to provide some tools to make that possible.
Yeah, we very much will try to point out where the starting points are,
but then it will be up to
each of us to take the steps.
As a child, I remember moving out to the end of a diving
board multiple times before finally the courage or foolishness or whichever it was to actually
take the next step and give up control and go into the water.
Very much in regard to these,
there are some of these that are going to feel very easy.
They’re going to feel very inviting and engaging.
There are some of these that are going to feel very challenging and maybe
not a little condemning.
Maybe that’s too strong a word,
at least convicting, let’s say.
I can be convicted by many of them just looking at the list.
And so, again, our hope is, “Hey, here’s a path.
Maybe you’re feeling God give you a nudge to
explore it a little bit and see where it goes.” And we very much want this to be more
than you listening to us talk on the computer for you and for us.
And so, we hope that it will be that.
So, we leave you today with the firm reliance and confidence that God is with you,
wherever you are right now,
God is with you.
And our prayer,
our heartfelt prayer is that we might
have our eyes opened,
our ears opened, that we might be aware of God’s presence with us,
in us, and through us in this moment and in all of the moments that follow.
And we, from that firm base camp,
then we’ll walk out as we seek to focus on these practices and invite
God to work within us through them.
Yeah, we are glad that you’d like to be a part of that journey
with us and we look forward to seeing where it goes.
As always, friends, we thank you for joining
us for our Pastor Talk Conversations.
We release these every Wednesday at nine o’clock central
standard time.
You can find them on Facebook,
YouTube, your favorite podcast app, our website.
Of course, we would be thrilled if you wouldn’t mind sharing that wherever you are.
It helps other people find the conversation.
And we would also,
in the course of this series,
love, if you want to put comments wherever you’re watching this,
send us an email and you can find that on the website.
We would love to engage with you in this process,
as this is just as much of a dialogue
as it is in this case a monologue.
So we look forward to the ongoing conversation,
and we will see you again next week.
Blessings, all.