Weekly Challenge: Overcoming

Here is a weekly Spiritual Challenge (starting tomorrow), designed to give us a practical way to grow in our spirit: 

Spend a bit of time conversing with God about how this will fit you- and how it will not, where the challenges will be in your relationships, schedule and personality.  Invite him in to work, create a few reminders of this challenge that you will encounter through the day and take a short time to reflect at lunch time or sometime midway through your day.

You never realize how fear-driven our lives are until you write down all the things you fear and reflect.

The first step in facing your fears is to make a list of the situations, places, or things that you fear.  Making a list of your fears can help you identify blockages in your life. If you dig deep enough, you will find there is fear associated with our failures, hesitations and restrictions of our freedom to be fully who we were made to be.  If there is a destructive pattern in your behavior and you look at it closely, you will see it is rooted in some fear.

If we want to achieve something, we must clear the way to it of all the things that are blocking us from making progress and fear is always at the source of those blockages.

Writing down is a way for you to recognize what happens in your mind instead of letting it consume you. 

Weekly Spiritual Challenge: Understanding

Here is a weekly Spiritual Challenge (starting tomorrow), designed to give us a practical way to grow in our spirit: 

Spend a bit of time conversing with God about how this will fit you- and how it will not, where the challenges will be in your relationships, schedule and personality.  Invite him in to work, create a few reminders of this challenge that you will encounter through the day and take a short time to reflect at lunch time or sometime midway through your day.

Say the Lord's Prayer.  Don't utter these words blindly, or too quickly, there is much to unpack in this prayer.  Don't speak these words blandly, they are not a liturgical incantation, they were spoken to evoke life by Jesus.  Take a minute and write this prayer in your own words and in your own understanding.  If you want you can share it below,  I find putting it in my own words a way to "own it" for myself and develop a better understanding.  This is especially helpful in familiar scriptures that I might otherwise pass over carelessly. Live with the Lord's Prayer through this week- hopefully this exercise will create a richer meaning of the words.

Weekly Spiritual Challenge: Selflessness

Here is a weekly Spiritual Challenge (starting tomorrow), designed to give us a practical way to grow in our spirit: 

Spend a bit of time conversing with God about how this will fit you- and how it will not, where the challenges will be in your relationships, schedule and personality.  Invite him in to work, create a few reminders of this challenge that you will encounter through the day and take a short time to reflect at lunch time or sometime midway through your day.

"This was what love meant after all: sacrifice and selflessness. It did not mean hearts and flowers and a happy ending, but the knowledge that another's well-being is more important than one's own."

~ Melissa De La Cruz

I feel compelled to add this:

"Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit.  Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others." Philippians 2: 3-4

Weekly Spiritual Challenge: Serving

Here is a weekly Spiritual Challenge (starting tomorrow), designed to give us a practical way to grow in our spirit: 

Spend a bit of time conversing with God about how this will fit you- and how it will not, where the challenges will be in your relationships, schedule and personality.  Invite him in to work, create a few reminders of this challenge that you will encounter through the day and take a short time to reflect at lunch time or sometime midway through your day.

“The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.” 

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Never underestimate the difference YOU can make in the lives of others. Step forward, reach out and help. This week reach out to someone that might need a lift.

Weekly Spiritual Challenge: Margin

Here is a weekly Spiritual Challenge (starting tomorrow), designed to give us a practical way to grow in our spirit: 

Spend a bit of time conversing with God about how this will fit you- and how it will not, where the challenges will be in your relationships, schedule and personality.  Invite him in to work, create a few reminders of this challenge that you will encounter through the day and take a short time to reflect at lunch time or sometime midway through your day.

"The biggest factor for modern exhaustion and melancholy is that our lives lack margin. Most people are pushing every aspect of their lives to capacity – spending as much as they bring in (or more), working absurd hours to fuel their spending and their concept of a career, rushing through things in their life just so they can rush through more things. Then, when something bad happens (a job loss, etc.), we don’t have that extra gear – we have no margin."  

~Trent Hamm

Weekly Spiritual Challenge: Generosity

Here is a weekly Spiritual Challenge (starting tomorrow), designed to give us a practical way to grow in our spirit: 

Spend a bit of time conversing with God about how this will fit you- and how it will not, where the challenges will be in your relationships, schedule and personality.  Invite him in to work, create a few reminders of this challenge that you will encounter through the day and take a short time to reflect at lunch time or sometime midway through your day.

“You have not lived today until you have done something for someone who can never repay you.” 
― John Bunyan

Remember, we only have what we give.

Weekly Challenge: Simplicity

Here is a weekly Spiritual Challenge (starting tomorrow), designed to give us a practical way to grow in our spirit: 

Spend a bit of time conversing with God about how this will fit you- and how it will not, where the challenges will be in your relationships, schedule and personality.  Invite him in to work, create a few reminders of this challenge that you will encounter through the day and take a short time to reflect at lunch time or sometime midway through your day.

“I do believe in simplicity. It is astonishing as well as sad, how many trivial affairs even the wisest thinks he must attend to in a day; how singular an affair he thinks he must omit. When the mathematician would solve a difficult problem, he first frees the equation of all incumbrances, and reduces it to its simplest terms. So simplify the problem of life, distinguish the necessary and the real. Probe the earth to see where your main roots run. ” 
― Henry David Thoreau