Integrity

Of Light and Darkness

Weekly Spiritual Challenge: Gratitude

This week's Spiritual Challenge, is deceptively simple (as are most spiritual disciplines). 

Yet you might find this simple thing hard.  Simple does not equal easy.  If this seems hard for you, ask yourself why.  This involves other people and expressing your feelings.  It is intentional work designed to give you an intentional stretching of your soul.  

Take time this week to tell some of your friends how they have positively spoken into your life. Practice gratitude. Today a text message or Facebook post or private message post is the modern day version of a thank you card. Find a way to send them a private message thanking them for how their words or example has changed you. You might be surprised how those words you never spoke can be meaningful and encouraging to others. Speak the encouraging word today. Pick people who have been a spiritual mother or father, sister or brother to you (or just a good friend for a season) and just write a few lines in gratitude.

Hardly Zen but

Weekly Challenge: Honesty

This Weekly Challenge might be imminently practical and may not seem all that spiritual.  Simply this:  For the next week you will attempt to pass each day speaking only the truth.  Kindly, carefully, gently, seek to live in reality telling the truth.  You may find yourself questioning how much truth is necessary, how far the truth can be stretched before it is actually a lie, whether dishonesty serves us better than we admit.

The truth is a very expensive gift.  We give it to ourselves.

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.