Who Is This Jesus? (Part 6): One Who Calls

I find it interesting that Jesus calls each person to follow him but that each call is particular.

Following Jesus can take a multitude of forms, but each life that follows Jesus involves a true encounter with Jesus, a mutual knowing of the truth of who we are before him, and an ability to hear and respond to what he asks or invites of us from there.

Zacchaeus was a tax collector, for instance. (See Luke 19:1-10.) He was the chief tax collector in his town, in fact, which meant he was very rich at the expense of everyone else. The tax collectors were notoriously crooked, demanding greater taxes than the state required so as to line their own pockets with the difference. 

He was not very popular, to say the least. 

But when Jesus called Zacchaeus, it made a difference in the specific way he lived. He determined to give half his riches to the poor and pay back those he had wronged financially four-fold. 

Then there’s Peter.

Peter was a fisherman all his life. Fishing is what he knew best and how he made a living. And when Jesus called Peter to follow him, it affected Peter’s life: “From now on you’ll be fishing for men and women” (Luke 5:10). And then later on, Jesus shifted Peter’s work again, telling him he would now become a shepherd: “Feed my lambs … Shepherd my sheep … Feed my sheep,” he told Peter (John 21:15-18).

What did Peter know about sheep-tending? He had been a fisherman all his life. 

But since that initial call to follow Jesus, he had learned more about what that following meant. He’d followed Jesus around for three years. He’d listened to Jesus teach, watched Jesus heal, witnessed so many miracles, and encountered the resurrected Christ. He’d been humbled and forgiven. And now it was time for Peter’s specific way of following Christ to become more particular to the person he’d become since that first call, so he was now being called to be a shepherd. 

The gospels are filled with stories like this. Each person, each encounter, each question, each search … every story is the encounter of a particular person coming in contact with Jesus and receiving an invitation to a particular call.

For someone who encountered Jesus in the midst of a particular sin, the call was to go and sin no more. For someone who’d been paralyzed their whole life, the call was to take up their mat and walk. For someone who was a social outcast because of their lifestyle and avoided contact with others at all costs, the call was to go into the town square and proclaim what had happened to everyone there. And, like Peter, the more we follow Christ, the more our particular call shifts as we continue becoming the people Jesus is continually making us to be.

Jesus invites us to follow him, and he tailors the call of that invitation to the place we currently are.

What does it look like for you to follow Jesus in this very moment? What is the particular call from him, right where you are?

Who Is This Jesus? (Part 5): One Who Sees the Truth and Gazes On It With You

Henri Nouwen talks about prayer of the heart being a way of prayer in which we “descend with the mind into the heart, and there to stand before the face of the Lord, ever-present, all-seeing, within you.” 

Imagine that: going into the very truth of yourself and seeing what is there, while simultaneously knowing Jesus to be there, too, gazing on what is there with you. 

You may find this terrifying. And I think I did for many years in my life with God, too. We are often scared of the truth of ourselves, and inviting the God of the universe to see that truth with us can seem like a purely crazy thing to do. 

Unless our view of the truth and our view of God with us in that encounter of truth changes.

I really love noticing the way Jesus encounters people in the pages of the gospels when considering this.

When Jesus meets the Samaritan woman at the well, he’s fully present to the conversation. He listens and genuinely responds to everything she says to him and asks of him. And then, in the midst of this conversation, he speaks the truth of her life to her: she has had five husbands and is now living with a man who isn’t her husband.

First she finds out that all this time he’s been talking to her, he’s known this truth about her and still continued the conversation. And then, when he speaks this truth out loud, he does so in such a measured tone.

There’s no condemnation in his words, only the spoken truth. 

And what’s more, even after he speaks this truth to her out loud — the truth that made her an outcast in her community — he goes on to continue their conversation. 

This must have totally turned the woman’s world upside-down.

Not only did someone speak to her without flinching or castigating her for the thing that made her a social pariah, but the person behaving this generously toward her, she soon came to find out, was the long-awaited Messiah. No wonder she ran into the village and started telling everyone she met about him!

And then there’s the example of the woman caught in adultery.

When the Pharisees dragged this woman before Jesus, his eyes don’t blaze in fury, nor does he hurl her from his presence in disgust. Instead, he kneels down and begins to write in the dirt with his finger — so calm and unobtrusive a response — while continuing to listen to the badgering crowd.

Then he makes a calm-as-can-be comment to them, straightens up, and asks the woman where her accusers have gone. 

Just like what happened with the Samaritan woman at the well, Jesus has a direct encounter with this woman who was standing before him in the naked, unhidden truth of her sin, and his response was not to flee or rail or turn away in disgust or cast her from his presence. Instead, he calmly and quietly asked her a question as they hold the truth of her life out in the open between them. 

There is a calmness to Jesus in these encounters that teaches us so much about what it is really like to encounter the truth of ourselves with Jesus, too. 

Jesus is not afraid of the truth of your heart. He will not turn away from any of the truth that you encounter there. He will not minimize it or pretend it isn’t there, either. He will look at it, and then he will look at you, and then the two of you will look at it together. 

And then you’ll talk. And you’ll continue to talk. And his posture toward you will never change.

Who Is This Jesus? (Part 4): One Who Removes Our Shame

Today I’m going to share with you a part of my story I don’t write often about. It has to do with my having been married before sharing my life with Kirk.

In 2004, I went through a divorce. 

We had been married 6 years, the last year of which was spent with about six states separating us, and the marriage and divorce are among the most difficult parts of the journey I have lived.

I can look back now and see the whole of it through a lens of healing and forgiveness — both of which were quite hard-won — and I can also see that neither of us knew much about what we were doing in our life together but were doing the best we could with what we had.

Today, I want to talk about the impact the divorce had on me and how it affected my life with God and my understanding of Jesus.

I remember how precious that year of separation and the first six months of my divorce were in my life with God. I was living on my own for the first time and had rented a tiny guesthouse in the historic district near my hometown. Every day, I would go in and out of my little guesthouse, conscious that I was learning what it meant to be the bride of Christ instead of someone else’s bride.

I was learning through that time, too, what it meant to be feminine and lovely to God, and so I began to wear clothes that deepened my ongoing awareness of that reality: pants in pastel colors of pinks and greens and purples, with various textures like velvet and corduroy and appliques like satin sash belts. I wore layers of blouses and jackets, too, and enjoyed the detail of ruffles and pearl buttons and chiffon overlays of my clothing.

And almost every night before bed, I would settle into my little twin bed inside that tiny guesthouse and read the words of Psalm 139 over and over again.

In all of this, I knew that God was teaching me my value.

But even still, underneath all that tender engagement with God, there was a seed of shame. 

No matter how much I had fought against divorce, still here I was: divorced. I was divorced without having chosen to be so, and I could do nothing to change it. Divorce seemed like the worst possible outcome for my marriage, and I couldn’t imagine the depth of God’s disappointment when he looked down upon me and saw that blight upon my life. 

I felt at a loss for how to hold this, and so at some point, I sat down with a pastor from my church to talk about it.

We sat on a planter outside the church after one of the services, and I told him how ashamed I felt. I told him that it seemed like the whole of my life going forward from here was counterfeit, since I was walking a path God never would have chosen for me.

God was in Plan A, but the divorce had averted me to Plan B — so now what worth could my life have to God?

I’ll never forget what the pastor said to me that day.

He looked at me and said, “Christianne, when God looks down from heaven at you, he doesn’t say, ‘There’s Christianne, my divorced daughter.’ He says, ‘There’s Christianne, my daughter.’ He doesn’t see your divorce. That’s what Jesus died for.” 

This was the first time what Jesus did on the cross really clicked for me. 

So much of my life, as I’ve shared before, had to do with perfectionism and performing well. I had sinned, definitely, and had asked forgiveness for my sins. But since everything I did was driven by a motive to outshine every possible standard, my heart never really got in touch with the depth of my humanity or sinfulness.

What’s more, the especially difficult sins in my life were practically invisible to me — I couldn’t hold the truth of them because that truth was too painful to admit. 

This is why I couldn’t understand grace. And that is why, in that single conversation with my pastor, I understood grace for the very first time. 

The reality of Christ’s death on the cross removes every single mark of shame upon our lives. Because of Jesus, we can now live in pure, unadulterated, enjoyable communion with God.

This is something that makes me amazed and in awe of Jesus.

Who Is This Jesus? (Part 3): One Who Made & Delights in Us

I mentioned earlier in this series that I was just about to enter my junior year in college when I came face to face with a truth about my lifelong faith: I didn’t really understand it in a personal way. One of the most true and heartfelt prayers that I’d ever uttered up to that point came out: “God, please teach me my need for Jesus and for grace.” 

This took me on a very long journey. 

Through the reading of that book and the realization that I really didn’t get what grace really was, I started to examine so much about my life — the way I felt, the way I thought, the way I acted, and what was underneath all of that feeling and thinking and acting. 

I became quite overwhelmed with the realities I encountered inside of me. For about two years, I went deep inside myself to learn what was there. And what I learned — which I’d not really grappled with before — was how much everything I did was rooted in perfectionism and performance. Everything — and I mean everything — was tied to an urgent need to do things perfectly, to shine, and to be loved in all that shininess. 

This bled into my life with God, too. 

Once I saw that my life with others and with God was based so wholistically on performance, I put on the brakes. I stopped doing. I stopped performing. I stopped going, going, going. I barely went to church. I stopped connecting to God in the usual ways I’d always done. I let myself curse out loud for the first time in my adult life, and I contemplated what it would be like to take up smoking. (This may sound silly, but it’s true.)

All of this was part of a lived prayer: God, show me that you love me beyond my performance. Teach me what it means to be unconditionally loved by you. 

Two years into this journey, I graduated college and started working full-time. Pretty quickly out of the gate, I was working two jobs — one full-time and one part-time — and I came face to face with the reality of my anxiety struggle. 

I think I was made acutely aware of my anxiety struggle at that time because I’d spent the previous two years realizing how performance-based my entire life had been. I was in the midst of trying to learn God’s unconditional love for me instead — how to be loved beyond my functions and accomplishments — but was suddenly working 60+ hours every week and trying to learn how to be a professional for the very first time.  

Cue anxiety and struggle and pain and turmoil and fear. Every. Single. Day.

One night, I spent an evening with a group of female college students. They were enrolled in the honors program for which I was the adjunct faculty director of the writing program. They were hosting a discussion night with all the female faculty of the program, and each of the faculty were invited to bring one of our favorite books around which to host a small group discussion with the female students. 

At the time, my favorite book was Denise Levertov’s collection, The Stream and the Sapphire, so I photocopied a few of my favorite poems from the collection and headed to the event. The female population of the program were milling about, chatting with each other and the other faculty, and I could feel the anxiety in me begin heighten. (I really am no good at small talk events.)

Then, shortly before the event was set to begin, one of the student coordinators approached me and asked if I would be willing to share my discussion group with another faculty member’s group, as only one person had signed up for my group. 

Ouch. That was a humbling moment. 

Another humbling moment came in the midst of the actual discussion group. The other faculty member had been able to generate with seeming ease quite a bit of discussion around the book she’d brought, even though no one in the group had read it before, but the discussion of the poems I had brought, despite having brought several for us to look at together, seemed to fall flat. 

I left the event feeling so much shame. 

On my drive home down the 5 freeway, I cried so hard.

I yelled at God: “What do you want from me? How do I do this? You say that you love me unconditionally, but I don’t know what that means. All I feel is failure and embarrassment. I don’t feel like I’ll ever be good enough. I don’t know how to get outside of this performance struggle.”

And somehow in the midst of all those tears and verbal explosions, something new happened. 

I can’t explain how it happened, but suddenly I was in the middle of an invitation to consider all the ways that God had made me — unique and creative and particular-to-me ways of being. 

My care for people. 

My ability to listen well. 

My love of writing. 

My enjoyment of sushi.

My fear of spiders. 

All of these particularities about myself started coming to mind, and I realized consciously for the first time: God made me this way, and all these particulars — no matter how big or small in size — delight him to no end. They’re what make me uniquely Christianne. 

When I exited the freeway, I pulled into a fast-food parking lot, dried my eyes, and marveled at this new realization. God loves me for who I am.

Scripture tells us that Jesus is the origin of all creation. It says that everything came into being through him and that nothing came into existence without him (see John 1:3 and Colossians 1:15-18).

We were created by and through Jesus. And what he created in us — who we simply are — delights him endlessly.

Who Is This Jesus? (Part 2): One Who Is Humble

I’ve just begun reading the book of Revelation as part of my morning devotions. This is the book, perhaps above any other book in Scripture, where we see the holiness, the majesty, the utter God-ness of Jesus. He centrally figures above all else — high above all else — in that narrative. All else in existence falls at his feet and worships him. 

He is truly the highest height of all awareness and existence, and Revelation demonstrates that reality with such clarity for us.

With the start of the Advent season just over a week ago, we are invited to notice an interesting contrast here. These four weeks leading to Christmas are a time of preparation and expectation, a time when we think about the coming of Jesus into the world as a babe on Christmas and as the savior of the world, while also looking ahead — and continuing to prepare ourselves — for his return.

Revelation depicts with such rich imagery that second return of Jesus into the world. There, we will see the fullness of his majesty and reign. We will see how truly great he is. We will see him as the ruler and origination of all that exists in creation.

But this morning, it is the humility of Jesus in his first coming that I’m reminded of. 

On a particular night, at a particular time, in a particular place, and in a particular body, Jesus became human. He became human — just like us. And he chose to start at the beginning, as a baby — just like we do.

What is that about?

Why would the highest crown of all existence become enfleshed in human form — and in the form of a baby, no less? Why would he choose to develop in a body the same way all of us must develop in our own bodies, one limb after another growing into itself with each passing year? Why would he choose to learn a language from its first stammers and stutters, just as all of us must learn our own languages from the start? Why would he let go of all the knowledge of all existence that he holds inside himself, only to start from scratch in knowing nothing, building one structure of thought and knowledge on top of itself, just like we must do?

It was — and is — for love of us. His love for us created a willing humility.

We will continue to reflect on that love in the continuation of this series. I hope you’ll continue to join us.

Who Is This Jesus? (Part 1)

Click here to read all entries in this series.

I will confess that I didn’t realize I would be writing a series on this Jesus I’ve come to know until the post that introduced that series had pretty much written itself last Friday. Sometimes that happens — I pray about what to write here, and then once I start writing it, something extra comes out I didn’t expect.

This new series on Jesus happened that way.

So I’ve been holding the newness of this series close the last few days, wondering what it will include and how to enter into it.

One of the big questions I’ve been holding is whether these reflections on Jesus will start in the Scriptures or in the experiences of my life (or both?). And I am still holding that question, and perhaps I will hold it every single day the series remains underway. Perhaps the answer Jesus gives to that question will be different from day to day. 

But for today, the answer to that question is to share a personal reflection of this Jesus I’ve come to know.

Accordingly, below are two video segments that I recorded recently for a project at Northland Church called Hope Changes. It is a project that marries stories from real-life people and the hope of Scripture as an offering to people walking through painful emotional and spiritual struggles, and I was privileged to work on the development team for this project over the last six months and also share my story as a contribution.

The two video segments below go together, then — the first segment shares a very personal struggle I’ve grappled with for many years, and the second segment shares stories of how Jesus has met me in that struggle in some very personal and very special ways. 

Part 1: 

Part 2: 

Jesus has become so dear to me. My hope is that, in some way, he also becomes dear to you, perhaps as we continue to reflect on him together.

Let's Reflect on Jesus

I’m not sure if you know the story of how I came into an intimate relationship with Jesus. It’s a story that begins, in great measure, with a very honest prayer that rose up from my heart in August 1998. I was 19 years old, about to enter my junior year of college, and I had finally gotten around to reading a book that one of my professors had given me in a previous semester.

Reading that book changed my life.

It was not the book’s intention, I don’t think, to bring me face to face with my lack of understanding of grace and of Jesus, but that’s exactly what it did. One afternoon, while sprawled on top of my bed in my apartment, reading the book, that realization became so real that the book fell from my hands and I bowed my head and confessed to God: “I don’t understand my need for grace, and I don’t understand my need for Jesus.” 

I had known Jesus my whole life. I don’t have any memory of life without him, in fact. I was always aware of his presence near me, even as a very, very young girl. But the circumstances of my life and some of the natural proclivities of my way of being conspired to take me on a very long journey — the long way around, you might say — to finally understanding my personal need for both. 

I’ve been reflecting on that very honest prayer of 13 years ago a lot lately. I’ve been struck by God’s incredible faithfulness to answer it. I think God continues to answer it every day, in fact, because my awareness of my need for grace and for Jesus only continue to grow. 

Why am I sharing this with you? 

Because my life and mind and heart are full — so full — of Jesus these days, and I want you to know this Jesus, too. 

For the next little while, I am going to be using the daily posts in this space to reflect on this Jesus I have come to know. It is my prayer that these reflections will create an opportunity for you to know him, too, if you do not know him yet — or simply to reflect on the Jesus you have come to know, if you already know him, too.

xoxo,

Christianne 

Discernment: It's an Embrace of Mystery

As I shared in a previous post in this discernment series, we often think of discernment as finding an answer to our question of choosing option A, B, or C for our lives in a particular moment. But really, it’s about something of a much greater scope.

It’s about the wholistic work God is doing in our lives — our lives seen in their totality, from beginning to end — as he seeks to conform us more and more into the people we actually are and the image of God we were created to bear. 

This means there is quite an element of mystery to embrace when we’re about discernment. 

Think of it this way.

Even when we wait and look and listen and discern the invitation of God in our lives toward a particular decision, we don’t know what will happen once that decision has been made. We may discern that, yes, we are going to accept that job offer — but even if we ascertain that job offer to be the next stone on our pathway forward, we don’t fully comprehend why. 

We only know that God is nudging us toward it. It aligns with the wholistic work he’s been about in our lives. It’s clearly the right choice for us at this point in our story. 

But toward what end? Not simply for the job itself, but toward the end of it being used to further our formation. 

The decision was not a destination but part of a larger process — a process we cannot fully perceive or apprehend and never will. It exists in the mind of God. 

Our part is to discern and follow, and in that sense, to be part of a great mystery that’s beyond us.

This morning, I read a short string of words in Psalm 40 that reminded me of just this truth: 

More and more people are seeing this: 

they enter the mystery,

abandoning themselves to God.

— Psalm 40:3

Life with God teems with mystery. He is so much greater than we are, and he is intimately acquainted with our life and ways and story. He knows the work he is about in us, and we see that work but dimly, simply following the next stone on the path.

Will you accept the holy mystery of this life with God, the invitation to something greater than your eyes alone can see about your life?

Di Cenere: From the Ashes

At the retreat that prompted the writing of this short series on discernment, I learned something new. 

Discernment comes from the root di cenere, which, literally translated, means “from the ashes.” 

What does it mean for discernment to come from the ashes? I’ve been thinking on this question since I first learned of the word’s translation.

The retreat instructor said that discernment isn’t meant to point toward the deadness of things, but rather toward where the ashes came from: they came from fire, from energy, from life. 

This has caused me to linger on what remains when a fire finishes. When we sift through the ashes, what remains? What elements proved of stronger mettle than the fire? What emerges when we pick through the ashes the morning after?

Which then turned my thoughts to this passage: 

No one can lay any foundation other than the one we already have — Jesus Christ. Anyone who builds on that foundation may use a variety of materials — gold, silver, jewels, wood, hay, or straw. But on the judgment day, fire will reveal what kind of work each builder has done. The fire will show if a person’s work has any value.

— 1 Corinthians 3:11-13

The passage speaks of the end of time, but it also, reflexively, asks us to consider the elements at the core of our lives. 

What is the gold, the silver, the jewels at the heart of your life? What are those things that simply will not burn away? How can your knowledge of those elements guide you in your process of discernment?

Discernment Concerns a Process, Not a Conclusion

When I was at the retreat that prompted me to write this short series on discernment, one of the instructors shared a quote by Richard Rohr that I find to be immensely helpful when considering the role discernment plays in our lives: 

“God becomes more a verb than a noun, more a process than a conclusion, more an experience than a dogma, more a personal relationship than an idea. There is someone dancing with you, and you are not afraid of making mistakes.” 

— Richard Rohr, The Naked Now, p. 23

This gets at the idea I shared in my previous post about all of life being a process of foundational experiences that reveal to us the unique story of redemption and healing and wholeness that God is about in our lives. 

So often, when we are in a process of discernment about a choice we’re trying to make in our lives, we are focused on the concluding outcome of that decision. What is the right decision here? What am I supposed to do? Did I make the right choice? Have I landed in the place I was supposed to land? 

But in the quote from Richard Rohr above, we are reminded that life with God is more about living through a life with God than arriving at a particular point or conclusion or decision. Life with God is a verb and a process, he says. It is active and ongoing. It involves continuous change, and that change concerns our inward and outward being. 

Who is God making us to be? What is the fullness and wholeness of us that is his aim over the whole course of our lives? And how does one decision or another affirm that work of wholeness in us? 

These are the real questions at the heart of discernment. 

It is not about one right answer or another that will bring us to a place of arrival. It is about how a decision continues to shape us into the person God intends for us to become in the broader, longevity-seeking scope of our lives. 

What is the work of healing, wholeness, and redemption God seems to be about in your life? And how might the decisions you are seeking to make be a part of that broader work?

How Our Foundational Experiences Can Aid Our Discernment III

Earlier in this series on discernment, I invited you to consider your foundational experiences of God, and in the second post on that subject, we narrowed our consideration to those experiences when we knew in an intimate way that God was speaking to us or intervening in our lives. 

Today, I’d like to broaden our consideration of foundational experiences to those experiences in our lives that made an impact on us in some significant or meaningful way. 

What are the experiences that marked you, scarred you, taught you, helped you, harmed you? What are the memories you revisit often, that made a deep impression on your heart? What moments in your life contributed in great measure to the person you have become?

I’d like to suggest that even these experiences can aid us in our process of discernment, too.

In fact, I would like to suggest that every meaningful moment of our lives — the moments that form the stuff of our story — are part of the specific story of redemption, grace, healing, and purpose God is weaving through our specific lives. 

It is my deep conviction that the stories we are living are not senseless.

In the places we experienced deep wounding, God wants to touch and heal us. In the places we were misguided, God wants to come and redirect our steps. In the places we experienced great consolation, God wants to teach us about himself and about ourselves.

When we look back over our lives, we may see the litterings of tiny moments or big moments that made an impact in some way. And it is in those moments that God wants to enter in and heal, touch, teach, and guide us.

He wants to make us whole and complete, lacking nothing, and therefore is about the work of redemption in our lives in exactly those places that broke us, splintered us, harmed us, or de-formed us.

This is how our foundational experiences — whether they were specific encounters with God or simply encounters with life — can guide us in our process of discernment. 

What is God about in you, because of your story? What are the themes of needed redemption in your life? How might that inform the decision you are seeking to make? Which path will take you deeper into the healing or fullness of that redemption?

A Litany for Thanksgiving

Kirk and I attended a Thanksgiving Eve eucharist service at our new little episcopal parish last night, and as part of the service, we prayed the following litany for Thanksgiving. I thought it would be meaningful to share it here with you, in case you’d like to take a moment to also voice these prayers of thanks to God today.

Let us give thanks to God our Father for all his gifts so freely bestowed upon us.

For the beauty and wonder of your creation, in earth and sky and sea,

We thank you, Lord.

For all that is gracious in the lives of men and women, revealing the image of Christ,

We thank you, Lord.  

For our daily food and drink, our homes and families, and our friends,

We thank you, Lord.

For minds to think, and hearts to love, and hands to serve,

We thank you, Lord.

For health and strength to work, and leisure to rest and play,

We thank you, Lord.

For the brave and courageous, who are patient in suffering and faithful in adversity,

We thank you, Lord.

For all valiant seekers after truth, liberty, and justice,

We thank you, Lord.

For the communion of the saints, in all times and places,

We thank you, Lord.

Above all, we give you thanks for the great mercies and promises given to us in Christ Jesus our Lord;

To him be praise and glory, with you, O Father, and the Holy Spirit, now and forever. Amen. 

I am thankful for many gifts from God in my life, one of which is this space here at Still Forming and the people who gather here to reflect and grow and pray. 

For what are you giving thanks today? 

How Our Foundational Experiences Can Aid Our Discernment II

We’ve been talking quite a bit lately about our foundational experiences — and specifically our foundational experiences of God — and how they can serve as a guide for us when we are in need of discernment.

There are so many ways to undertake a process of discernment — so many ways this subject has been explored and examined and written about through the centuries and the ages — and so much of that material is immensely helpful in uncovering what discernment is, what the process is about, and how to learn and determine the best path forward. 

We’ve been spending a bit more dedicated time in this small series on discernment exploring an aspect of discernment that is, I think, quite lesser known and considered as a point of value in the process. 

Let’s consider for a moment what discernment is about. What is being discerned, exactly, when we are needing discernment? 

Usually this is a process of trying to determine the right way forward in our lives. This could apply to a large decision we are trying to make — whether to take a particular job, whether to move to a new place, whether someone we are dating is the right person for us to share our lives with, what to do with our lives.

It can also apply to the smaller, everyday encounters of our lives. How ought we respond to that person with whom we have such difficulty? What is my real motive in wanting to pursue a particular path right now? Is this the right church for me? 

And then, there’s perhaps the most intimate question of all: how is God speaking to me right now?

As I mentioned above, there are volumes that could fill whole wings of very large libraries on the subject of discernment. It is clearly not a simple subject for us humans to understand, and we have been trying to understand it and seeking guidance on the matter from the wise ones we know for a very, very long time. 

I think something helpful to notice here is that discernment is needed in those very places that are not clear cut. If there was a simple answer to our question — a very clear response that God indicates would be the right way forward in a given situation, given what has been indicated to us in the scriptures or the tradition of the church — then discernment is not really needed. 

Discernment is required in those very grey and fuzzy places where we don’t have the readily available gift of a black-and-white answer on the matter. 

And this is where our foundational experiences, I’m coming to believe, can provide an immense gift of their own.

One thing I will say about this approach to incorporating our foundational experiences into our process of discernment is that it assumes God is personally acquainted with each one of us. And not just acquainted with us, but invested in us.

It assumes that the significant experiences of our lives — every single one of them — is part of the specific formation God is about in us. 

I’m going to write a bit more about this on Friday. (I won’t be writing here tomorrow, which is the Thanksgiving holiday here in the United States.) But until then, I’ll invite you to consider this question: 

Have you ever viewed the foundational experiences of your life as significant to God in some way and integrally a part of the formation he is about in your life? 

How Our Foundational Experiences Can Aid Our Discernment I

So, it’s taken several posts to get here, but I’d like to invite you to consider how your foundational experiences of God can help you navigate through a process of discernment. 

I mentioned in Friday’s post that I’d like for you to recall those foundational experiences of God that you knew at a very deep, intuitive, gut-level place inside of yourself were a true encounter of God interacting with you. 

As you take and hold those experiences, I’d like to invite you to regard those experiences as having provided you with a sense of God that can continue to direct you. 

To make this a bit more practical, let me share with you an example from my own life.

This has to do with the way Kirk and I have learned to discern God’s direction in our life about big decisions — where to live, where to work, whether to say yes to an opportunity being offered to us, and so on.

We’ve learned that, for us, God’s direction often carries the quality of a stone emerging out of the water at just the right time. 

This sense of God’s movement in our life was born out of several foundational experiences that all carried that similar quality of God’s provision and direction and which we have now learned is a means of guiding us continually in these kind of life decisions.

One of the first times I can remember this happening was when Kirk and I got engaged on St. Patrick’s Day in 2006.

I had a feeling Kirk would propose that day, even though we hadn’t discussed any particulars about getting engaged, nor had we discussed anything about when or where we would get married, where we would live when we got married (while we were dating, I lived in Southern California and he lived in Central Florida), or what our life would look like after we joined together. 

Still, I had a feeling we were going to get engaged on the weekend that we did, so in preparation, I began to mentally brainstorm some of the more specific details I knew we would discuss once he asked me to marry him and I said yes. 

One of the first things I knew we would discuss was the wedding. Would it happen in California, where my family lived, or in Florida? Would it be a large or small affair? Would it be a regular kind of affair at all? 

This was a second marriage for both of us, and I had known all along, after my first marriage ended, that if I ever married a second time, I would not want a normal kind of ceremony. I didn’t really know what that meant, but I just knew all along I would want it to be different.

I began to consider the idea of eloping to Ireland.

What a strange idea, I know!

But it seemed very much in line with who we were — we had first met and become casual acquaintances in Ireland, we had begun our initial e-mail correspondence on St. Patrick’s Day, and we were (most likely) going to be getting engaged on St. Patrick’s Day the following year. You could say that Ireland already loomed rather large in our life and history together.

But the real “foundational experience of God” in our life of decision-making together happened when we did, indeed, get engaged. For the very first time, we began to discuss some of the particulars and possibilities for our wedding, and I shared with Kirk the idea I’d begun holding in my heart about the possibility of eloping to Ireland.

I am not joking when I say that he pulled the car over to the side of the road, opened the trunk, and pulled out the latest issue of National Geographic that he had received in the mail that very same week. The cover story concerned the ancient Celts, and inside the cover story was the mention of a monastery ruins site on the island of Inis Mor in Ireland where a priest regularly performed wedding rites. 

Needless to say, that’s where we got married, and I cannot imagine the process being any easier than it was.

And really, our continuing life together these last five years has been comprised of many similar moments.

It often looks like this.

We will begin a seemingly innocent conversation — perhaps about whether to move out of our first studio apartment, or whether to revisit the possibility of employment for Kirk in a certain place, or what sort of next steps might be possible for me when my graduate program ends — and very simply and deftly, the answer to our question will emerge out of nowhere, often very soon after the conversation begins. We’ll come upon a house for rent while out for a Sunday drive, or the phone will ring and it will include a job offer we didn’t know existed at that very same place we had been considering employment, or we’ll be invited to breakfast with friends and a new opportunity will be presented that I couldn’t have imagined for myself. 

We’ve learned again and again that God brings just the right thing at just the right time to us, without our having to go searching or hunting or planning or forcing it along, just like our wedding in Ireland came together for us.

Accordingly, since we’ve learned that God often works in this way with us, we can revisit this foundational sense of God’s work in our life when presented with new opportunities. Does it have that similar quality as all those other opportunities did, like a stone emerging from the water at just the right time and place? Did it come to us organically? Does it feel like it’s happening in an unforced and natural manner?

These things guide our decision-making often, and it’s one practical example of how a foundational experience of God’s movement in our life can aid in our process of discernment.

How might your own foundational experiences of God guide you in a similar way? What sense do they give of God’s interaction in your life that can provide a compass of sorts for your decision-making?

More on Foundational Experiences

I mentioned that I’d be writing a short series on discernment for the duration of this week, but we’ve gotten to the end of the week and I’m realizing there are a few more thoughts I’d like us to consider together on this subject. So I’ve decided to extend the discernment series a bit longer into next week. I hope that’s okay with you! 

Accordingly, today I’d like to revisit the ideas shared yesterday about our foundational experiences of God. 

I realized after writing that post that in asking you to consider your foundational experiences of God, those experiences may not have been positive. Perhaps you came into the faith without realizing fully what that meant. Perhaps you were raised in a church or a home where your understanding of faith was twisted into a pretzel and all that resulted was fear and confusion and pain. 

What we might term “foundational experiences of God” may be foundational indeed — but they may have done more harm than good, and now we’re left to pick up the pieces.

So today I’d like to invite you to consider your foundational experiences of God in a slightly different, more focused light. 

Let’s recall those moments in life when you just knew it was God. Perhaps it was a moment when the truth you’d learned about God’s love or truth or forgiveness or grace somehow clicked and became real for you, not just head knowledge anymore. Or perhaps it was a moment when you knew God intervened in circumstances because there was just no other possible explanation. Or perhaps it was as simple as a felt presence surrounding you or following you around or showing up at occasionally odd moments, and you just knew it was God somehow.

These are foundational experiences of God, too. They’re the foundational experiences of God that teach us, truly, who God is to us — how he intervenes in our lives and relates himself to us. 

This is the kind of foundational experience Jesus had in those baptismal waters when he heard that voice from heaven speaking his beloved sonship over him. He knew it was God. He knew it was truth. It was not twisted or confused in any way.

So, what about you?

What are those foundational experiences of God in your own life? What do they, upon considering them, speak to you about God? How did he relate himself to you in those moments? What did he communicate about himself to you? 

What Are Your Foundational Experiences of God?

Three years ago, when I had just begun my training as a spiritual director, I attended an instructional retreat weekend that had the topic of discernment as its central focus.

On the very first evening of that retreat, we watched a short clip from Mary Ann Scofield, one of the founders of Spiritual Directors International, talking about our foundational experiences of God and how they can serve as touchstones in our ongoing lives of faith. And this past weekend, as I attended a similar retreat weekend on that same topic, we revisited this idea of foundational experiences of God and how they can serve us in our discernment processes. 

Consider the baptism experience of Jesus in Matthew 3.

Jesus comes up from the water, and a dove descends from the clouds as a voice from heaven says, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well-pleased.” This was a declarative moment in the life of Jesus — a moment that confirmed his identity not only as the Son of God, but also as one who is beloved. 

We see Jesus move from the bapstimal encounter into the wilderness, where he is tested by the devil at that very point of his identity. Three times, the devil tempts Jesus by saying, “If you really are the Son of God, do this … or this … or this.” He is testing the very meaning of what it means for Jesus to really be the Son of God, and Jesus must go back to that foundational encounter and remember. Reconnecting with his true identity that he received directly from God in that baptismal encounter allows him to respond to each temptation.

What about you? 

What foundational experiences of God have formed your life? What did those foundational experiences teach you about God and yourself? How might returning to those foundational moments serve you in your own process of discernment? 

Are You a Thinker or a Feeler, and Other Helpful Considerations

Yesterday we began a small series on the topic of discernment. Through each of the daily posts this week, we are going to consider how we practice the art of discernment in our lives and what we can learn about our process of discernment to help us in future moments of decision in our lives. 

In yesterday’s post, I asked you to look back upon your life to see if there has been a pattern or process to your decision-making. Today, I’m going to take that a step deeper and ask you to consider aspects of your personhood and how those have historically played into your decision-making process — or how they might help you in the future. 

If you are familiar with the Myers-Briggs personality type indicator, you know that it carries four categories of indication for each person’s make-up. 

• Introvert or Extrovert
• Senser or Intuitive
• Thinker or Feeler
• Perceiver or Judger

There are loads of resources that you can find to explain each of these type indicators and to help you determine which indicators are your dominant preference. But today, I want to consider how these personality type indicators can become helpful to our process of discernment. 

Let’s take, for example, the difference between a thinker and a feeler.

For someone who is a thinker, charting out a pro-and-con list for a particular decision-point can prove immensely clarifying and helpful. A thinker will also be helped along in their decision by conducting research or appealing to those with knowledge and/or experience related to the decision-point they are considering.

Someone who is a feeler, on the other hand, might find themselves better served by noticing the emotive affect a particular decision casts upon them when they hold it inside themselves. They may also be helped by paying attention to the physical responses of their bodies when weighing one decision over another. 

By way of another example, consider introversion and extroversion.

These categories speak to how each of us gains or loses energy. An introvert becomes weary from too much external stimulation and becomes energized and filled up through “down times” of solitude — times that allow them to think, reflect, and rest in the quiet. An extrovert finds that solitary, quiet activity a bit draining, however, and becomes much more energized when around other people.

Which type are you, and how might that truth of yourself shed light on the best decision you are seeking to make? Has your personality preference type served you to discern a decision you needed to make in the past? 

How Do You Discern?

I was at a retreat this past weekend with the community of people from whom I received my spiritual direction training over the last three years. Each November, they host an instructional retreat weekend, and this weekend’s theme was the topic of discernment. 

How do you discern the movement and invitation of God in your life? 

This was the question at the heart of the retreat weekend, and I thought I would use some of the reflections I gained from the weekend as the basis of this week’s postings. 

To open the conversation on discernment this week, then, I’d like to invite you to consider your usual path for discerning the way forward at critical decision-points in your life. 

How do you go about making decisions in your life? How do you know which path you ought to take? What has been your typical process? Do you have a typical process?

Letting the Truth Be the Truth

I shared recently that I’ve been experiencing emotions that are quite new and powerful to me. They rise up, quite unexpected, and honestly unsettle me.

I’m not used to feeling my heart on my sleeve. I’m the kind of person who takes in an experience and ponders it slowly, deciding how I feel about it and how I want to respond. I’m slow to feel, you might say, always wanting my feelings to match what seems most fitting or right or true to a situation. 

As much as I have often thought that approach to my emotions is the equivalent of wisdom, I’m learning these days, as I experience my emotions much more in the moment, that it keeps me from really knowing myself. This slow to feel approach has served as a shield of sorts — a shield that keeps me from knowing my heart, my emotions, my true response to situations, and even, in some ways, the depths of my own depravity.

That’s not always helpful. 

And so God has been giving me the gift of my emotions lately, even as they don’t feel much like a gift at all. When the emotions are hard, or when they cause me to sin against another in my heart, I wish this gift wasn’t being given to me at all. 

And yet I can read the psalms and be reminded that this is, in fact, a good thing: 

Count yourself lucky — 

God holds nothing against you

and you’re holding nothing back from him.

When I kept it all inside,

my bones turned to powder,

my words became daylong groans.

The pressure never let up;

all the juices of my life dried up.

Then I let it all out;

I said, “I’ll make a clean breast of my failures to God.”

Suddenly the pressure was gone —

my guilt dissolved,

my sin disappeared.

— Psalm 32:2-5

Those images of bones turning to powder, of pressure never letting up, and of the juices of one’s life completely drying up … they’re pretty vivid, aren’t they? We get this sense of what happens when we hold everything in and don’t let it out. Our bones dissolve to powder from the pressure of holding those feelings down and down and down. Just like a covered pot of steaming food will eventually dry up if it’s left covered too long, so will the juices of our own lives dry up when we hold inside the truth of the emotions we feel. 

So I’m doing as the psalmist says today and counting myself lucky. I’m lucky because the truth of my emotions can’t go unnoticed right now, and so I bring that truth to God. And in the places where those emotions cause me to sin, I confess it and am set free. 

He Comes to Us Where We Are

Yesterday I wrote about an experience I had recently of feeling like I was being grabbed by a ponytail on the top of my head and tossed about by the whims of others. I shared that I was able to see Jesus sitting nearby, inviting me to disengage from the abuse and come join him on the brownstone steps. I said I found it interesting that he didn’t come rescue me. 

Rescuing me, in the way I’ve previously experienced Jesus as my rescuer, would have looked like him coming to disengage me from the abuse himself. It would have looked like him coming out into the street, confronting the abusers, and pulling me safe into his arms and away from the scene of such pain. 

It would have looked like him rescuing and defending a young girl in the way she needs to be rescued and defended. 

But that’s not what happened. And what’s perhaps most surprising to me is that I was totally okay with that. 

It was a picture, for me, of my growth. I noticed that when I came to sit on the brownstone steps with Jesus, I was no longer a 3-year-old girl with a ponytail but an alive and strong 32-year-old woman who could sit shoulder to shoulder with Jesus and hold an adult conversation. It was so electrifying and invigorating to notice and experience that.. 

And it reminded me that he comes to us exactly where we are.

We’ve been talking about this in the Look at Jesus course I’m teaching right now. We’ve been noticing how differently Jesus responds to different groups and types of people. With some people, he’s gentle and kind. With others, he’s direct and abrasive. 

It can be unsettling to see the many different colors of Jesus in one huge array at once. 

But we’ve come to think it shows his genius — that it has to do with his ability to know exactly what a person needs and to meet them where they are, like the most perfect teacher or parent that ever existed. Some people need gentleness and kindness. Others need greater directness and candor. And others need something totally different than either of those things.

Jesus knows the difference and gives them the exact right thing. 

It reminds me of a moment several years ago when I really got at least part of the miracle of Paul’s teaching in Philippians 2: 

Think of yourselves the way Christ Jesus thought of himself. He had equal status with God but didn’t think so much of himself that he had to cling to the advantages of that status no matter what. Not at all. When the time came, he set aside the privileges of deity and took on the status of a slave, became human! Having become human, he stayed human. It was an incredibly humbling process. He didn’t claim special privileges. 

— Philippians 2:5-7

Now, there are many things to learn of God and Christ inside these words. But one thing these words teach us is the nature of Christ’s love. It’s a love that comes to us where we are. 

When I needed Jesus to rescue me in times past, he rescued me. When I needed him to hold me in his arms to comfort and soothe me, he did just that. And when I needed him to remind me of my strength, my volition, and my own dignity, like he did in the ponytail incident more recently, that’s what he did. 

He comes to us where we are. And where we are and what we need changes over time as we grow. This, too, is what spiritual formation is about. It’s about growing into the whole and complete person we are meant to be in God’s sight, and that changes over time as we grow into it.

How do you need Jesus to meet you right where you are right now? What does his coming to where you are look like in this particular time and place of your life and growth?