Spirituality – Page 92 – Lisa Colón DeLay | Spiritual Formation and the Way of the Desert Elders

A Season of Returning : 2014

This is Ash Wednesday, 2014.

lent

It wasn’t a special day or season as I was growing up in my particular Christian faith tradition, but with the new connections and resources I found through graduate school and the kindred spirits I found on the internet over the last ten years, I have been able to tap in and reconnect with this very ancient, rich, and reflective seasonal observance, each year.

This time of year, and especially during this particularly harsh winter, we can feel isolated, burned out, discouraged, troubled, or restless. It’s not just a state of mind, it’s a spiritual thirst.

Lent is a whole season that specifically helps us work through the darker, profound things that reside in the deepest recesses of our hearts, and prepare us for Spring (in every sense of the word).

This year, my husband and I are using a YouVersion Bible App reading plan called Lent for Everyone which includes a daily commentary by N.T. (Tom) Wright. Each day, the Lenten scripture reading and commentary brings the season into a richer light.

(Click to see all the Lenten plans.)

Why not do a reading plan this season?

Here’s another resources you might like.

It’s from Ruth Haley Barton’s Transforming Center.

(Click it to read the whole thing.)

Scripture for Ash Wednesday: Joel 2:1-2, 12-17 or Isaiah 58:1-12; Psalm 51:1-17; 2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10; Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21

“‘And yet even now,’ says the Lord, ‘return to me with all your heart . . .’” —Joel 2:12

The “Praying for Enemies” Misconception

Remember the Sermon on the Mount?

It’s the 4 chapters ( Click to read Matthew Chapters 4-7 ) where Jesus lays out this upside down, counter-intuitive foundation for the Kingdom of Heaven on earth. He shows how God’s ways don’t look like our ways. It’s a recapitulation of the law of Moses that was warped by God’s people over time and needed to be righted.

Disciples of Christ try to get this passage into their DNA and live it out. While many claim to be Christians few really follow or even grasp the framework Jesus lays out for the Kingdom. Maybe it’s too challenging.

In Matthew 5 Jesus covers the very unpopular idea of not hating our enemies.

• We like to side with people we agree with.

• We like to make sure people know where we stand and what we oppose.

• We love our own

(Much like today, the prevailing thought at the time was that your kin, tribe, or people group are your neighbors and you should love them. Everyone else? They could be treated like enemies. Jesus stresses that our enemies are our neighbors too and later he uses the parable of the Good Samaritan to make his point about what love and following God really looks like.)

But, back to hating our enemies…

(quote blocks cover Mathew 5:43-48)

“You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighborⁱ and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven.

Loving our enemies means blessing them. Blessing our enemies means we enrich their lives.

But, what about the prayer part?

There’s a common misunderstanding that this verse implies that we should pray for blessing for our enemies, or pray that good things happen to our enemies, or perhaps the most common…we should pray that they will change.

(That’s one I’ve done quite a bit!)

Jesus’ point is different.

He’s not suggesting that we pray for circumstances to change or for our enemy to change, but that’s just what we do, isn’t it?

No. The point is that our enemies and the persecution works to change us into children of God, when we do as Jesus would do.

What praying “for them” means is that we are praying for them to be our teachers. We are praying for us. The trying experience shows us the potential to take on the nature of God. A nature that is so radically different than ours.

God’s ways are the ways of love.

• What does that mean?

It becomes more obvious as Jesus continues the thought and tells us something about God and his character.

How good is God? Thoroughly. Or we could say “perfectly good”.

In fact, he is so unsparingly generous in his goodness that…

He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.

Huh? That seems odd. He does good to bad people. . .

We think of justice as righting wrongs usually by giving someone a form of evil or payback for their evil, and rewarding good with more good. We like liking those who like us and we like punishing or casting out those we don’t like.

For instance, in two minutes on Facebook and you’ll see demarcation lines drawn. Outsiders and insiders. Good and bad. Idiots and smart.

We assume that praying for them (to change) is the godly option …

(because we are actually tempted to do something really nasty and let them have it…but, gosh, we are holding our selves back, you know, because of trying to be godly and such).

The godly thing to do is to think and act through the framework of love as our heavenly Father would.

This has nothing to do with feeling warm fuzzies or giving out hugs. It’s about fundamental fairness, as God defines it.

It’s about a shift is perspective.

Jesus tackles that next:

If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that?

So what should we do instead? Jesus says…

Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

**Don’t trip over the perfection part.**

The point of the statement is to show how God is thoroughly good and also quite different in his ways than you and me. Be like God.

Being like the good Father from heaven is the true aim. This portion of Matthew 5 isn’t truly centered on what to do about our enemies. Weird, right?

It’s about transforming our thinking and our ways into Kingdom ways.

(That’s what all of the Sermon on the Mount to geared toward.)

The more good and loving we are, (even to those who are unlike us, or who hate and mistreat us), the more we are like children of God and children of his kingdom (dominion).

The contention Jesus makes is that God doesn’t play favorites.

Most people don’t like this part and don’t truly go along with it. We do gymnastics to find some useable loopholes or other verses to avoid the this part, because we define ourself by who our favorites are.

Why doesn’t God play favorites?

Because he really loves us. It is the very nature of God, as defined and modeled by Jesus.

Evil is redeemed through generosity, forgiveness, and love.

Sounds crazy, of course, but we see this happen all the time.

• Remember the story of Officer Jeremy Henwood who bought a child a happy meal just a few minutes before he was violently gunned down in a random attack (and his good deed was caught on video)?

• Or the woman from Rwanda who’s only son was violently murdered. She not only visited the young man who killed him and visited him in prison, but later adopted him and became his mother when he had no place to go.

This stories make us want to be better people through just hearing the story!

• Think of Jesus dying for his enemies.

• Think about how true forgiveness makes things new.

Because we let the person off?

No.

It’s because we have transformed.

We stopped letting the offense trap and define us.

The next time you think about “praying for your enemies” remember:

• You are praying for you.

• You are praying for your mindset to change about what is happening.

• You are practicing being a child of God.

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“Survey says!” (7 second Survey results of 2014)

Create your free online surveys with SurveyMonkey , the world’s leading questionnaire tool.

Did you take the survey? Thank you!

A few weeks ago I created this The 7 Second Survey to see who was reading this blog and what you like best.

FINDING #1

I was going to post much more heavily on the thing that brings in the $ in my “day job” this year. I was hoping to get more work and inspire other creators and writers like me.

That’s right, Marketing Communications tips and tactics. But, it appears my reader base is mostly the original one from my first blogging efforts in 2007. Overwhelmingly so.

That’s probably good news, and honestly, it surprised me.

So, I will not discard the topics and theme that started it all!

Once per week, at the very least, I will hit on a spiritual topic. It may be anything from a Christian spiritual practice, to theology, to Christian living, or personal and spiritual transformation and improvement. If that’s how you found me, and that’s why you visit, I’m glad I know better now!

Also, I will be a bit more aware of including my brand of humor, which as you may know, I have determined as “damp”. (i.e. Almost dry humor)

(Please note that unlike many “Christian author” websites, I will very rarely step into the fray of controversy so commonly seen on religious blogs. I just don’t have the stomach for it anymore…for a while now, really. I find it 95% shallow and disheartening. If you like that stuff, you have plenty of options, though, and I hope you find what you like for that.)

Screen Shot 2014-02-21 at 1.50.09 PM

FINDING # 2

Another thing I learned is that I don’t have too many folks who come by to read more than once per week, even though I post 2-3 times per week. Now, I’m wondering if I’m writing too much. Maybe. Or maybe you should come back more often!

I’m guessing that there are two possible solutions, or three, to cope with that:

1. I can encourage you, my dear readers, to list the blogs you read through the super handy free reader service called Feedly which houses posts you haven’t read yet. It works like a catalogue of awesomeness. No more bookmarks and time-killing web surfing. You just paste in the websites you like, and boom, they’re all in one place. The best part, no more relying on your memory to visit a few times a week. What a relief! (Can you tell I use it?)

2. I can encourage you to get email delivery through free Feedburner service (top right sidebar)…for no more silly and random blog searches and relying on your memory.

3. Don’t sweat it.

(I’m doing all three.)

FINDING #3

The third question was open ended…”fill in the blank style”. About half of the respondents left something to answer the question:

“What would you improve at the website?”

The funniest one (or whatever) was…

“Use spellchecker.”

As if I don’t.

…Yes. This site is full of mistakes. Typos. Proofreading issues. Editing errors. Etc. I try to hunt them down. I find plenty too late and some not at all.

If you see a problem that bothers you or you’d like to help me out, please use the contact button and let me know. I do like the help. :)

Also, I’m flawed and weak human–awash in imperfections. I’m more creative than I am a good speller or editor of my own work. If I ever have the money, I may hire someone for that. But, I’m doing #3 on this. (The “Don’t sweat it” option.)

In truth, I use this site as a sandbox. I build stuff. I sculpt the messy sand of words. I don’t worry too much. I would be creating posts even if no one came to read them. I cannot help it. At all.

It’s like this:

Sometimes you’ll find a few lincoln logs from the cat of imperfection here in my sandbox, as it were,

but hopefully more often you’ll find that what you’re reading is still worth it despite the shortcomings.

Anyway–
Thank you for reading and journeying with me through these years. I appreciate it immensely.

More great things are brewing!

The next post is here. It’s about the day I turn 42. The photo will give you a chuckle!

-Lisa

Guest writer at Everyday Liturgy

I’m very glad to have the honor of being the guest writer today at Thomas Turner’s blog:

Everyday Liturgy

Thomas wrote me saying,

I would love for you to contribute a 500 word (or so) post about how participating in a particular church or denomination has helped make you the Christian you are today. The purpose of this series is largely ecumenical, and looks at the positive you gleaned out of the experience. If you had a bad experience that turned into something good later on, I would think you could make a great post out of that…

Some of you may not know just how fundamentalist my roots are.

Here’s but one example:

Several people approached my mom to discourage her from marrying my dad. Why?

Because their offspring would be bi-racial.

Plenty of (fundamentalist) Christian groups at the time prohibited “inter-racial” dating and (obviously) marriage and pro-creation.

Southern Baptists were the slave-owning southerns who coined their monicker at the time of the American Civil War (to them known as “The War of the Northern Aggression”). Northern Baptists, as they were once called, later changed their name to American Baptist and became (typically) more progressive and liberal in their views over time.

Southern Baptists proliferated to many places outside of the the South (to the American North and through missionary work, to all parts of the world), but kept their name and, as you might guess, some of their same notions.

(To be fair, things have changed for the better, mostly. Today, folks in churches coming from that tradition run the gamut of very strict and conservative… “old school patriarchal imperialist southern” -if you will- to more gracious and relaxed in their dogma on issues of race, gender, and other matters.)

(By the way, my dad was Puerto Rican. Are you curious to see what he looked like? Here. Like most conversations about “race” –as if that was an actual thing– it’s really just vestige of a medieval mindset and a preoccupation about skin tones and/or physical features. Sadly, it still is and by people you would imagine would know better. But, I’ll tackle that in some other post.)

I wonder how many of them were relieved that I ended up having my mom’s light skin.

(This is were Obama and I are alike. Like me, he actually looks more like his mom than his dad. Trust me, it’s true. I notice these things! :) )

So, what was my journey and where do I stand now?

Give it a read and find out!

Everything…but connection

chianlink

My friend Kayla visited her parents’ church over her summer break for 10 weeks or so.

They were attending this suburban church with a large attendance each Sunday morning and I thought she’d really enjoy the change. Maybe she would be disappointed to come back to her normal, small-town life.

When I asked her about it, she said, “I should have loved it. The music was amazing; the people friendly. They had lots of youth programs and small groups going, and the pastor chose meaningful things to teach. I should miss it, but I don’t.”

This surprised me, so I asked her why she thought this was.

She said something so simple that it gave me a punch of profundity.

“You don’t miss something you don’t feel connected to.”

I started to wonder about the people I’ve lost through death, circumstances, or diverging paths.

Some I missed and some I rarely thought of. Those I did not miss much weren’t really all too different (in general) from the ones I did miss. It didn’t directly reflect the quality of person they were or if we had a lot in common. Like Kayla pointed out, I missed the ones I felt connected with and to. Reflecting on that, the ones that had stronger bonds created more longing or loss in the void of their absence.

That may seem pretty obvious, but the critical gap comes in when we miss why we are connected and what it means to be available and vulnerable on a regular basis with others you can trust. Apart from that, you won’t miss much.

I sense something has been lost in many communities of faith and in many other places because we are so much more amused by our distractions than we are connected in deep ways.

Human connection is never really about measurable stats. We already realize this. It’s about investment in others, sure,

but it’s also about the reciprocity of that investment. It’s always a two-way street.

Some people are wonderful and you invest and hope for a harvest–of some sort–where you both benefit, and you assume they do too, and then it doesn’t happen. The fruition doesn’t manifest or withers on the vine. Maybe the soil was bad, maybe a storm came or drought, or pestilence, maybe something else thwarted success. Sometimes it’s obvious and other times you just sense something is wrong that is hard to make right again. Sometimes you just need to move on and other times, you have to try again in a new season with different seed.

That happens in faith communities and in interpersonal relationships. It happens in business and in extended family life.

If the connection is lacking you won’t be missed. And you won’t miss them. It’s likely that you will feel disappointed about that.

We overlook the idea and process of true connection even as we want it the most.

Is there some thing or someone you’d like to feel more connected with?

Oh,
3 more things.

1. I will be posting a “spiritual-themed” topic about once per week. The other times I will concentrate on other ideas depending on what strikes me and will often concentrate on topics related to helping you create and communicate better.

2. I really am excited to see what this year brings and I’m really happy you came today.

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