Ordinary human beings ...

“We must not be led to believe that the Disciplines are only for spiritual giants and hence beyond our reach, or only for contemplatives who devote all their time to prayer and meditation. Far from it. God intends the Disciplines of the spiritual life to be for ordinary human beings: people who have jobs, who care for children, who wash dishes and mow lawns. In fact, the Disciplines are best exercised in the midst of our relationships with our husband or wife, our brothers and sisters, our friends and neighbors.”
Richard Foster, Celebration of Discipline

This is how Foster introduces his book about the disciplines. So many times in my own life I have wanted someone to come along and help me grow in my faith and give me the tools to help me on this journey. Through many years in college, mission trips, youth rallies, retreats, weekly devotionals, and just wonderful times out in God’s creation, I have been inspired in so many different ways to spend time with God. You may think that since I have been the one writing these devotionals, that this has been an easy task for me. It has been hard. It can be difficult to work through some of these disciplines. We are in such a fast paced society, even in such a small little town like Hollis. We are constantly feeling the pull to go, go, go. God wants us to be, be, be in His presence and let his love, grace, peace, hope, and encouragement flow over us.

There are so many other disciplines we could have looked at, but we just had the time to focus on these few. Just because our class times are done, it doesn’t mean we need to stop working on these disciplines. In fact, we should all feel a challenge to take it a step further by working on these disciplines and helping someone else develop their own. Wherever we are, at the end of this class, my hope is that it is closer to God than when we began.

When we began, we started out by focusing on Zephaniah 3:17. Do you remember this time together? Do you remember taking the time to be alone and quiet yourself down and recite this over and over again? Let’s look at it one more time.

“The Lord your God is with you, he is mighty to save. He will take great delight in you, he will quiet you with his love, he will rejoice over you with singing.”
Zephaniah 3:17

Our God wants all of this for us. He actually longs for us to quiet down and rest in his arms of love. I know that many of you felt that as we participated in some of these exercises. God is with you and He is daily waiting for you to spend that time with Him. Over the next few days we will be looking back at some of the disciplines we have worked through. I am going to ask a huge favor of you all. Since we will not have another time to get together and discuss our feelings on this experience before I have to turn my final project in, I would like you all to consider at least one devotional or experience that we worked on together and share that with me. You can email it to me directly at theroarks4jesus@aol.com. I will then take your thoughts and use that as one of our devotional thoughts for the following week. That way we can all take a part in closing down this “overflow” of our hearts. “Closing down” is hopefully the wrong way to say this, because one of the goals of this project is to allow this experience to overflow into the lives of those around us. Are you experiencing any overflow?

Thanks!

Jason