Learning to be honest with oneself as to what has helped and what has not helped is a fresh beginning for those who need to face ongoing defeat. This column is dealing with the special elitist world of managing your spiritual life from event to event, conference to conference, mountain top to mountain top, to learning to live through the ordinary daily battles of life.
I have learned that you can’t teach a process through an event. Process is taught through daily life with others in covenantal community. Meaning other people who have agreed to choose the same life you have as a faithful follower of Christ. You teach the Bible to another person by regularly reading and memorizing it together and testing it through your daily experiences. And those experiences are dotted with events. Think of the normal cycles of life. A year, a month, a week, a day, a morning, an afternoon, an evening. God himself set these realities and tells us to regularly join together for common worship to acknowledge that we have the joys, pleasures, disappointments, and pains, of life in common.
Your sin wants to be alone with you
We all share sin and the need for forgiveness, redemption, reconciliation, and for victory and celebration. We build these festivals into our calendars because they boost us and change us. But they only have their full effect when we combine the special with the ordinary. Conferences and special events can inject our spiritual blood stream with eagerness and desire, but we better get back to home base fast, connect into our community, and get real. Otherwise, we fall into the enemy’s trap. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, “Your sin wants to be alone with you.” If you can be isolated with your sin, believing that you and God can handle it alone, you will easy prey. Event spirituality and process spirituality are a partnership. We need jolts of joy to spur us on, that is the event. But daily process, reading, studying, praying, memorizing, a life submerged in obedience in the ordinary grind is where it manifests itself with such power that you feel God’s presence.
A Chronicle of my ordinary
It occurred to me to look back over my last year and see what my ordinary looked like. Back in April of 2022 it was a warm and windy day in south Texas. I was gathered with some Christian leaders at a Ranch and I was taking a break, sitting on a porch enjoying the warm breeze. Something hit me on the neck and stung me. I slapped it to the ground and saw it was a caterpillar. I’ve learned a great deal about a certain stinging caterpillar since then. I took steroids for the next sixty days to defeat the rash that spread over my body. This, of course, did some damage to my intestinal process which led to a series of tests which led to a colonoscopy. In parallel, over that same period and continuing, was a growing battle with PVCs (extra beats of the heart) and a growing battle with A-fib. After more tests and consultations, I decided on heart ablation, an amazing process, but still not an exact science. But the procedure has improved my situation and for that I am very thankful.
Then came the recovery, the healing up, the headaches and migraine type events. I believe the stress and the ongoing medication adjustments have all contributed to sleepless nights, and a continual monitoring of heart rates, et al.
Becoming less and less is not ordinary at all
It just so happens that during this period there were some losses in my life. An important ministry relationship ended—and it left an empty space. I turned over The Bonhoeffer Project, a leadership training ministry I founded,[1] to new and capable leadership, and I was out. Another empty space. It was about that time in my life when I was expecting honor, praise, and homage. I got silence, solitude, contemplation, writing and research. Here it comes—
What had I always idealized as the perfect life?
A life of silence, solitude, contemplation, writing, research, (and perhaps with a little writing cabin near a stream and Starbucks). But it turned out to be a little too silent for my taste. I found less satisfaction in multiplying my efforts than I anticipated. I grabbed onto and hung on tightly to the words of John the Baptist when his disciples complained about Jesus’ growing fame.
“John replied, “No one can receive anything unless God gives it from heaven. You yourselves know how plainly I told you, ‘I am not the Messiah. I am only here to prepare the way for him. It is the bridegroom who marries the bride, and the best man is simply glad to stand with him and hear his vows. Therefore, I am filled with joy at his success. He must become greater and greater and I must become less and less.”
Getting to “Yes”
or
The Grind and The Wild
I recall Richard Rohr saying that he spent the first hour of his day getting to “Yes” with God. I thought, OK, that sounds like a plan. Getting to “Yes” means, “Yes” Lord, I will allow you to reshape me today, to change me today—today I will be available for transformation.” So, while I still speak to groups and publish a column every week, my main job is to be transformed daily. Jesus told us to pick up our crosses daily and follow him. The Apostle Paul said, “I die daily.” [2]
My ordinary time or season is a lot like your ordinary time. When you write down a record of it, it isn’t ordinary at all. It is revolutionary, it is wild. My chronicle reveals what Paul’s letter to the Ephesians tells us. The first three chapters are the majestic mountains of mysterious and glorious truths about the gospel, about God, and about us. They provide the jolts of glory that inspires and injects us with desire to please God and live for him. The remaining three chapters are about the grind, the ordinary demands of life that test us. We need both, as the extraordinary paves the road for the ordinary, and of course, it is in the ordinary that we are transformed, proven, and where the people nearest us see God’s glory the brightest.
Bill Hull
March 2023
No comments:
Post a Comment