Lisa Colón DeLay | Spiritual Formation and the Way of the Desert Elders
Resources, Guidance, Products, and Services for personal growth, spiritual formation, and community connection
Topics pertain in some way to the unseen realm of Reality, the inner world, or the Divine, most often in a Christian and ecumenical context with the assumption that all people are in reality, beings with and of spirit.
Pushing from experience to experience is a tendency of our time. It’s like we become human skipping stones though. We take flight, but only skim and bounce until we plunge to a place that feels like the end. What if the perspective we have was positioned from a worldview instead? That would mean we would be prepared for the high and low experiences, and hopefully go more than surface deep at the onset.
Are you addicted to the energy of “the experience”?
How do you see the world?
I just designed my new business card, not for my graphic design business, this time, but for my work in spiritual things.
(btw if you are looking for business cards, I’m running a special for custom cards, 500 designed, printed & shipped to you for just $43, available in September only. Graphic design is how I help put food on our table, since I don’t get too many donations here, as of yet.)
(also note- I am a senior this year, but I won’t complete my M.A.R. degree until May, 2010.)
We just got back from a trip, and on our way we saw this comical sight. When a trucker carries an empty load, it’s called “dead heading”. This trucker, made some effort to show he wasn’t exactly doing that. The rubber chicken suggests he was joking. You like this one? Let me know.
It got me to thinking…What about you and me? Have you looked at what you’re hauling lately? (I’ll be writing about some of mine in a post, soon.) Are you noticing crazy baggage? Are we truly making forward progress, or instead, failing to admit our dead-heading, by just going through the motions, or joking around, rubber chicken-style? Just something to chew on…
Welcome to the most popular survey at this blog!
(Is this is silly question? Yes. Try to have some fun, okay?)
Directions: Answer these simple questions, True or False, add up your score, and I’ll give you some instructions at the end.
1. T or F On cold, windy days, sometimes it feels like the wind goes “right through you”.
2. T or F Cats and dogs bother you when you don’t want them to.
3. T or F The wrong mail has been delivered to your home.
4. T or F This wrong mail to your home stuff has happened more than once.
5. T or F Sometimes you feel lighter in the morning time.
6. T or F After a hair cut, sometimes you miss your hair.
7. T or F You feel like you’d like to “go home” sometimes, even though you might be at your own house when you think that.
8. T or F Babies and crazy people sometimes stare at you…knowingly.
9. T or F Your fear of heights has gotten worse over the years.
10. T or F You don’t wear out shoes like you did ten years ago.
Now, give yourself 5 points for every T, and 10 points for every F. Add them up.
If you scored 50-100, your soul is pretty hard to define, size and shape-wise, but I won’t lie to you, you have one. It might fit into a mailbox.
If you scored over 100, you have a soul, and a mailbox is no place to put it. Use your mailbox for letters, and small packages. Take larger packages directly to the post office, and take your soul and spirit with you.
We may not think about our spirits and souls in an everyday way, but if we hold our breath for 20 minutes, a lot of questions get answered. The life breath goes right out of us. The Greek word for spirit is literally “breath of life.” It seems there are a lot of things that aren’t incredibly easy to define. If we think we can use the Bible as a glossary, we’ll find out, there isn’t a definition of the word “soul,” “spirit,” like there would be in a glossary, which would clean up the confusion, nice and tidy-like. But, most of us realize our life experience isn’t just surface level. Are we simply machines that live a few decades, and then die? That’s the harder thing to believe, especially when we take in Beauty that is all around us.
Things like Beauty, Hope, Love, Innocence, and such, are *Ideals* that point deeper, or further out, than we can clearly perceive, or could ever accurately measure. Knowing God (who is infinite and personal) works the same way. So does a life that includes an acknowledgment of soul and spirit, and a journey toward the heart of God who is “Other,” the Source of Good, and the best of the ideals written on our hearts.
Thanks for playing.
I hope you stay, read some posts or try the other self-tests, and leave comments where you’d like to.
-Lisa
I’m working on a meaty post about Hope. but before I finish and post it, I wanted to hear your ideas.
Take a stab at it. Define hope as you see it. Please invited others to respond too.
Thank you!