Lisa Colón DeLay | Spiritual Formation and the Way of the Desert Elders
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(a personal reflection from Gospel Virtues by Jonathan R. Wilson)
Cosmic Hope: For all times, for all places, and all people, and nothing can take it away.
This idea “hope as story” is not sourced in a human story.
It creates the circumstances by which we may endure, and serve each other. (not a will to power)
It is found in community, personally, with Person, and eschatologically.
It is transcendent…
Strangely enough—It can be started through worship.
How might you define it?
Wouldn’t it be cool if God was a genie, and if you rubbed him the right way you could get your wildest dreams to come true?
Or maybe he could be like the Lotto, and you could hit the Jackpot with him, and a windfall of goodies could come your way, with no trouble at all.
Or God could be like a butler with supernatural body toning and skin enhancing skills to diminish the signs of aging and flabbiness.
Ah, God, the big vending machine in the sky…
Except-God asks us to be familiar in relationship to him like a spouse. He calls us his “Beloved.” Hum… conundrum…
Is the Get God-Get Rich idea perhaps a bit immature? Near-sighted?
Anyway, God is a Being described as a Person, right?
A friend of mine, Jon Acuff, has a hilarious post called “Secretly Believing in the Prosperity Gospel.” You’ll laugh out loud if you read it. His book, “Stuff Christians Like” is a great commentary on Christian sub-culture that will have you laughing non stop! (Especially if you were ever a preacher’s kid!)
“All in all, one of the major things I gleaned from Brother Lawrence, was the similarity of my struggle to his battle, to get past punishing myself for my failures and losing my focus on God. It seems that when BL finally internalized the concept of God’s grace, he realized that as soon as he saw the disconnect in his life it was foolish to waste time beating himself over it (asceticism, which could take that quite literally, especially in BL’s day!). He learned to immediately return to the position that was already his because of God’s grace, continuing in the joy of His presence.”
“I’m glad Brother Lawrence seems like such a regular guy. He prays things like “God, I can’t do this unless you help me,” and when he messes up, “God, I *always* do that, and if you don’t help me I won’t ever do better!” That I can relate to!”
“I loved that Brother Lawrence was his own man – it was just him and God becuase everyone elses ideas confused him, so he just went straight to God. It was nothing in between – he would just get up – own the difficulty and carry on!!”
“For me, Brother Lawrence broke down some of my pre-assumed barriers by helping to break the secular and sacred divide that has happened in my life. I have often thought… okay, now it’s prayer time, then work time, then church time, then social time… etc. In reality, those separations don’t exist, and it’s immensely helpful to integrate our whole lives.”
For more on -Explaining “online Learning Groups”- click on the tab above called “Learning Groups-Updates”
Yes, for some of us–it’s getting depressing out there. The 10.2% unemployment rate is taking it’s toll. The number of people who are discouraged from looking for work pushes this number to over 17%.
It looks like “Change We Can Believe In” might have to be a kind of diaper change, because the whole package has gotten a bit soggy with, well, you know.
I want to encourage something that’s hard to come up with right now. Hope. Now, I Know we were offered “hope,” or having audacity of hope, about a year ago, okay more than a year ago, but I’m talking about something entirely different-A different perspective of the thing we term “hope.”
Hope really doesn’t come from someone’s promises, or vision-casting. It doesn’t come from having prosperity, or a cleaner environment. It actually comes from aligning/joining our own hope with a Hope that comes from something outside all of us.
The Source of goodness, the Source of Love, the Source of Hope itself, is not just something to pin a fragile string of our hope to, like a shinny balloon that sails into the sky, and makes us feel better.
It’s very much stronger than that. Ultimate Hope, Love, Goodness, is a person. The ideal we think of, with such things, is such because there is an origin to each one, in the first place. We wouldn’t even know about ultimate Hope, unless there was an Eternal Mind to be it, and eminent it, to begin with.
So really, our hope transcends circumstances. Good news, indeed!
And yet, we can do much to change some of our circumstances. When we are given a soggy diaper full of, you know what, we can start a change we can believe in.
Stay strong. Keep your confidence going.
Register to vote.
And remember that Hope is never truly found in a person, or circumstance.
It seems like with too much work, we get in too little worship. Our priorities push it to the side, out of the main focus. That just our relationship with God suffers, but so do all the other ones, right? Family, friends, and neighbors get less of us. And, what’s left over it’s really our best. Sometimes, it’s our worst. We can be frustrated, exhausted, anxious, or pre-occupied. We’ll take phone calls, instead of carving out time for them. We’ll miss meals, or events because of the demands of our high-paced work-style, which has become a full-blown life-style. Time to unwind, do nothing, or just really enjoy something like a sunset, a wonderful meal, a walk, or talk with the son or daughter, is pushed far into the margins, most of the time, overshadowed by a hectic schedule, and work, work, work.
My pastor brought this sort of thing up today. Yes, some jobs automatically come with a heap of obligations. But, when our living becomes much more about getting things done, than it is about being, in truth, we are robbing ourselves of life itself.
How fascinating that the Hebrew root word for work and worship turn out to be the SAME thing. “Avodah” This suggests that our work isn’t something different than worship, as we typically treat it. Everything we do when we work can be done as a worship practice. Work is offered as worship, and a pleasing sacrifice to God. Perhaps this way, it won’t be so much of a curse to our selves either. Maybe this way, we will make better boundaries because it is in God’s realm. He wishes for us to have abundant life, rest, peace, even as we work at our best for him.
Leave your comments, please :)