The Journey: An Attentive Life

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From the Courtroom to the Promise

A Soliloquy on Abraham, Grace, and the Whisper of the Spirit

I remember standing in the courtroom beside him.

He had already told me the truth that morning outside my office. The confession came quietly, almost as a relief.  “I did it,” he said. “I’m guilty.” And he was.

The campus was buzzing for days. One of their own—a student leader, respected, admired—had been caught selling drugs off campus. It was the kind of story that spreads like wildfire in a small community. But that morning there was no defense left. Only truth.

So when the hearing came later that day, I stood beside him.  When the judge asked questions, he answered honestly. When it was my turn to speak, I did not try to erase the obvious. I did not attempt to polish the facts into something more flattering. Yes, he was guilty.

But as I stood there beside him, another sentence formed inside me. A deeper grammar than the courtroom allowed. Guilt does not get the final word. There is a kind of grammar in the kingdom of God that our world rarely understands. In ordinary language we might call it a compound modifier—two truths standing together without canceling each other.

  • He was guilty.
  • And he was still—still,  a child of God.

I have come to believe that the entire Christian life unfolds inside that strange grammar.   Read More

CategoriesJesus' Way, Spiritual Conversation by

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. He followed 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 by the harsh names they hurled like stones. Retard seemed to be the most common. Perhaps that is part of why Nouwen’s choice has stayed with me. He exchanged the polished halls of prestige for the sacred ground of obscurity.

 

And then he wrote a book, Show Me the Way—a title soaked with longing.

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CategoriesSpiritual Conversation by

The Incognito God

“We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade the presence of God. The world is crowded with Him. He walks everywhere incognito.”1
—C.S. Lewis

 

Let’s think about that: some days or even weeks, I feel I have successfully evaded the presence of God—not by design or intention; instead, it seems I walked different streets or sang different songs, or simply didn’t see or hear or feel his presence.  You have felt that too; I know it. God incognito. What now?

 

I understand: it sounds like I blame you (me) for missing the presence of God. Instead, let’s hear the invitation in some words below—from scripture and from wise writers and friends.  They tell me that God desires relationship with us when we seek him, not just answers to all our questions. They invite us to align our expectations—to accept that, for now, we see only partially. To become detectives of divinity. To move at the pace of being known. And to listen to our own stories for evidence of God’s presence. Read More

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I Lift Up My Eyes: Psalm 121

 

I lift up my eyes to the hills—
 from where will my help come?
My help comes from the Lord,
who made heaven and earth.

Psalm 121:1-2

What are you looking at?

It is an ordinary question—one you ask when a friend suddenly pauses, their attention caught by something you cannot yet see, or when a passenger turns to look back along the highway. We ask, “What are you looking at?” Common, yes, but it may be one of the important spiritual questions with which to begin a day: What will claim my attention in the hours ahead? It is a question to be asked by all of us.

 

For ministry leaders, the question carries particular urgency. Our eyes are trained to notice what needs attention: the unfinished sermon, the struggling congregation, the conflict that will not resolve, the call still unreturned, the budget, the building, the meeting, the grief beneath someone’s composed face. Much of ministry is the holy work of looking closely at what stands before us. But over time, faithful attention can harden into the weary habit of staring only at what is wrong. For the rest of us, we know the busyness that distracts during a typical day of work, groceries, the gas station, bill paying, and dinner preparation.

 

Attention is never merely optical. What holds our gaze eventually lays claim to our imagination, emotions, dreams, and hope. Read More

CategoriesSpiritual Conversation by

You’re not listening

It was one of those weeks—cluttered with noise, burdened with endless to-dos, stretched thin with distraction. Sitting alone at the large wooden table in our familiar coffee shop on Whidbey Island, I found myself lost in the swirl of my own busyness. The world hummed around me, yet I felt distant, untethered.

 

Then came the question—gentle yet piercing, one that refused to be ignored. 

“Are you following Jesus?  Are you truly a follower?”[1]

 

I knew the answer I wanted to give, the one my heart longed to be true. But honesty whispered otherwise. 

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CategoriesEncouraging, Spiritual Conversation by

Interlude Questions Matter

In a recent blog, Rob (Loane) talked to us about connecting the “answers” with questions. For many years, my work put a grant in our hands that allowed us to develop campus ministry leaders in two ways: leadership practices and spirituality. As a group, we loved times for “shop talk,” when we opened the floor for new ideas, innovations, and methods for spiritual formation on college campuses. The ideas would flow, copious notes would be taken, and many of us returned home with a “plug and play” mentality about what we heard from our peers.  

 

Over time, however, we needed to remember that best practices are “answers” or “responses” to questions that emerged out of local issues, contextual problems, or partial “solutions” in vivo, that is, in life lived on a campus in Indiana, upstate New York, urban LA or Minneapolis, small town Kentucky or metropolitan Dallas. We discovered that “answers” in the form of new programs or practices are not universal but specific to place, setting, staffing, ecclesial identity, and practical movements in the story of the ministry itself.  

 

A new campus pastor might bring something new to the table that a long-time pastor might have tried years before. A large staff team might initiate multiple complex plans that a campus pastor with a part-time assistant could not. Once again, questions matter.

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CategoriesEncouraging, Spiritual Conversation by

Peace Like a River

Wendy and I found ourselves in a VRBO on Penn Cove in the middle of Whidbey Island. We were wrestling with our future: Where shall we go? Should we make a move back to Washington State? There was uncertainty, sprinkled with more than a little anxiety. 

One evening, as we listened to music, a sea otter showed off its athletic prowess just north of our deck. A song began to play: “It Is Well,” sung by Kristene DiMarco. A version based on a hymn written in 1873. 

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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

CategoriesPrayer, Preparing Your Heart by

The Jesus Prayer: A Sacred Script for Everyday Souls

In a culture shaped by ritual and repetition, Jesus offered something radical and surprisingly intimate. In Jesus’ day, rabbis taught their students (disciples) a signature prayer that summarized their theology in liturgical form. 

 

When Jesus’ students asked for his prayer, he gave them something unexpected, a bold alternative to the structured liturgies of first-century Jewish life.  It was not simply a continuation of the religious status quo but a sacred disruption of their familiar, repeated prayers. In so doing, he reframed the spiritual imagination of all who would learn his prayer: the Jesus Prayer—a prayer not of performance, but of presence, a quiet cadence of intimacy. He taught his followers how to pray as other rabbis did, but more importantly, what it means to be heard by God.  It was a prayer not only for learned, professional religious folks but for all who want to grow in intimacy with Abba. 

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