Last night I finished John Eldredge's new book, Walking With God, and I'm also in process of reading Frank Laubach's Letters from a Modern Mystic. Both gave me some new thoughts as it pertains to this topic. (I actually have another blog post to do later this week that relates WWG to RC more directly).
John Eldredge is relatively well-known, so I won't go into who he is, but Laubach was a missionary to the Philippines in the 30's who entered an experiment of connecting each minute of his life to God. He wrote of this to his dad, and those letters were published in a small volume in 1937.
I'm read so far about six months into Laubach's attempt, but the last letter I read of his sparked the thought -- this is really about bringing the kingdom of God into each and every moment of our lives. Thinking of God practically in parallel to each moment and thought we have ... this is a way of bringing the kingdom of heaven to our lives.
If we did this, what would happen to our "dedicated" times to God? Our quiet times? I think they'd radically change, wouldn't they? Many days, they'd be much shorter. They may focus on other spiritual disciplines than they do now (more reading and studying for instance, and less prayer). As a community, this ingraining of spirituality in everything we do, what would that do to our gatherings?
I wonder if they wouldn't bring more missional aspects to our corporate gatherings. If we are always thinking of God outside the gatherings, we are likely to attach more of God to our other activities and bring more of our outside activities into our "oasis" that is our gatherings. We bring needs and opportunities we might not have spotted without this constant connection, and seek more equipping to handle them, to reach others, to bring redemption to "real life".
But that could only work if our gatherings allowed some very open communication. An order of worship, a monologue teaching, a song service as we typically have them -- how do we express this missional aspect with so much "orderedliness" in our gatherings? Order is appropriate, but orderliness?
Just a pondering ...
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More Than Meets The Eye
6 years ago
2 comments:
These sound like interesting thoughts although I may need more detail on what you mean by "connecting each minute of his life to God." or your term "this is really about bringing the kingdom of God into each and every moment of our lives." to really understand that we are on the same page.
This is language influenced by Frank Laubach, and to a lesser extend, Brother Lawrence.
It is about bringing God in each moment. Do you think of God each minute of the day? In each decision, or conversation, do you think with your idle "cycles" of brain juice about how God would want you to act? Do you ask God how to you should act?
Paul called this praying "unceasingly". I think it is the same -- asking God's desires in each moment of your life. It is hard, but making the effort is a part of "surrendering" to God, I believe. If we are surrendered to God, then we will even want to know what God wants us to have for lunch. Do we ask?
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