Exchanged Living

Developing a Rule of Life

Summer is always an interesting season of life for me. At Hope, things both slow down and speed up in ways.  The church schedule slows down a bit; less weekly commitments makes for a more open week. But it also speeds up--that open schedule allows me to travel and participate in ministry more readily outside of my usual parameters. That's an incredible blessing in many ways, but it also messes with my weekly and even daily rhythms of life, which I seem to spend my fall, winter and spring re-establishing.

In my Vocation of Ministry (VOM) class at seminary, we spent part of our time discussing and developing a rule of life. A rule of life is designed to function as a set of guiding principles that shape your life into the one you feel called to live by regularly committing to certain practices and disciplines that will yield a healthy life for you.  The concept of a rule of life stems back to early monastic practices, and is best embodied in the Rule of Saint Benedict, which has been used by the Benedictine monks for fifteen centuries. While a personal rule of life may not have the breath and depth of a monastic rule,  it's aim is the same: to give your life structure that ultimately puts you in a better position for growth and obedience in your journey of faith. It's a practical way to take ownership of the working out of your salvation as Christ works in you "to will and to act for His good pleasure" (Phil. 2:12-13)

One of the first things we were instructed to do when developing our own rule was to make a list of the practices that we know to be most critical to our faith.  These may not be areas that you are strongly growing in at the time, but should be a working inventory of the things you know will nurture your spiritual growth. Include things that you currently do as well as things you hope to integrate into your life. Many people divide these activities into daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, or other intervals of time based on the activity (i.e. a practice of sabbath keeping is a weekly practice by nature, while having an extended time of solitude may be something you can do only once or twice a year). These activities should also be holistic in nature, meaning your entire life should be integrated into your rule (for it is all spiritual). So your mind, body, soul, and community should all be taken into account when gathering these things together; this can include physical activity, social involvement, family commitments, etc...

Once you gather these things, structuring your rule can begin. Remember: the goal of a rule of life is not to structure yourself into as legalistic pattern of living, but rather to frame your life daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, in a way that enables a growing communion with God and a growing obedience to/from God.  So you should avoid simply listing things that you already do, which won't encourage a stretching growth, and you should avoid piling a list of structure on yourself that requires a complete revamping of life. Challenge yourself, but also make sure your choices are not so un-natural that they become a checklist to get done each day.  I like the language of rhythm when thinking about these practices; they should have a natural pulse that you fall in line with, even if they vary from time to time. (think about it: you have some natural rhythms in your day--sequences you follow when you wake, when you go to bed, etc... How can you integrate these practices into your daily rhythms?)

I'm currently rehashing my rule of life.  The one I did for class was rushed and poorly thought out in my opinion. I've resisted publishing mine here, as I don't think there is a prescriptive way of doing this. I've seen a number of people's rule of life, and they are all different and very distinct to that person. And people change theirs regularly based on how they are growing and how their calling is being refined. What I love most about this practice is the intentional direction it takes to own the process of growth; God calls us to transformation through Christ by His Spirit, and our lives are designed for this kind of transformation. Through ordering your life intentionally, you can better posture yourself for the kind of communing encounters that change us and our world.

If this is a practice you're interested in, leave me a comment and perhaps we can collaborate/discuss more.

I hope the light at the end of the tunnel is not a train.

I'm getting closer to the end of this semester, and every part of my being wants to slack off and coast through. But I've realized that is impossible, because I can't coast through this stuff, so I'm pressing on. In the past four days I've had 18 hours of class, two worship services, written 24 pages of research, and signed a lease on a new place. I have another paper due soon that I have to finish tonight...and I'm sweating it. Lift a brother up if you get a shot...

That being said, I am so grateful that these are my biggest concerns these days. There's a whole lot happening in our world, affecting people in big and small ways, and most of them don't affect me. I know that's a gift many don't have. Let me know if you need help, or even just prayer about whats affecting you these days. May the Lord bless you and keep you...

Oh, and two PS''s:

• Ben Harper's new album is on sale at AmazonMp3 today for $4. check it out-
• Gabe Close, my sugar-free left-handed guitar-playing friend/brother has posted a few songs on his myspace site that I played keys/organs on. Check out "what we want" and "hadn't i been good to you" (the full band versions).

"On Silence and Laughter"

I've just finished reading Parker Palmer's book Hidden Wholeness for one of my classes at Asbury. Breaking down all the incredible and thought-provoking stuff in this book would take more time than I have, but I do have a few quotes I'm thinking about from the chapter he entitled "On Silence and Laughter."

For Lent, on of the things I've fasted from has been listening to music. Weird, I know. But listening to music is a foundational part of most of my days.  I listen to it critically, casually, as background, as part of my studying rhythms, and as part of my devotional life. So taking a break from it has left me with a lot of empty sound space in my life. This has called me into pray quite a bit, but even more so into silence.

Silence is a scary thing sometimes. I remember when, as part of our worship team's exploration of Scripture and meditation upon it, we began to take 15 minutes to sit in silence with a text and just listen.  After the first time at it, many people simply talked about how 1. that was the first intentional silence they'd had all day, let alone in a while, and 2. that silence was difficult. I agree...

Parker mentions how silence is like a "little death" of sorts. This death brings the illusions of the eternal life of busyness into view, and remind us that we are in some ways always moving towards a Greater Silence. He echoes the admonition of Saint Benedict, who told his pupils to "keep death before one's eyes daily", a morbid sounding practice until one comes to grips with the possibilities that death can bring to one's soul, possibilities realized in the passion of Christ, whose death led to a Spirit-empowered resurrection. In Parker's words, "little deaths bring little births", and as silence has all but confronted me this Lent, I think I'm starting to experience some of both of these. Or to paraphrase Paul, to know the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death that I may attain His life. (Phil 3:10-11).

So I'm trying to not only allow this kind of silence, but to begin to choose it regularly. One of the hardest things about it is how vulnerable you become to the Holy Spirit in those moments.

In this silence,
I find my heart asking
for what I sometimes fear:

for You to bring Your death
to what is now not me
anymore.

My cowering darkness
clings to this
lack of talk,

knowing that when You speak
it has no where to go,
no where to run.

My will betrays my fears,
praying haphazardly
for Your violent words;

words that can make
an apple pie from scratch
now threatening to make something new

out of me.

(a poem from Lent, 2008)

It's hard to be silent when you know what silence can lead to... perhaps revelation. And not just of the Father, but of our own hearts. I've found that it's the dialogue in my own heart in this silence that needs the most attention, for that's where true transformation begins: within the heart. Sometimes I take notes about what's happening in my heart/head so I can begin to see what's happening and what the Lord might be bringing to light, even calling to death. Which brings me to a different quote from the chapter:

" Spiritual gravitas unleavened by humor makes a bread of life that gives a bellyache." (p. 154)

As Parker points out, silence and laughter aren't often coupled, especially in spiritual discussion. But both are life-giving practices.  I've heard it said that laughing is like half a prayer, and I know Jeff has said on multiple occasions that when we see heaven, one of the first things we'll probably realize about our lives is that we could have laughed more. Laughter can reveal truth, can expose reality for what it is. And honestly, laughing makes you just as vulnerable as silence, though in a different way.

There are certain things that one can only laugh about when one sees them as they are, including oneself. Perhaps intentional silence will lead to more spontaneous laughter... I hope to find out.

I hope your Sunday has laughs and silence tomorrow.

One way to define disappointment:

Hearing about an all-you-can-eat crawfish boil (in Kentucky), then, while headed to said crawfish boil, finding out that they've already run out of crawfish.

Blitzen Trapper, Big Speeches and Jeremy Bentham

There are three things I'm excited about today:

1. I've been listening to Blitzen Trapper, an Indie/Country/Rock band from Portland. Their album Furr is dominating my listening time these days. I'm downloading their previous album right now; hopefully it will be as great as this one is. Apparently, they've played some shows with Iron and Wine, another fav of mine. Wow.
2. It's inauguration day. Whether you voted for Obama or not, this day's going to be historic, and that just gets me pumped. It's a big turning point in the social/political landscape of our nation--one that's been past due, even if I don't agree with him on every issue. He's so good from the podium anyway, I'm sure this speech is going to be amazing.
3. Tomorrow is the premiere of Season 5 of LOST! I may not sleep tonight...it's like Christmas Eve. Any hunches on what may happen this season? Theories? I'm sure I'll have a Thursday post on the show, that is, assuming that my mind is not blown to the point of not being able to type.

Reflections on an Exodus-Based Prayer Experience

Today at TFCA, Andrew and I led the Middle/High School students through a prayer experience we crafted around the Exodus, which we've studied for the past several week together. We based each of the stations on one of the events we discussed:

• We began with a "burning bush" experience, where we lit was was, in effect, a candle representing God's ever-presence and call to us to recognize Him in our midst. Students removed their shoes and prayed, echoing back to YHWH's conversation with Moses on holy ground.
• One station was a naming station. Moses' name means "to draw out", and the Exodus story shows us how Moses fulfilled the plan of God in obedience and drew the Israelites out of Egypt and into the land of promise. At this station, we asked students to write their names on large sheets of paper, where other students could then come and write attributes of those students they see as part of how God may use them in the future for his kingdom.
• We had two chain-metaphor stations: one for confession and one for deliverance. The confession chain was a long chain of paper strips (pictured above) where students could confess things that were keeping them in Egypt, so to speak, and out of the experience of God's promise. The deliverance chain was the inverse of that--it was a chain of praise for the ways God has delivered them out of bondage and into His full provision and victory.
• We has a psalm/song station based on Moses and Miriam's songs in Exodus 15. These songs boast in the Lord's might and power, His favor toward His people and His faithfulness to keep His word. We asked students to write their own poem/psalm/song/prayer about the things the Lord has done for them and their families/churches. They then kept their writings in their bible, marking this passage with their own echo of this chapter.
• We had a station of intercession, where we asked students to stand in for those who are suffering and need the Lord, asking for His mercy and deliverance for others. They wrote these names and situations on white boards and prayed for the requests of others as well as the situations they wrote down.
• And finally, we had a "manna station. The manna station consisted of note cards and empty bread loaf bags. Students wrote down verses on the cards that were nourishing to their own walk of faith. They then placed these cards in the bread bags. At the end of the prayer experience, the students drew "manna" out of the bread bags to take with them as encouragement and nourishment for their journey.

We've set up a number of prayer experiences like this before (with varying stations). Todays was shortened a bit, but ended up being a pretty amazing experience from what we saw and heard. At the end of the time, we brought the two chains of deliverance and confession and linked them together with a piece of paper bearing the name of Jesus. We talked about how, much like the Exodus story, our life of faith is the story of the tension between deliverance and the need for it. We live in the already/not yet experience of salvation, and Jesus is not only our Savior and our Hope, but also our process (or our Sanctification). He is the Victor where we've tasted victory, and the only chance of victory where we need it most.

In a lot of ways, this is very Advent-y; this season in which we celebrate that the Messiah has come and yet we grieve and long for the day when He returns and makes all things new. I think its crucial to tap into this kind of tension in our faith because it drives us to both the covenant we're in and the hope we have because of it. Jesus' arrival in the flesh was the culmination of a long history of God's faithfulness being shown in history as He related to Israel. It was the covenant of God that God acted out of towards the Israelites in the Exodus story, to the point where before the writer mentions that God was remembering His covenant with Abraham, Issac and Jacob, he had already set Moses apart to "draw out" the people for His purposes. By the time we reach the New Teatament, we see this pattern of God's faithfulness to His promises as well established in spite of the reckless and often shameless disobedience of His people. He is faithful, and those who stand on His promises have never seen anything but that.

The baby in the manger is the most tangible expression of God's faithfulness to His people in all of history. It's His committment to His word, as He once again steps into history to intervene for His people, and this time in a new way: as one of them. He becomes a frail, helpless child--picture the one who spoke the universe into existance now having to cry for food and drink, a mother and father cleaning up the messes of the one who would clean up theirs, and all the worlds who would believe. The Incarnation gives us our cornerstone to build our faith on. And yet, there is still an equal call for hope in what has not yet come: the promise demands it.

One of my favorite portions of the Exodus story is when the Israelites are next to the Red Sea, fearing their imminant death as the best soldiers of Pharoah charge towards them. Moses makes this awesome speech, one that belongs in an epic like Braveheart or Gladiator:

Moses answered the people, "Do not be afraid. Stand firm and you will see the deliverance the LORD will bring you today. The Egyptians you see today you will never see again. The LORD will fight for you; you need only to be still."  (Exodus 14:13-14)

What confidence, eh? There's a part of me that wonders if the griping and complaining ones felt like  idiots after Moses rolled that little speech out. And yet, its not that part of the story that excites me the most; its the verse after it:

Then the LORD said to Moses, "Why are you crying out to me? Tell the Israelites to move on..." (v. 15)

The first time I read that passage, I didn't get it. "Hmmm...why cry out to God again...oh, yeah. They massive dudes with chariots coming to kill us. Lord, if you're going to deliver us, you better step in and do something---that's why I'm crying out to you."

But Moses didn't get it. God had already steped in: He gave his word.

When God called the children of Isreal out of Egypt, in the call, in the promise, everything they needed to move forward was provided. The motion of moving forward reflect what the writer of Hebrews marks as faith, or the assurance of things hoped for. God wasn't asking them to wait on Him, but rather to believe and hold to His promise and to move forward on it as their (only) hope. Maybe it was at the river side they first felt the tension of already having deliverance and not yet having it.

As we connected the two chains today, I began to think about how the incarnation and subsequent passion of Jesus is the only way this already/not yet tension becomes bearable. As Don Peters and David Clark pointed out in their intro to our (Hope's) Advent celebration, there are actually three comings we celebrate during Advent: the birth, the second coming, and Jesus' arrival in our own lives. Jesus arrived, but through the cross and resurrection, He still shows up. In the tension of already rescued and needed redenption, Jesus comes into our history, our circumstances and arrives, tying the faithfulness of God in our past to our moment, and linking our moment into the hope we have in Him now.

And it is through His arrival now, through the person of the Holy Spirit, that we are continually re-created and renewed. He enables holiness through giving us His very own, and through that we find and hold to the promise all the more; the promise ahead of us that is waiting to be unearthed and displayed.

So as we talk Advent, maybe we should talk more about this tension, and really start to embrace it. May it enable us to meet with Jesus now, as His life reaches back and forward in promise for us, establishing every step between Egypt and the promised land, the new Eden, forever.

Updates from home

For those who have called, emailed, etc... here's an update on my family's status during Gustav:
The last message I got from my brother said that BR was hit hard--he had two tree tops downed in his yard, but nothing hit the house. He and my parents are both without power. My dad said that they are fine, and are running on generator power.

This storm is steady losing force, but is still destroying lots of things and threatening much more. Please continue to pray for the people of south Louisiana and the Gulf Coast, for Bobby Jindal and the officials who are making decisions that for many are life and death, and for the many families that are facing tragedy once again. Pray for the people in the Gulf who were hit by this storm a few days ago--for the many dead in Jamaica, for the homes and crops that were destroyed by Gustav before it became a US concern. Pray for those who have been shipped out of their homes again--that they are well taken care of wherever they are and that the can quickly return to their homes. Pray that the lives loss are minimal and that peope reach out and help again as rebuilding efforts begin.

Storytelling at the Gideons Convention...

Well, I'm back from the Gideon's International Convention in Louisville, and it was a great week. I ended up leading worship for a couple of different age groups during the week, and it's always interesting to lead groups of people in worship, especially people who you don't know and who don't know you. The 12-13 year olds liked songs with motions. I learned that the hard way. Thankfully, I had a motion-filled week at x4:12 the week before.

I think the most incredible night I had there was the one night I led for the 14-15 year olds. I went in to help out and do a couple of songs, and half way through the first song, i broke a string on Andrew's guitar (which I way playing because I had broken a string on my guitar). I tried to keep going, then broke another string. That put me up to my personal record of three broken stings in two days. So I just stopped playing, and everyone there kinda of stared at me and thought "What now?"

Which brought me into an interesting dilemma--how do you lead a group of people in corporate worship without music (especially as a musician)? Or better yet, how do you lead a group of 14-15 year olds to worship when they translate worship as singing songs?

I thought about leading them in some songs acapella-ly (bad verbage, i know), but they didn't know the songs anyway, and my powerpoint only had the songs I was planning on doing. So we ended up talking about what we were just singing, which happened to be the song "Enough" by Chris Tomlin and Louie Giglio:

All of You is more than enough for all of me
For every thirst and every need
You satisfy me with Your love
And all I have in You is more than enough.

If God is the author and perfecter of our faith (which He is), then He's writing our faith stories everyday. We live by faith, and we see the Author in what's happening all around us. I challenged the group to look at their life and think about who God has shown Himself to be based on what they've experienced in life, or to word that differently: how has God shown You who He is?  We opened the floor up, and some pretty amazing things happened.

These young people started standing up and telling us stries about their own lives, about God showing up in the midst of tragedy, of His ability to heal and forgive and restore, of His power to break addiction in their own lives and the lives of their families, of His constant presence, of His ability to truly satisfy. All this from 15 year olds... and the amazing part of it all was their stories outlined the image of God that has echoed through history. God unchanging, the God who is faithful, the God who saves and rescues, who redeems, delivers, transforms, fills, loves, and protects, the God of Abraham, Issac, and Jacob, and us--He showed up in our lives. In our stories. It was amazing.

We heard stories for 30 minutes or so before we wrapped up our time of worship with prayer. God had done great things in out midst, and as we testified to one another, we were reminded that God is great, and He is here among us, still doing awesome things and still worthy of our worship.

There's a post I want to start every couple of weeks that is focused on this kind of storytelling in our community (or at least this online community)--one where we can share with one another some of the stories from our own lives about God and how He's shown up in them. In Searching for God Knows What, Donald Miller wrote something to the effect of this: the most dangerous lie I ever believed is that life is a story about me. I think we are all naturally storytellers; I hope to tell stories from my life that do not put me at the center of it.   

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Listening to: Fee - All Because of Jesus