Bed Battles

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I’m fighting a losing battle.

Despite my plans and hopes for early and productive mornings, my bed will not easily release me. Blame it on cold and dark winter mornings (I have), or on a baby in the house (I haven’t so much), or on simply not getting to bed early enough (I’ve done this too). Wherever the blame is placed, it doesn’t change where I am firmly placed most mornings after I intended to be elsewhere. All that said, I suppose there are worse battles to be losing.

While comments on a blog are always nice, I think I’d rather not have all the ones that could be typed when a post like this follows a post on the power of intention! My toes can only take so much pounding.

Intention

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Intention is a big deal.

“Where there’s a will, there’s a way.”  That another translation of the same sentence.

The Jedi version was, “Do, or do not.  There is no try.”  So said Master Yoda.

So also said William Law.  He wrote a book called “A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life”–quickly seen to be a book about intention.  His version of Yoda’s thought goes like this…

“It was this… intention that made the primitive Christians such eminent instances of piety, that made the goodly fellowship of the Saints and all the glorious army of martyrs and confessors.  And it you will here stop and ask yourself why you are not as pious as the primitive Christians were, your own heart will tell you that it is neither through ignorance nor inability, but purely because you never thoroughly intended it.”

I won’t bother debating how today’s “average believer” compares with that of another time and place.  I simply want to highlight that whatever we become… it will be because we intended to become just that.

That’s the power of intention.

Informed isn’t Formed

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I’ve been blessed recently by Eugene Peterson’s words.

In reflecting on how Scripture works to shape our lives, he puts this out there…

“It is possible to conceive of ourselves too narrowly, for there is far more to us than our genes and hormones, our emotions and aspirations, our jobs and ideals.  There is God.  Most, if not all, of what and who were are has to do with God.  If we try to understand and form ourselves by ourselves we leave most out most of ourselves.”

“And so the Christian community has always insisted that Holy Scripture that reveals God’s ways to us is necessary and basic to our formation as human beings.  In our reading of this book we come to realize that what we need is not primarily informational, telling us things about God and ourselves, but formational, shaping us into our true being.

It is the very nature of language to form rather than to inform.  When language is personal, with it is at its best, it reveals; and revelation is always formative—we don’t know more, we become more.

I hope this finds you experiencing revelation–the Divine speaking into your life through His Word–and being shaped into the you dreamed of long ago.  If you feel you could use more of that, let me suggest the obvious: You could use less of something else.  Free up time and space and attention, and devote it to positioning yourself before the Revealer.

You’ll be formed in the process.

Praying Like a Complete Idiot

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I bought this book while in line at the supermarket a while back…

Flipping through it, I’ve concluded something: I’d do well–exceedingly well–to pray idiot-prayers like these!

Take this one from Christina Rossetti:

“O Lord, the Lord whose ways are right, keep us in your mercy from lip service and empty forms; from having a name that we live, but being dead.  Help us to worship you by righteous deeds and lives of holiness; that our prayer also may be set forth in your sight as an incense, and the lifting up of our hands be an evening sacrifice.”

So for all the morons out there, I’ll bring you more occasionally so that, yes, even folks like us can learn to pray.

Punting is for Pansies

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That’s the word according to Pulaski Academy’s coach Kevin Kelley.  Coach Kelley is a numbers geek who decided to use an “idiotic” strategy, which he felt was sound by the stats…

An entire season of not punting.

End result?

A state championship.

Football buffs, check it out HERE.

Everyone else, keep moving and have a Merry Christmas!