Discern Part 2

 

Yesterday, you held the questions that were living in you.  Today, I want to introduce you to a format and framework for living the questions.  I encourage you to adapt this in ways that make sense for you.  Let the process inform you rather than make you feel like you must follow every single word exactly.  Moreover, you may not need all seven steps.  Feel free to make this your own as you seek to be open to the Spirit in living your questions.

State Question: This is a process of gradually uncovering what is at the heart of your questions.  Start by writing down the question, then ask if that fully captures what you are wrestling with ~ why or why not?  Walk away from the question and come back ~ how is that question read now?  Continue to play with the question, try not to get too tense or tied up in getting it “right”, trusting that every re-phrasing of the words inches you closer. 

Gather Information: List all the options and opportunities; all the ways you could respond.  Be as creative as possible, be wildly outrageous in possibilities, too.  What is the safest answer? What is the riskiest?  Identify potential obstacles, concerns, and needs.  What excites you most, and what fears awaken within you?

Pray: Reflect on the options and opportunities through prayer, inviting the Holy Spirit to open your mind and heart. Imagine yourself at the end of one year, how might you feel?  Hold each opportunity quietly before God and listen for God’s still singing voice/wisdom.

Decide with peace: Choose the option that brings the most peace.  Trust that you can postpone the decision if you don’t sense peace.  Note that peace can still hold space for nervousness; we will never be 100% confident, but hopefully feel the “Blessed Assurance” of God’s grace and love. 

Accept the beautiful messiness: Fully embrace your choice, asking the Holy Spirit to give courage when you want to backtrack or run away. 

Action with openness: Implement your decision, potentially giving up something you are attached to, and ask for strength to move forward. 

Seek signs: Look for good fruit from your decision; where are you sensing grace or goodness or God’s love?

 

If you have questions or want to talk more about this, let me know.  Try this out in your life, test it, dance, and play with the process.  You can use this for small choices (where to go for dinner with a friend or what to get your pastor for Christmas) before trying it out on a major decision.  Prayers you find a way to live your questions in the days to come.

Discern Part 1

 

For the last few weeks, we have been exploring the spaces within us, around us, and between us.  We have prayerfully sought to pay attention to what is happening in our own skin, asking the question, What is it like to be you?  We can also ask, how do other people experience you?  That last question can be difficult to ask and even more difficult to hear the answer to!  This week, we will turn to how do we know what to do?  What is the next right step?  The fancy theological term for this is discernment.  Discernment is different than making a decision.  Our culture teaches and tells us that when we make a decision, we weigh the pros and cons, if the balance of the scale tips/tilts toward pros, do it!  Of course, sometimes our linear logic fails us, and we can end up doing something because it feels good or because we want to…and no one is the boss of us!  Emotions can present themselves as reasons and rationale that make complete sense to us.  How do you discern what to do, when to do it, and how to do it?  First and foremost, we start with a question. 

 

What is a question that you’ve been living with for a while now?  The poet Rainer Maria Rilke once wrote:

 

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given to you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

 

The succinct summary of this quote is to “live the questions”.  We reside in a results-oriented culture.  What did you accomplish and achieve, and cross off your to-do list?  Sometimes we hide behind busyness because our questions are restless and even unanswerable!  Today, write down the questions that have been living in your soul, patiently waiting for you to turn on the single lightbulb that hangs by a string in your soul, illuminating all the cobwebs and clutter we can keep there. 

 

What are the questions that are lingering in your soul?  Write those down…add to them later today when you are in the car going somewhere, and suddenly a question comes to you that you didn’t realize was in the luggage of your life!  You can continue to add to your list throughout the week, months, and days to come.  May you sense the sacred as you go down the steps slowly into your soul this week.  Amen.  

Friday Prayer

 

God of relationships that are dynamic and divine; there are endless possibilities of relationships that impact me each week, help open me to all that is within me, between me, around me and beyond me.  Help me continue to pay attention to You, how You are authoring my life and the edits You, O God, are making in my heart and soul in how/where/when/why I show up.  Help me hold loosely the holy connection and community with others, both one-on-one and in groups.  I hear Jesus saying that where two or three gather, You have promised to already be in the room before the door is unlocked and the a/c is turned on.  Trinitarian God who is in collaboration and conspiring with Christ and the Spirit, help me see that all life is connection.  May the truth of Your presence continue to be the wisdom I need this day and every day.  Amen.

Between Week 2

 

One last time, here are the four spaces:

 

1. The space inside you ~ this is the space in your head, heart, body, and soul.

2. The space inside another person ~ this is the space in the head, heart, body, and soul of the person to whom you are interacting.

3. The space between you and another person ~ this is the “third space” ~ the energy generated in the meeting.  Think of a Venn diagram ~ where you are one circle and the other person is a separate circle ~ but when you come together, your circles at least touch or intersect.  This is creates a new energy that is more than just the sum of the parts of you and the other.

4. The space between others in a group ~ this is when the Venn diagrams of a group all intersect ~ sometimes beautifully (think of our choir singing) or chaotically (think of that meeting where anxiety and anger hovered/hummed in the air ~ and got into your lungs!)

 

How you show up in groups can affect and infect the whole room.  Pastor Steve Cuss talks about how anxiety and anger can be the loudest voices in the room.  These voices can be contagious and shape how you show up in that space.  I know I can shrink in the face of bullies sometimes.  When others are shouting and spit flying from their lips, I am not my healthiest, God created self.  Other times, my anger gets the better of me and I bully the bully right back.  I will tell you, sarcastically, when I become the bully that always goes oh so well.  Do you shrink or get bigger in groups?  Do you fade into a wallflower or need the spotlight on you?  The answer for most is both.  The deeper question is, where/when do I get bigger, and when do I shrink?  And secondly, why do I do that in those particular settings?  Why do I get angry at that meeting but joke my way through the other?  Why do I let one person throw me off in this situation, but in another gathering, that person doesn’t have the same effect?  Humans are fascinating (and frustrating), but a source of endless exploration in the laboratory of life.  Today, when you are in a group of featherless bipeds hanging out, notice the energy between people and in the room.  Is the vibe healthy and holy or broken and afraid?  Notice this, hold this, be curious, and pray for God (who is already there in every room and every gathering every everywhere) to guide you and help you up as the beautiful beloved person God crafts you to be.  Amen.

Between Week 2

 

So far this week, we have explored the space in you on Monday.  Then, yesterday, the unknowable and frustratingly uncontrollable space in the other person.  Any new insights you’ve had?  These spaces are inexhaustible.  You will never finish knowing yourself and people are an endless mystery.  When the sphere of your life intersects and interacts with the sphere of another, your two circles overlap, creating a third space ~ the Venn diagram of our lives.   In this third space exists a past, present, and future.  You have history with family members and friends ~ which contains the good, the bad, and the ugly.  Maybe that thing your uncle said at Thanksgiving four years ago still sticks with you and visits you every time you are preparing to see him.  Maybe you have friends with whom you have been on great adventures, and that helps define your relationship.  The third space is tended by you and the other.  Relationships and human interactions are a collaborative group project.  One other cool tool to hold as we consider third space is that there is a continuum of ways people show up/tend from enmeshment to detachment.  Enmeshed people tend to over-function in relationships, thinking it is all up to them.  That they can only be happy when everyone else is happy.  Their mood depends on the other person.  We all have experiences and examples of enmeshment, when it felt like someone was smothering us with unwanted attention and presence.  Detachment is the other end, when the person is distant or disconnected.  This can be someone who is aloof and acts like s/he/they have no responsibility for the relationship.  An example is people whose faces never change from neutral when you are telling them about something important.  You might be thinking of an encounter you didn’t feel seen, safe, or soothed by another person ~ or even threatened.  Because the third space is co-owned and managed by both, it is very difficult to change that space.  If you have always been the helper, the one others lean on, the one who cooks and cleans, trying to get the other to live/function differently is like climbing a mountain.  All of this is an oversimplification of the complex dynamics of relationships.  If you’d like to talk more, please let me know. I welcome the chance to explore what it is like to be you and how relationships impact and influence how you show up and the story you live from.  Continue to hold the four spaces in your heart as you move about your day.

Between Week 2

 

Did you discover or uncover anything new about the story and space inside you?  Did you overhear yourself talking about how clearly your doctor has it out for you, or how that obnoxious person at the meeting you can’t stand clearly wants to make you look bad?  There is a story in you, and that impacts not only the story we tell about ourselves, but how we see others.  Remember the four spaces:

 

1. The space inside you ~ this is the space in your head, heart, body, and soul.

2. The space inside another person ~ this is the space in the head, heart, body, and soul of the person to whom you are interacting.

3. The space between you and another person ~ this is the “third space” ~ the energy generated in the meeting.  Think of a Venn diagram ~ where you are one circle and the other person is a separate circle ~ but when you come together, your circles at least touch or intersect.  This is creates a new energy that is more than just the sum of the parts of you and the other.

4. The space between others in a group ~ this is when the Venn diagrams of a group all intersect ~ sometimes beautifully (think of our choir singing) or chaotically (think of that meeting where anxiety and anger hovered/hummed in the air ~ and got into your lungs!)

 

The second space is what is stirring/swirling inside another.   Upfront, I need to say this is a space you cannot control or ever comprehend.  If I were made king for the day, I would outlaw the phrase, “I know exactly how you feel.”  You don’t.  I would suggest lovingly, you don’t even know how you feel sometimes!  Yet, how much time and energy ~ anger and attention ~ effort and hours in a day do we spend defining, describing, and trying to influence the space of what is in another?  We used to think that if we just gave someone enough information s/he/they would clearly be convinced by our brilliance.  We used to think that if we just gave someone a pamphlet, book, brought them to a seminar, or exposed them to the “truth”, all would be well.  Only, that isn’t how the world works.  There are people I have known and talked to for years who still have opinions that are opposed to mine.  The space inside another is not yours to fix or save.  This is gut-wrenching because others can hurt us, and we want to salvage the relationship.  This is where anger, anxiety, stress, and strain start to swirl within us.  When have you tried to educate someone and your words fell flatter than a cake without baking soda?  When have you tried to fix someone, only to have them resist your words?  This is what we heard in Jeremiah on Sunday.  Remember, you are in good company; most of Israel wasn’t convinced or convicted by the prophet's words!  Notice this space as you tend the one holy space in you where you and God collaborate and cooperate and can co-author the stories you tell yourself/others about who you are.  Amen.  

Between Week Two

 

Last week, we explored and examined the space between your head, heart, and soul.  The space between moments when you absorb the words and actions of another and when you respond and react to what you’ve encountered.  There are four spaces that Pastor Steve Cuss identifies where energy or emotions exist and emerge from ~

 

1. The space inside you ~ this is the space in your head, heart, body, and soul.

2. The space inside another person ~ this is the space in the head, heart, body, and soul of the person to whom you are interacting.

3. The space between you and another person ~ this is the “third space” ~ the energy generated in the meeting.  Think of a Venn diagram ~ where you are one circle and the other person is a separate circle ~ but when you come together, your circles at least touch or intersect.  This creates a new energy that is more than just the sum of the parts of you and the other.

4. The space between others in a group ~ this is when the Venn diagrams of a group all intersect ~ sometimes beautifully (think of our choir singing) or chaotically (think of that meeting where anxiety and anger hovered/hummed in the air ~ and got into your lungs!)

 

Over the last several weeks, I shared with you the September slowdown.  Those meditations were an invitation to explore and experience the space inside you.  I wanted you to find ways to listen to your life.  My prayer is for God to be the editor of my story, I tell myself.  But others have red ink pens, making comments on what they think I should be doing.  Hearing my own voice and God’s voice is difficult.  Plus, my brain already has a narrative about who I am ~ which is not always positive.  I tend to hold onto my mistakes way too long.  To listen for God and God’s words written on my heart is to rewire the pathways of my brain.  While this is possible, it takes a lot of intention and energy.  The space inside you is cluttered, and cleaning out the cobwebbed corners will take more than a month of slowing down; it takes a lifetime.  Many prayer practices are about checking in with yourself.  Remember back to the beginning of Jeremiah.  He said, “I am only/just a child”.  The multiple ways we see ourselves impact and influence how we show up.  Most mystics believe that you have a public self (the one you post online), a private self (that maybe you share with family or friends), and a secret/shadow self (that you don’t let see the light of day to anyone, even yourself).  Think about the stories you tell about yourself.  Maybe your meta-story is of having nothing and being successful.  Maybe you share stories about having everything and losing it all.  Maybe it is a story about everyone being against you.  Maybe your stories reinforce that there is nothing special about you, just an average life.  If you are curious about the story you are telling, listen the next time you are sharing an experience with a family member or friend.  Are you the hero or the zero?  Are you often the one being criticized or dehumanized by others?  How would God write that story?  If you are even braver, you may want to ask a close friend, “How do you experience me?”  That is a tough question to ask, to be asked, and to listen to a response!  Today, explore the space in you.  The thoughts, emotions, questions, and unresolved clutter that sit in the corner.  List what swirls in your soul and let the love of God hold all you are, remembering that you are more than “just” or “only”.  You are known by God before you know anything, even right here and now.  Amen.