Category Archives: Life

Accountability

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Life’s been racing lately; blogging has fallen down the list, though I often think of things to post. Reading some quotes online, I found this list of questions as suggestions for a men’s accountability group.

What effect would your life feel if you answered questions like these with friends regularly?

Relationship building is a process which takes time; when that time is invested, trust and vulnerability grow. We offer these questions as part of this building process, knowing that when used in love and wisdom they will help men open their hearts to each other.

1. Have I been with a woman in the past week that could be viewed as compromising?
2. Have all my financial dealings been filled with integrity?
3. Have I viewed sexually explicit material?
4. Have I spent adequate time in Bible study and prayer?
5. Have I spent quality time and given priority to my family?
6. Have I fulfilled the mandates of my calling?
7. Have I just lied to you?


Words: Part IV

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I love the Scriptures.

But sometimes I don’t know what to read when I open the cover.

I recently opened The Message and flipped to what Eugene Peterson wrote as an introduction to the prophets.  Here are a few bits…

Everyone more or less believes in God.  But most of us do our best to keep God on the margins of our lives or, failing that, refashion God to suit our convenience.  Prophets insist that God is the sovereign center, not off in the wings awaiting our beck and call.  And prophets insist that we deal with God as God reveals himself, not as we imagine him to be.

For a people who are accustomed to ‘fitting God’ into their lives, or, as we like to say, ‘making room for God,’ the prophets are hard to take and easy to dismiss. 

The God of whom the prophets speak is far too large to fit into our lives.  If we want anything to do with God, we have to fit into him.

One of the bad habits that we pick up early in our lives is separating things and people into secular and sacred.  We assume that the secular is what we are more or less in charge of: our jobs, our time, our entertainment, our government, our social relations.  The sacred is what God has charge of: worship and the Bible, heaven and hell, church and prayers.  We then contrive to set aside a sacred place for God, designed, we say, to honour God but really intended to keep God in his place, leaving us free to have the final say about everything else that goes on.

Prophets will have none of this. 

They contend that everything, absolutely everything, takes place on sacred ground.

And that’s why I’ve always loved the prophets.

Thanks Eugene.

Words: Part III

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Kathleen Norris speaks of the Rule of Benedict, which she was exposed to upon connecting to a Benedictine community, where sharing took on new heights.

In Benedict’s rule, this was said about how possessions would be shared…

“Whoever needs less should thank God and not be distressed.  Whoever needs more should feel humble because of his weakness, not self-important because of the kindness shown him.  In this way, all the members will be at peace.”

“Whoever needs more should feel humble because of his weakness”…

I can’t say I’ve ever heard that angle in discussions of materialism and wealth, but wow…

Benedict, you nailed it.

And you nailed most of us too.

Words: Part II

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Speaking of how humility factors in the journey of every person, Joan Chittister said it this way…

Humility requires first and foremost what the ancients called memoria dei, ‘the awareness of God,’ at all times, in all places, at the center of all things.  It is so easy to make ourselves gods of the tiny little kingdoms we occupy.  We climb very small ladders and then assume that we have risen to the heights of our humanity.

The realization that God is god and that we are not requires serious reflection.  Striving for all the tops of all the pyramids in the world will not change the fact that no person ever really reaches the top of anything and that the real acme of creation lies deep within the soul and waits for us to bow before it in awareness and in praise.  Those whose lives are lived without listening to their hearts, those who make themselves, their work, their status, their money their god, never find the God of the universe, who waits quietly within for us to exhaust our compulsive race to nowhere. 

Words

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I’ve had more chance to read recently than usual.  And I’m thankful.

Words are powerful in my world.  It’s regularly impressed upon me how the lives of people I’ve never met have spoken powerfully into my own life… through thoughts thought, language found, and words recorded.

I like to dream that my words might do that for someone someday.  I’d like to try.

Then a line from a Zorro movie comes to mind…

“You were trying.  She was succeeding.”

And so I follow this post with several from people who’ve recently succeeded in blessing me with their words.