For many people, the word "discipline" is a negative. A disciplined person is not spontaneous or fun-loving. It seems that being disciplined means giving up freedom and joy.
The truth is the opposite. Discipline is the path to freedom and joy.
I play piano, acoustic guitar, and bass guitar. I love playing in bands. But learning to play a music instrument requires ... you guessed it—discipline.
In my case, my parents enforced the discipline of piano practice which I didn't appreciate at the time. But I sure appreciate it now. Without the discipline of practice, I wouldn't have the freedom to play music or the joy that comes as a result.
Now to the present.
I am dealing with a lot of uncertainty in my life right now. I am facing a layoff. There is serious illness in my family. A close loved one has moved out of state. I can't give you details because it involves my family. But, rest assured, I am facing stress.
I want to share with you two of my daily spiritual disciplines. These disciplines help me stay joyful and present during each day. They help me sleep peacefully each night.
The disciplines I am talking about are meditation and prayer.
First, I credit meditation with enabling me to go through each day being present to my life and for my loved ones. Meditation helps me embrace today's joy rather than worrying about tomorrow's potential problems.
Before I started meditating, my mind would often wander to unpleasant places. It would jump into the future, offering me anxiety about bad things that might happen. It would jump into the past to call up things I regret. It would remind me to worry about things over which I have no control.
My thoughts still wander into bad places, of course. But it happens a lot less and I have a lot more control over it when it does.
I meditate almost every morning. I use an app to provide a timer and some background nature sounds. I sit still and try to be only where and when I am. I focus on my breathing. When my mind wanders, I gently and non-judgmentally return my focus to my breath. When I first started, I could barely endure two minutes. Now I enjoy 10-15 minutes and occasionally indulge in 30 minutes. I have meditated for up to 60 minutes at a time.
Sometimes I include prayer. Sometimes I tell God I want to connect with and be present to Him alone during this time. Then I return to the practice of being fully present to the moment.
Meditation has made a real difference in my ability to not let negative thoughts get ahold of my mind. With physical exercise, lifting weights enables you to lift more weight. When I practice controlling the focus of my thoughts, it enables me to go through my day more in control of what I think about. Less anxiety. Less regret. Less worry. Yeah, it's been pretty cool.
Second, I want to share a specific prayer discipline with you. This prayer helps me sleep peacefully. It's a prayer of release.
Every night I either sit on my bed or kneel beside it and pray something like this: "Well, Lord. Here I am. It's the end of the day. I've had all sorts of stuff go on during the day. But now I'm going to bed. I can't do anything more about this stuff tonight. So, I'm releasing it to you. If I need to deal with it in the morning, you can give it back to me then. But for now, here it is." Usually I start my prayer with my hands balled up into fists with the palms facing upward. As I pray about releasing my stuff for the night, I open my hands in a gesture of release. Sometimes I even blow on my palms and picture all the stuff of the day floating away on my breath. I see it like the fluffy stuff that floats away when you blow on a dandelion.
Now that I think about it, Jesus did these same things. He often went away by Himself to pray for hours. He must have spent part of that time in silence. When He was facing His crucifixion, He prayed about His impending death and then released it to His Heavenly Father.
Something inside me still recoils when I hear the word "discipline." That's probably from my childhood. In my adult life, I've discovered that discipline is the path to freedom and joy.
Is an active and nearly daily discipline a part of your life?
You can let us know what it is by clicking here and leaving a comment.
You can let the folks at THRED know what you think by clicking here.
Tuesday, February 19, 2019
Tuesday, February 5, 2019
An Unforeseen Hero
I've never been much of a comic book reader. I have, however, enjoyed many of the comic book-based movies from DC Comics and Marvel that have been popular in the last 10 years or so.
The popularity of these movies, which seems to drive Hollywood toward making more and more of them (perhaps not always good ones), makes me wonder why our culture is so interested in these films. Add to the superheroes and their story of fighting against some kind of overwhelming evil, all the various others like it. There's Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, The Chronicles of Narnia, Star Wars, Game of Thrones, and a variety of other enchanted worlds featuring vampires, zombies, werewolves and more. In all these, we see the power of immense evil against the feeble and tentative good, which nevertheless prevails (or at least with Game of Thrones, this is what viewers continue to hope!).
What is it with these sorts of stories, that they are able to get a hold of our attention? What makes them all so attractive?
I wonder if it is perhaps the fact that we, as 21st-century Westerners, live with a fairly flattened, disenchanted, scientifically bland reality. These films and stories present a very different world. In them is magic, mystery, a cosmic battle between good and evil, a hope united around a common good, and (usually) a happy ending in which the plot resolves in favor of the "good" and the salvation of all from whatever sort of evil was threatening.
In our world today, beyond the fact that we not only can explain away most things that appear mysterious (e.g., the rainbow), we pride ourselves in it, we also experience significant chaos that often produces feelings of being out of control, hopelessness, and despair.
This got me thinking about the "incarnation"—the Christian story about how God became a human, like one of us. The story of the incarnation is really a story about a hero. It involves a fight between good and evil, right and wrong, light and darkness. It's a story about a world that is up against the odds, hoping against hope that a hero might save them.
In this story, the great enemy is human sin. God, the creator of all humanity, called upon his creatures to be holy"—perfect like he is. But this was impossible. Try as they might, no human was able to achieve the standard that God set forth. It was if evil had already won and was found already at work in the lives of humans to prevent them from living in any sort of way that might win God's favor. So they needed a hero.
And that hero came in the most unlikely form. He was a Savior born just like every other human. He emerged from his mother's womb feeble, weak, crying, and needy, just like every other child. But he was not like every other human. He was special. He was conceived in a mysterious manner, his mother becoming pregnant not in the normal way, but by the power of the Spirit of God. His life was a marvel. At a young age, he was deemed as wise beyond his years by elite members of his culture. He later performed miracles, turning water into wine, healing the sick and blind, and even raising back to life those who had died.
But those who were in charge during his lifetime were afraid of him. The message he proclaimed about the coming of the kingdom of God undermined their authority and offended them. So they killed him. But he was no mere man. He was the God-man, Jesus Christ. And to prove his identity, God raised him from the dead three days later. And everything changed.
Perhaps you think this is just a story Christians tell. Maybe you doubt Jesus even existed, or maybe you think the man whose birth instigated the Christmas celebration was just another wise teacher to go down in history. When Christians say Jesus is God or that he saves them from sin and evil, maybe it sounds like a narrative and a philosophy that happens to work for people who grew up with it, or people who need help facing their weaknesses.
Those are good challenges to raise, and I won't pretend they have simple answers. I'd like to humbly propose a question of my own: what if our modern interest in hero films and books is an echo of our awareness that some kind of battle needs to be fought in the real world, and we need a hero?
In the most unexpected way, I believe Jesus became the hero we needed. The incarnate God, Jesus the God-man, took on the greatest evil the world knew in a cosmic battle for the fate of humankind. And he won. The consequence of sin in the world meant death would swallow us all. But now death itself was defeated and put to death when Jesus came back to life and offered to share his victory over sin and death with us.
The next time you find yourself drawn into a hero story, maybe pause for a moment or two and give it some thought.
Written by Chad Lakies
You can let us know what your favorite hero story is by clicking here and leaving a comment.
You can let the folks at THRED know what you think by clicking here.
The popularity of these movies, which seems to drive Hollywood toward making more and more of them (perhaps not always good ones), makes me wonder why our culture is so interested in these films. Add to the superheroes and their story of fighting against some kind of overwhelming evil, all the various others like it. There's Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, The Chronicles of Narnia, Star Wars, Game of Thrones, and a variety of other enchanted worlds featuring vampires, zombies, werewolves and more. In all these, we see the power of immense evil against the feeble and tentative good, which nevertheless prevails (or at least with Game of Thrones, this is what viewers continue to hope!).
What is it with these sorts of stories, that they are able to get a hold of our attention? What makes them all so attractive?
I wonder if it is perhaps the fact that we, as 21st-century Westerners, live with a fairly flattened, disenchanted, scientifically bland reality. These films and stories present a very different world. In them is magic, mystery, a cosmic battle between good and evil, a hope united around a common good, and (usually) a happy ending in which the plot resolves in favor of the "good" and the salvation of all from whatever sort of evil was threatening.
In our world today, beyond the fact that we not only can explain away most things that appear mysterious (e.g., the rainbow), we pride ourselves in it, we also experience significant chaos that often produces feelings of being out of control, hopelessness, and despair.
This got me thinking about the "incarnation"—the Christian story about how God became a human, like one of us. The story of the incarnation is really a story about a hero. It involves a fight between good and evil, right and wrong, light and darkness. It's a story about a world that is up against the odds, hoping against hope that a hero might save them.
In this story, the great enemy is human sin. God, the creator of all humanity, called upon his creatures to be holy"—perfect like he is. But this was impossible. Try as they might, no human was able to achieve the standard that God set forth. It was if evil had already won and was found already at work in the lives of humans to prevent them from living in any sort of way that might win God's favor. So they needed a hero.
And that hero came in the most unlikely form. He was a Savior born just like every other human. He emerged from his mother's womb feeble, weak, crying, and needy, just like every other child. But he was not like every other human. He was special. He was conceived in a mysterious manner, his mother becoming pregnant not in the normal way, but by the power of the Spirit of God. His life was a marvel. At a young age, he was deemed as wise beyond his years by elite members of his culture. He later performed miracles, turning water into wine, healing the sick and blind, and even raising back to life those who had died.
But those who were in charge during his lifetime were afraid of him. The message he proclaimed about the coming of the kingdom of God undermined their authority and offended them. So they killed him. But he was no mere man. He was the God-man, Jesus Christ. And to prove his identity, God raised him from the dead three days later. And everything changed.
Perhaps you think this is just a story Christians tell. Maybe you doubt Jesus even existed, or maybe you think the man whose birth instigated the Christmas celebration was just another wise teacher to go down in history. When Christians say Jesus is God or that he saves them from sin and evil, maybe it sounds like a narrative and a philosophy that happens to work for people who grew up with it, or people who need help facing their weaknesses.
Those are good challenges to raise, and I won't pretend they have simple answers. I'd like to humbly propose a question of my own: what if our modern interest in hero films and books is an echo of our awareness that some kind of battle needs to be fought in the real world, and we need a hero?
In the most unexpected way, I believe Jesus became the hero we needed. The incarnate God, Jesus the God-man, took on the greatest evil the world knew in a cosmic battle for the fate of humankind. And he won. The consequence of sin in the world meant death would swallow us all. But now death itself was defeated and put to death when Jesus came back to life and offered to share his victory over sin and death with us.
The next time you find yourself drawn into a hero story, maybe pause for a moment or two and give it some thought.
Written by Chad Lakies
You can let us know what your favorite hero story is by clicking here and leaving a comment.
You can let the folks at THRED know what you think by clicking here.
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