Try Softer

The phrase, “Try Softer” has been simmering inside of me since I read it. It is a key component of The Me I Want To Be - Becoming God’s Best Version of You (based on the book by the same title by John Ortberg) worship and small group series we are currently in the midst of.
For nearly my entire life I have been taught that growing spiritually into God’s best version of me involves certain prescribed spiritual disciplines. For example, early morning devotional time, daily writing in a journal, praying for a certain length of time in a certain way, etc. John Ortberg, defines a spiritual discipline as, “simply an activity you engage in to be made more fully alive by the Spirit of God”. I have seen this come to life in a new way as I have re-read about the lives of many persons in the Bible. No two people grew to become God’s best version of them in the same way.

This means I have to change how I think about what “counts” as spiritual, for what makes an activity spiritual is NOT the activity itself. It is whether or not I do it with and through the Spirit of God. It is the quality of the presence and interaction with the Spirit while I am doing the activity. In fact many times the people in the Gospels who got into the most trouble with Jesus were the ones who thought they were working hardest on their spiritual life.

The river of living water, God’s Spirit, is always ready to guide you toward God’s best version of you. I invite you to try softer, try better, and try different to engage the Spirit of God in ways that make you more fully alive. I would like to hear how this is working out for you.

Reflecting on "The Me I Want To Be - Becoming God's Best Version of You" - John Ortberg

Introduction to the Gospel of Mark

Below is an introduction to the Gospel of Mark that my cousin, Dave Green, posted recently (http://statelineobserver.com) and was written by Nick Cave. I thought it was exceptional. Enjoy.

An Introduction to the Gospel According to Mark
by Nick Cave

When I bought my first copy of the Bible, the King James version, it was to the Old Testament that I was drawn, with its maniacal, punitive God who dealt out to His long-suffering humanity punishments that had me drop-jawed in disbelief at the very depth of their vengefulness.

I had a burgeoning interest in violent literature, coupled with an unnamed sense of the divinity in things and, in my early twenties, the Old Testament spoke to that part of me that railed and hissed and spat at the world. I believed in God, but I also believed that God was malign and if the Old Testament was testament to anything, it was testament to that. Evil seemed to live close to the surface of existence within it, you could smell its mad breath, see the yellow smoke curl from its many pages, hear the blood-curdling moans of despair. It was a wonderful, terrible book, and it was sacred scripture.

But you grow up. You do. You mellow out. Buds of compassion push through the cracks in the black and bitter soil. Your rage ceases to need a name. You no longer find comfort watching a whacked-out God tormenting a wretched humanity as you learn to forgive yourself and the world..

Then, one day, I met an Anglican vicar and he suggested that I give the Old Testament a rest and read Mark instead. I hadn’t read the New Testament at that stage because the New Testament was about Jesus Christ and the Christ I remembered from my choirboy days was that wet, all-loving, etiolated individual that the church proselytised. I spent my pre-teen years singing in the Wangaratta Cathedral Choir and even at that age I recall thinking what a wishy-washy affair the whole thing was. The Anglican Church: it was the decaf of worship and Jesus was their Lord.

“Why Mark?”, I asked. “Because it’s short”, he replied.

I was willing to give anything a go, so I took the vicar’s advice and read it and the Gospel of Mark just swept me up.

Here, I am reminded of that picture of Christ, painted by Holman Hunt, where He appears, robed and handsome, a lantern in His hand, knocking on a door: the door to our hearts, presumably. The light is dim and buttery in the engulfing darkness. Christ came to me in this way, lumen Christi, with a dim light, a sad light, but light enough. Out of all the New Testament writings – from the Gospels, through the Acts and the complex, driven letters of Paul to the chilling, sickening Revelation – it is Mark’s Gospel that has truly held me.

Scholars generally agree that Mark’s was the first of the four gospels to be written. Mark took from the mouths of teachers and prophets the jumble of events that comprised Christ’s life and fixed these events into some kind of biographical form. He did this with such breathless insistence, such compulsive narrative intensity, that one is reminded of a child recounting some amazing tale, piling fact upon fact, as if the whole world depended upon it – which , of course, to Mark it did. ‘Straightway’ and ‘immediately’ link one event to another, everyone ‘runs’, ’shouts’, is ‘amazed’, inflaming Christ’s mission with a dazzling urgency. Mark’s Gospel is a clatter of bones, so raw, nervy and lean on information that the narrative aches with the melancholy of absence. Scenes of deep tragedy are treated with such a matter of factness and raw economy they become almost palpable in their unprotected sorrowfulness.

Mark’s narrative begins with the Baptism, and ‘immediately’ we are confronted with the solitary figure of Christ, baptised in the River Jordan and driven into the wilderness. ‘And he was there in the wilderness 40 days, tempted of Satan; and was with the wild beasts; and the angels ministered unto him’ (1:13). This is all Mark says of the Temptation, but the verse is typically potent owing to its mysterious simplicity and spareness.

Christ’s forty days and forty nights in the wilderness also say something about His aloneness, for when Christ takes on His ministry around Galilee and in Jerusalem, He enters a wilderness of the soul, where all the outpourings of His brilliant, jewel-like imagination are in turns misunderstood, rebuffed, ignored, mocked and vilified and would eventually be the death of Him.

Even His disciples, who we would hope would absorb some of Christ’s brilliance, seem to be in a perpetual fog of misunderstanding, following Christ from scene to scene with little or no comprehension of what is going on. So much of the frustration and anger that seems at times almost to consume Christ is directed at His disciples and it is against their persistent ignorance that Christ’s isolation seems at its most complete. It is Christ’s divine inspiration, versus the dull rationalism of those around Him, that gives Mark’s narrative its tension, its drive. The gulf of misunderstanding is so vast that His friends ‘lay hold of Him’ thinking,’He is beside himself’ (3:21). The Scribes and Pharisees, with their monotonous insistence on the Law, provide the perfect springboard for Christ’s luminous words.Even those Christ heals betray Him as they run to the town to report the doings of the miraculous healer, after Christ has insisted that they tell no one. Christ disowns His own mother for her lack of understanding. Throughout Mark, Christ is in deep conflict with the world. He is trying to save, and the sense of aloneness that surrounds Him is at times unbearably intense. Christ’s last howl from the cross is to a God He believes has forsaken Him: “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani”

The rite of baptism – the dying of one’s old self to be born anew – like so many of the events in Christ’s life is already flavoured metaphorically by Christ’s death and it is His death on the cross that is such a powerful and haunting force, especially in Mark. His preoccupation with it is all the more obvious, if only because of the brevity with which Mark deals with the events of His life. It seems that virtually everything that Christ does in Mark’s narrative is in some way a preparation for His death – His frustration with His disciples and His fear that they have not comprehended the full significance of His actions; the constant taunting of the church officials; the stirring up of the crowds; His miracle-making so that witnesses will remember the extent of His divine power. Clearly, Mark is concerned primarily with the death of Christ to such an extent that Christ appears consumed by His imminent demise, thoroughly shaped by His death.

The Christ that emerges from Mark, tramping through the haphazard events of His life, had a ringing intensity about him that I could not resist. Christ spoke to me through His isolation, through the burden of His death, through His rage at the mundane, through His sorrow. Christ, it seemed to me was the victim of humanity’s lack of imagination, was hammered to the cross with the nails of creative vapidity.

The Gospel According to Mark has continued to inform my life as the root source of my spirituality, my religiousness. The Christ that the Church offers us, the bloodless, placid ‘Saviour’ – the man smiling benignly at a group of children or serenely hanging from the cross – denies Christ His potent, creative sorrow or His boiling anger that confronts us so forcibly in Mark. Thus the Church denies Christ His humanity, offering up a figure that we can perhaps ‘praise’ but never relate to. The essential humanness of Mark’s Christ provides us with a blueprint for our own lives so that we have something we can aspire to rather than revere, that can lift us free of the mundanity of our existences rather than affirming the notion that we are lowly and unworthy.

Merely to praise Christ in His Perfectness keeps us on our knees, with our heads pitifully bent. Clearly, this is not what Christ had in mind. Christ came as a liberator. Christ understood that we as humans were for ever held to the ground by the pull of gravity – our ordinariness, our mediocrity – and it was through His example that He gave our imaginations the freedom to fly. In short, to be Christ-like.

This essay originally appeared in the Pocket Canon.
Gospel According to Mark, (C)Canongate, 1998

Missional Church described by Dietrich Bonhoeffer

I picked this up(read-copied) this off of www.inhabitatiodei.com Inhabitatio Dei

It is so truth filled that I could not NOT use it.

"Our church has been fighting during these years only for its own self-preservation, as if that were an end in itself. It has become incapable of bringing the word of reconciliation and redemption to humankind and to the world. So the words we used before must lose their power, be silenced, and we can be Christians today in only two ways, through prayer and in doing justice among human beings. All Christian thinking, talking, and organizing must be born anew, out of that prayer and action. . . . It is not for us to predict the day—but the day will come—when people will once more be called to speak the word of God in such a way that the world is changed and renewed. It will be in a new language, perhaps quite nonreligious language. but liberating and redeeming like Jesus’s language, so that people will be alarmed and yet overcome by its power—the language of a new righteousness and truth, a language proclaiming that God makes peace with humankind and that God’s kingdom is drawing near. “They shall fear and tremble because of all the good and all the prosperity I provide for them” (Jer. 33:9). Until then, the Christian cause will be a quiet and hidden one, but there will be people who pray and do justice and wait for God’s own time."

~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “Thoughts on the Day of Baptism of Dietrich Wilhelm Rüdiger Bethge,” in Letters and Papers from Prison, 145:389-90.

intentional attentiveness

The hot weather we are having has me thinking about summer. Spring is a time of plants sprouting up. Fall is a time of harvesting fruit from the plants that we saw arrive above ground in the spring. Summer is a “middle place” of waiting, between spring and fall. I recently read this quote by Sue Monk Kidd from her book, When the Heart Waits, “We seem to have focused so much on exuberant beginnings and victorious endings that we’ve forgotten about the slow, sometimes tortuous unraveling of God’s grace that takes place in the ‘middle places.’ ”
Certainly summer is a wonderful time to enjoy warm weather, family, picnics, and the Horton Bay General Store. These are the very reasons that the living Christ invites us to journey through summer on a path of transformation and not merely stagnant waiting. The key is intentional attentiveness in the present moment. That same attitude or characteristic was the key ingredient of Jesus teachings among the disciples. Intentionally being attentive to God within us, God in others, and God in all creation in the here and now. Not distracted by what the future fall seasons may bring or anchored in the great springs of the past, but simply being intentionally attentive to the present moment activity of God. Writer Cam Yates calls this being a “prayerful presence” at every moment.
How might you foster an intentional attentiveness to the present moment in your life this summer? In what ways might you use different senses to be attentive to God in you, others, and the world in the present of every moment? How can you participate with God and be a “prayerful presence” for yourself, others, and the world? May your experimenting in being intentionally attentive in the present moment this summer give you glimpses of “the tremendous thing that Christ means to make of you”(C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity) through your experiencing of the “unraveling of God's grace” that occurs in you.