CategoriesDeep Mentoring, Jesus' Way, VP3 happenings by

Pause, Patience, and Jesus’ Way

What opens us more deeply to growth and faithfulness in Christ? What seems to hinder our formation as persons and communities in Christ? 

I have been pondering Jesus’ way in light of these two questions lately, in preparation for our upcoming VP3 Gathering in Kelowna, October 5-7. If these questions are currently important to you, consider making your way to beautiful British Columbia. Join us and our conversation.  

The element of Jesus’ slow and patient way with others has resurfaced in my mind in the past few weeks. Not by any means new thoughts, but perhaps something of my own pace, driven by my current occupations and preoccupations, has prompted a pause. Slow down. 

Big picture, our cultural preoccupation with speed, efficiency, and control—“Do everything faster!”—leads me to notice Jesus’ unhurried way with others. Our constant search for shortcuts and “getting the biggest bang for our buck” does not condition Jesus as he moves through the world. This slow, patient mentoring unfolds most clearly in the way Jesus treats his disciples.  Read More

CategoriesJesus' Way by

Did Jesus practice work-life balance?

Jesus should have written a book about work-life balance. He didn’t, but he practiced something like it. The Gospels describe his pattern of movement, beginning with his baptism by John.

  • He knew who he was because he listened to God tell him, “You are my Son, in whom I am well pleased.”
  • From that identity, he moved into a busy ministry of teaching, preaching, healing, and confronting evil.
  • And he went off to “lonely places” to pray in solitude.

Spiritually, Jesus seemed to see identity, belonging, learning, worship, and rest as deeply interconnected. Teilhard de Chardin once said, “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience, but spiritual beings having a human experience.”1 If he is onto something, we have been given a caution: do not overspiritualize spirituality. Eugene Peterson also cautioned us to remember that spirituality is primarily about life, life, and more life. Read More

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Breakfast on the Beach

Living the Resurrection

Resurrection did not begin with a sermon. After the shock of the empty tomb, after fear and disbelief, after locked doors and unfinished conversations, Jesus Christ does something so ordinary it is almost anticlimactic.

He makes breakfast.

Bread.
Fish.
A charcoal fire.
Morning light.
Tired bodies.
Hungry souls.

This is how resurrection announces itself—not as spectacle, but as presence.

“The surprising thing about biblical spirituality is that God is present in the ordinary, daily, common, and concrete realities of life.”1

“God is forming us into a new people. And the place of that formation is in the small moments of today.”2

Resurrection doesn’t pull us out of the world; it restores us to it. And here, on the beach, resurrection smells like smoke and fish and fishing nets. What we are invited into, as were these disciples, is resurrection breakfast—the most dramatic event in human history captured in quiet, small, and ordinary things. Read More

CategoriesJesus' Way, Seasonal by

Jesus Sees Peter

We all want to be seen by Jesus, the very Son of God. We often seek a feeling of His presence, a longing to sense Him beside us and with us. The writers of the Psalms often cried out for God to be close, to not turn a deaf ear to them, or for God’s glory to thunder forth, asking God with words like these: “Do not hide your face from me.”[1]

This morning, I started my day by asking God that I might “sense you every hour and make this day a prayer.”

Just hours before he held the bread and cup of the Passover feast, Jesus refocused the eyes of the disciples’ faith to see more than unleavened bread and wine—more even than the memory of the exodus from slavery in Egypt. He looked each of them in the eye, gave them the spiritual food, and said, “I give you this bread, this wine. I ask you to do this often to remember not only our historic covenant, but the covenant fulfilled—the new covenant in my blood.”

When God makes a covenant with people, God is true to God’s word. Of the many terms we might use to describe God, these two are formative: God is covenant-maker, and God is covenant-keeper. Read More

CategoriesJesus' Way, Spiritual Conversation by

Prophet, peacemaker, or partisan?

Your emotional reaction to the title for today’s blog is already an indicator of your readiness for curiosity. It’s not a direct statement from Scripture, but I want to raise the question of the kingdom anticipated in the Bible for Jesus’ reign.

 

Isaiah 11:1ff puts us in mind of what God’s intentions were (and are): I ask you to read verses 1-9 to make sense of today’s blog.

 

Did you notice?  Jesus was “the shoot from the stump of Jesse.” If you’re an apprentice of Jesus, this is the mandate to which we bow: “His delight shall be in the fear of the Lord.”  Not to be afraid of the Lord, but to honor, respect, follow, and obey the Lord. This oracle forecasts a new king coming out of the line of Jesse, not out of any political party, but from a long past of faithfulness to Yahweh. What is the nature of this new kingdom? Read More

CategoriesJesus' Way, Seasonal by

“Immanuel is not just a Christmas story.”

A Ministry Refresh and a Season of Reflection

Over the past 18 months, we have been working to refresh our ministry’s signature offering – The Journey process. We love how it has turned out. It has now been about three weeks since the refreshing, rewriting, and formatting have all stopped, and The Journey Stage 3: A Shared Life is off to the printer. Cheers! 

 

Since then, I have begun reflecting on what we have been learning along the way as we worked on this project. And perhaps, because the timing of this reflecting coincides with the weeks of Advent and the anticipation of Christmas, my initial thoughts have mostly landed on this theme—embracing God with us, Immanuel, is at the center of our ongoing, lifelong formation in Christ as individuals and communities.  

 

A compelling way to look at God’s character and mission is to notice a defining thread woven through the entire biblical Story–God desires to be with his people. From the garden of Eden to the Tabernacle and the Temple to the Incarnation of Jesus to the new heavens and new earth, the Triune God seeks to dwell among his people (e.g., Gen 2-3; Ex. 29:45-46; Lev. 26:11-12; 2 Chr. 6:18; Ps. 90:1; John 1:14, Rev 21:1-5).   Read More

CategoriesJesus' Way, Lifestyle by

Show Me the Way

Show Me the Way

Henri Nouwen was a man of many worlds — Dutch, Catholic, professor at Yale — yet he walked away from the shining halls of academia into the gentle margins of life. Following Jesus’ footprints into the quiet, often overlooked sanctuary of L’Arche, where people with disabilities live together in community.

 

That world was not unfamiliar to me. My brother Jerry carries his own story — one shaped by the way others whispered, “Be careful around that young man.” And the harsh names they hurled like stones, retard seemed to be the most common. Nouwen exchanged the polished halls of prestige for the sacred ground of obscurity. Read More

CategoriesJesus' Way, Seasonal, Theology and Spirituality by

Lent: A Season of Reorientation

Last week I introduced Henri Nouwen and Lent as a journey of the heart; this week let’s consider Eugene Peterson and Lent as a season of reorientation.

I met Eugene Peterson at a campus ministry gathering in the early 90s.  I took classes from him and consider him my spiritual father, though we had only a handful of times together.  Lent, as an annual remembrance, was, like other practices, a time for reorienting one’s life toward God’s kingdom.  He emphasized what he might even have called the countercultural nature of Lent by which Christians learn to resist the pull and lure of consumerism and self-centered living. Read More

CategoriesJesus' Way, VP3 happenings by

A VantagePoint3 Gathering

We host a VantagePoint3 Gathering every couple of years and invite our dispersed community of developmentally minded leaders to join us. Last week, 77 of us gathered in Scottsdale, AZ.

A group of men and women, ages 17 to 84, came together, sharing a deep concern for “growing up in every way into Christ” and helping others grow up into Christ. Most of us also wanted to find a little warmth amidst winter’s cold. Read More