CategoriesMentoring Matters, Spiritual Conversation by

Tables, altars, and presence

Jesus was a carpenter, but as an artisan, not simply a builder.  My “office” table was built by the Boos company and was intended to be a cutting board in a kitchen.  It sits in the corner of what I sentimentally call my “cabin,” a room with knotty pine walls and ceilings, a space of intimacy, warmth, and windows. Twelve windows in all that let me see the sun coming from the east in the morning and the shadows as they move to the west in the evening. It’s sturdy, as cutting boards should be. It’s the perfect height to give me a view of the horizon—with its sunlight, trees, clouds, and the morning marine layer of fog. After all, I live on an island in the Pacific Northwest.

 

This table has become, for me, my altar in the world; it is more than just furniture.

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CategoriesEncouraging by

I can sing anytime

Outside Chris’s bakery, Oak Harbor, WA, he carried a box of a dozen of the most colorful doughnuts in the bakery. He was parked next to us. I heard him singing as he prepared to climb into his truck. I said with a smile, “You haven’t had a doughnut yet; how can you be singing?”  He smiled back and replied with joy on his face and delight within, “I have Jesus. I can sing anytime.”

 

Wendy and I both felt his joyful conviction. I started my morning by taking our dog, Mackenzie, out to the backyard. My daily morning prayer is a greeting of adoration, an old Jewish prayer: “Blessed are you, Lord God, King of the universe.” And “This is the day the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad in it.” Just moments later, we experienced this man’s testimony of praise.  Yes, he testified, first in song and then in naming Jesus as the reason for his joy.

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The biography of one’s life

Tell me your story

Whether you read novels or prefer Netflix movies, the story is the center of both genres. We could call them the curriculum for those writers. As a good novel unfolds with unexpected twists and surprising turns of a plot, so the biography of one’s life unfolds. Where it will lead is not always clear until more of the story develops.

 

The deepest truth of spirituality is always autobiographical. It is incarnational, lived in the grit of life on Monday and Tuesday, and all the days of the week. “My drifting is consecrated in pilgrimage.”[1] The gentle and probing questions of a mentor draw us to the central action of spirituality: to pay attention for the presence of God in everything.

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On the Emmaus Road

A Journey of Revelation

On the other side of Easter, we find ourselves on the Emmaus Road. We get to walk the seven miles from Jerusalem to Emmaus with two disciples who are anything but joyful. Rather, they are downcast, defeated, discouraged, perhaps even feeling betrayed in the midst of their confusion, sorrow, and grief. Jesus is dead. Jesus was crucified. Jesus will never be present again to speak, teach, console, heal, and love them. Hope was shattered for these two who had pinned their hope on Jesus as the Messiah. The long-awaited one they believed was sent from God to redeem Israel and set the world right once again.

 

I’ve never walked that dusty road, but I know Emmaus—the experience of disappointment and unanswered questions. Like you, I have lived in the darkness of what feels like the absence of the living God. I have lived focused, not on hope or Jesus’ declaration about the future, but focused instead on my own emotional sense of loss and disappointment.   Read More

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The voice we long for

“I want to hear Jesus’ voice.”  Many years ago, Richard Foster, founder of Renovare’ told us three things prevent us from hearing that voice we long for: noise, hurry, and crowds. In Luke 10, we find a case study of both sides of that dilemma. Martha is a busy host who opens her home to Jesus and never sits down because of her compulsion to be busy. She must have felt obligated to provide a high level of care for her Lord. Mary, on the other hand, remains seated as an attentive student, opening her mind and heart to Jesus’ teaching. “Martha, you are distracted by many things…only one thing is needed.” Read More

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Ears to hear

On a recent podcast, I heard the speaker say, “We have less capacity to listen in our culture today than we did in the past.”  I disagree. I say, “No, our capacity is not the issue, our intentionality is.”  Jesus said it: “He or she who has ears to hear, listen”

 

I’ve been musing on this and found myself coming to a new thought: What happens to the mentor when they have ears to hear? Does something change in you as a mentor because you engage in deep listening? I think the answer is yes. Read More

CategoriesMentoring Matters by

A steady uncovering of grace

When she first sat at her mentor’s table, she couldn’t precisely tell you why she was there.  Her life wasn’t falling apart, her prayers didn’t feel hollow, her faith hadn’t been shaken, but she was looking for something more. “I think I have settled for shallow waters along the shore, and I know deep waters are calling to me, I know that deep calls to deep.”  She didn’t expect answers, but maybe good questions, presence, and trusted words to help in reading the stories she knew.  God was still writing with her.  In the weeks that followed, she experienced a slow, steady uncovering of grace in the deeply personal, ordinary, sacred steps of her journey.

Spiritual mentoring, or simply call it spiritual friendship, is an intentional and deliberate process of sacred conversations for the purpose of soul formation. From my own experience with the mentors of my own life, I know it to engage at least three common experiences… Read More

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Who are your students?

It was thirty-two years ago, and the memory is still strong. I was in my second year as campus pastor at my alma mater in St. Paul. A beloved faculty member was fired just days before the start of the school year. We became a community in pain, crisis, and conflict. Emotions were running high, and feelings were deep, and we needed to be ready for the students to watch us as we taught by our actions, words, and reactions. I wrote a pastoral letter to the community asking for calm and redemptive love as we muddled our way forward. The stakes are even higher for us in our divisions across our nation. I’ll share some of what I wrote then, never thinking it might apply so intensely today. Read More

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We all need an Elizabeth

In the familiar gospel story, Mary, newly pregnant, makes haste to see her cousin Elizabeth, who is surprisingly pregnant in her advanced years.  We all need an Elizabeth. 

 

You know their sons: Jesus and John, cousins, due to miraculous births. Mary knows that she has been given a mission, a future, and a sacred purpose beyond anything her own life drama could write or imagine. Why? Because she had experienced a “Theo drama,” in which God invited her to a task too large for a young Jewish girl to imagine on her own. Her response? “Let it be to me as you have said, I will set aside my own ego drama for something you intend for my life and through my life to the entire world.”  Theos, of course, is the Greek word for God.[1]

 

Mary reaches out to someone else who has found her role in step with God at the opposite season of life to the teenage girl. Elizabeth has also seen her purpose in the larger drama of God’s explosive plan for the universe: “For God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.” Before John the Baptist and Jesus knew their sacred purpose, two women, mothers both, young and old, were overcome by the drama of God’s call and purpose for their lives. Two women, neither highly educated nor socially prominent, set aside their own plans and accepted a larger plan for them and through them.   Read More