First Follow

Community, Faith, God 0

In the biblical pattern of faith, believing comes last. Indeed, this pattern repeats in both the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament. From the calling of Abraham and Sarah through the great prophets and heroes of Israel to Jesus and the early church, those who walked with faith started by following, by becoming part of God’s community, by enacting the practices of God’s way, and finally by recognizing and proclaiming the glory of God.

— Diana Butler Bass, Christianity After Religion, p. 209

Practicing Faith

Faith, Growth, Guidance 0

Jesus did not walk by the Sea of Galilee and shout to fishermen, “Have faith!” Instead, he asked them to do something: “Follow me.” When they followed, he gave them more things to do. At first, he demonstrated what he wanted them to do. Then he did it with them. Finally, he sent them out to do it themselves, telling them to proclaim God’s reign and cure the sick. When they returned from this first mission, they could not believe what had happened. They discovered that proclaiming the kingdom was not a matter of teaching doctrine; rather, the kingdom was a matter of imitating Jesus’s actions. Jesus did not tell them to have faith. He pushed them into the world to practice faith. The disciples did not hope the world would change. They changed it. And, in doing so, they themselves changed.

— Diana Butler Ross, Christianity After Religion, p. 207-208

Community First

Community, Faith, God, Growth 0

If you want to knit, you find someone who knits to teach you. Go to the local yarn shop and find out when there is a knitting class. Sit in a circle where others will talk to you, show you how to hold the needles, guide your hands, and share their patterns with you. The first step in becoming a knitter is forming a relationship with knitters. The next step is to learn by doing and practice. After you knit for a while, after you have made scarves and hats and mittens, then you start forming ideas about knitting. You might come to think that the experience of knitting makes you a better person, more spiritual, or able to concentrate, gives you a sense of service to others, allows you to demonstrate love and care. You think about what you are doing, how you might do it better. You develop your own way of knitting, your own theory of the craft. You might invent a dazzling new pattern, a new way to make a stitch; you might write a knitting book or become a knitting teacher. In knitting, the process is exactly the reverse of that in church: belonging to a knitting group leads to behaving as a knitter, which leads to believing things about knitting.

Relationships lead to craft, which leads to experiential belief. That is the path to becoming and being someone different. The path of transformation.

It is also the path found in the New Testament; the Way of Jesus that leads to God. Long ago, before the last half millennium, Christians understood that faith was a matter of community first, practices second, and belief as a result of the first two. Our immediate ancestors reversed the order. Now, it is up to us to restore the original order.

— Diana Butler Bass, Christianity After Religion, p. 203

Our Father’s Story

Faith, God, Guidance, Letting Go, Prayer 0

Do you see the difference between making an isolated prayer request and praying in context of the story that God is weaving? God answered our prayer for Kim to speak, but the answer was inseparable from repenting, serving, managing, and waiting. Most of our prayers are answered in the context of the larger story that God is weaving.

Living in our Father’s story means living in tension. (Will the book get written? How can Kim speak if she can’t do sentence structure?) After all, tension and overwhelming obstacles make for a good story! How boring life would be if prayer worked like magic. There’d be no relationship with God, no victory over little pockets of evil. . . .

Look for the Storyteller. Look for his hand, and then pray in light of what you are seeing. . . .

When the story isn’t going your way, ask yourself, What is God doing? Be on the lookout for strange gifts. God loves to surprise us with babies in swaddling clothes lying in mangers.

Sometimes when we say “God is silent,” what’s really going on is that he hasn’t told the story the way we wanted it told. He will be silent when we want him to fill in the blanks of the story we are creating. But with his own stories, the ones we live in, he is seldom silent.

— Paul E. Miller, A Praying Life, p. 201

Faith and Vision

Faith, God 0

Many of us wish God were more visible. We think that if we could see him better or know what was going on, then faith would come more easily. But if Jesus dominated the space and overwhelmed our vision, we would not be able to relate to him. Everyone who had a clear-eyed vision of God in the Bible fell down as if he were dead. It’s hard to relate to pure light.

— Paul E. Miller, A Praying Life, p. 193

Rich Complexity

Faith, God, Prayer, Waiting 0

If Jesus were a magic prayer machine, he’d have healed this woman’s daughter instantly, and we would not have discovered her feisty, creative spirit. Likewise, Jesus’ ambiguity with us creates the space not only for him to emerge but us as well. If the miracle comes too quickly, there is no room for discovery, for relationship. With both this woman and us, Jesus is engaged in a divine romance, wooing us to himself.

The waiting that is the essence of faith provides the context for relationship. Faith and relationship are interwoven in dance. Everyone talks about how prayer is relationship, but often what people mean is having warm fuzzies with God. Nothing wrong with warm fuzzies, but relationships are far richer and more complex.

— Paul E. Miller, A Praying Life, p. 190-191

Answered Prayer

Faith, God, Prayer 0

When we turn to God in faith, we release anxiety. We remind ourselves that God knows the desires of our hearts and knows, too, what is best for us. No prayer goes unanswered. No request goes unfulfilled — although the answer may not come in the form that we think we desire. God knows everything that we need upon our spiritual path. Knowing this, we do well not to let ourselves be too concerned by our prayers not being answered the way we think they should be. We should affirm that God is answering our prayers even when no answer is immediately apparent to us. God’s timing and our timing may differ. We do well to defer to God who has in mind the harmony of the whole of which we are a part. There is no limit to the good that God can accomplish.

— Julia Cameron, Faith and Will, p. 219-220

A “Yes” in Disguise

Faith, God, Guidance, Prayer 0

In cozy retrospect, it is often very clear that the “no” that we received was actually a form of spiritual protection, not merely a deliberate and flippant thwarting of our will. When we receive a “no” from God, it is often actually a “yes” in disguise. Instead of focusing on what we cannot have, we need only turn our attention toward that good which God is moving forward in its stead.

— Julia Cameron, Faith and Will, p. 176

Living a Mystery

Acceptance, Faith, God, Life, Trials, Trust 0

In your search for a reason for your illness or tragedy, no reply will be forthcoming. Turn yourself to the comfort of faith in Divine guidance. The purpose of the mysteries of our lives may well be to lead us out of our dependence on human reasoning and its limited ability to account for why things are the way they are and into the acceptance that Divine intelligence is actually in control of our lives. Divine intelligence works in ways that we cannot understand, yet we can come to understand that we cannot completely trust much else. Always remind yourself that you are living a mystery, not solving one. Live within your questions that you have, but do not allow them to take over your life, your thoughts, or your actions.

— Caroline Myss, Why People Don’t Heal and How They Can, p. 177