Tag Archives: Maturity

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Praying for a Lifetime


www.gemhelen.com“I do not find as life goes on that the principle of putting prayer first in daily life becomes any easier to keep. It is true that long habit makes it natural to keep the Rule of Prayer, but, on the other hand, decreasing vitality makes it harder to use times which were formerly easy. I have had, like many others, to use the early morning because the struggle against wandering thoughts was too hard in the evening. I feel sure that the constant warfare which is necessary to keep prayer in the first place must go on as long as life lasts.” (Morgan, Edmund R. Reginald Somerset Ward: His Life and Letters. London: A. R. Mowbray & Co., Ltd, 1963, p. 78.)

Beginning with prayer did not somehow become easy as Ward aged. It isn’t happening that way for me either. He actually found that the diminished energy of aging made it harder to engage in a regular habit of prayer. But harder isn’t impossible. Harder is just harder.

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Always a Beginner With God


IMG_7184After we’ve been Christians a while, we may be tempted to think we’ve got the Christian life figured out. Simon Tugwell speaks to this temptation well:

“Often we shall be tempted to think that at last we have begun to see the pattern, at last we are beginning to find our way around, or at last we have mastered whatever lesson was being taught us. And then, without warning, we shall be moved into the next class and have to start all over again at the bottom.” (Tugwell, Simon. Prayer: Living With God. Springfield: Templegate Publishers, 1975, p. 115.)

This is so true of growth in the spiritual life. Just when we think we’ve mastered the little neighborhood within which we’re tempted to see ourselves as masters or experts, God widens the circle a bit and we realize how little we really knew. We are always beginners in relation to God. Wherever it is that we feel we’ve become experts is actually a very small and confining space.

As we prepare to enter a New Year, where might Jesus be expanding your horizons? Where do you feel stretched and a little uncomfortable? How might that actually be an invitation into a deeper, richer experience of Jesus in your life?

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Spiritual Honeymoon


From our Thanksgiving 2010 trip to the Dominican Republic

I remember the very warm fuzzies of my first few dates or first few days of marriage with Gem. Those kinds of “firsts” are very fun. It’s often the same in the early stages of the spiritual life. Here is the way Carlo Carretto put it:

“But here too, it is the same as with love. Words pour out to begin with. Then they get rarer and deeper. In the end they are reduced to some monosyllable which none the less contains everything. Mostly a soul speaks a great deal at the time of its conversion, during the period of its novitiate, that is, the first years of its discovery of God. It is the easiest time for the soul. Prayer has a certain novelty, it seizes the imagination. And God, for his part, encourages the soul; everything pours out as in the beginning of a happy marriage.” (Carretto, Carlo. Letters from the Desert. Trans. Rose Mary Hancock. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1972, p. 43.)

Having just come through Black Friday where many are looking for life and joy in a new toy, in a culture that celebrates the new thing and grows quickly tired with the old thing, it is hard to help people understand that an element of maturity is a kind of “reduction of devotion” in the sense of felt and verbalized love. We say more as beginners in prayer than we do down the road in a more mature stage.

 

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Community is Indispensable


IMG_8089“It is a matter of experience that we cannot go on indefinitely, nor can we witness effectively, without fellowship, God often brings the most spiritually mature people up against a blank wall in order to teach them this. They reach an impasse, something they cannot deal with alone. Then they discover the absolute necessity of fellowship with others in Christ, and learn the practical values of the corporate life. But when once this is known there is a new fruitfulness.” (Watchman Nee. Changed Into His Likeness. Wheaton: Tyndale House Publishers, 1967, 1978, p. 55)

Think about places in your journey where you may have felt stuck, frustrated, or less fruitful than you had hoped. How might this be a place where God is inviting you to enter more deeply into supportive community and a more shared work of God? Why not take a few moments to talk this over with the Lord?

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Thoughts on Perfectionism


Gem and me in front of the Treasury in the ancient stone city of Petra (Jordan)

I’ve shared here in the past about my being a recovering perfectionist (in “The Deadly Disease of Perfectionism,” “Perfectionism Paralyzes” and “Good Enough?” for example). One of the ways this sneaks up behind me is in the common Christian question about what is the best decision in a particular situation? For me, that question often become paralyzing. I usually end up doing nothing.

For example, if I have ten ways that I could meet with God, but can’t figure out which is best, then I sometimes end up doing none of them. Even if I did the poorest fitting one (whatever that would be), it would have been more than the nothing I ended up doing.

Whatever “holy perfection” is, it’s about completeness or maturity, not flawlessness. Satan wants perfect to mean flawless. That is humanly impossible and a great trap. I have found that sometimes, my way out of such stuckness is make the free choice to do nothing. I own that choice. I take responsibility for it. And, then, I find myself free to change my mind to choose a good that just might not be perfect (or even necessarily the best).

Satan uses my perfectionism as a way of making me into a victim, rather than a son of God with power and authority in Christ.

I must now allow perfectionism to enslave me. I think of Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 6:12 “And I will be mastered by nothing (including perfectionism).” Paul says that all things are permissible or legal. I could make any choice I might want to make. But I don’t want to be mastered by anything. I don’t want to be stuck in legalism, nor through exercise of freedom. Not every free choice is necessarily beneficial.

And I cannot overcome perfectionism perfectly! Freedom from perfectionism comes in relationship with a God of mercy and grace. I need His help.

Perfectionism felt valuable in my twenties and thirties, questionable in my forties, and now diabolical in my fifties.

For Reflection:

  • Do you recognize any patterns of perfectionism in your own ways of thinking? How are you coming to see it as more liability than asset?

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Giving Up Too Soon


The caves of Qumran where the Dead Sea Scrolls were first found.

“One of the greatest tragedies of a divorce is that just when the pain of the clarifying process is most acute, when both unconsciously know that they must mutate or perish, the work is stopped and the partnership breaks off. Instead of the painful breaking through to the deeper level of understanding and responsibility for each other which may be within reach, they make their escape and have to start all over again if they enter marriage with another.” (Steere, Douglas. Work & Contemplation. New York: Harper & Brothers, Publishers, p. 139).

To the tragedy of divorce, one could add so many others—lost faith, abandoned ministry or mission, left churches. If we don’t learn to stay with hard things for at least a while, we’ll never grow past a rather juvenile view of the world that must always feel good to me. “It isn’t meeting my needs” is usually a precursor to a restart that takes us back to the starting line. I wonder how many times I’ve given up on something, not realizing a finish line was just around the next corner.

Suffering can be a means of gaining clearer, simpler perspective. Breaking through to deeper places of faithfulness and fruitfulness rarely occurs without some hard digging into deeper soil. Starting over at a new church, ministry, marriage (or fill in the blank) is exactly that—starting back at the beginning. There is no long and challenging obedience in the same direction that takes us far. We end up doing little loops around the same familiar little territory and wonder why we haven’t made much progress over time.

For Reflection:

  • Where is one hard place in your life where you are tempted to call it quits and start over elsewhere? How might God be encouraging you to stay a little longer?

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The Measure of Spiritual Experiences


The remains of the village of Capernaum in Israel.

“The greatest mystics like Teresa of Avila have always put little store by their experiences of rapture unless these left them more tender, loving, strengthened, and simplified and better able to live peaceably and encouragingly with those about them.” (Steere, Douglas. Work & Contemplation. New York: Harper & Brothers, Publishers, p. 132).

This is an important word of caution to those who want to focus on dramatic spiritual experience as the measure of spiritual maturity. There is actually little if any correlation between them. Deep and profound experiences may cause us to become gentler, more compassionate, more courageous, more simple, but they also may make us self-important, demanding, proud and distracted. This is a heart issue. It is also about whether our focus is on God Himself, or on the experiences God gives us.

For Reflection:

  • Can you think of a dramatic experience with God in your story that marked you and changed you in a lasting way? Can you think of others that seemed to make little difference down the road?
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Learning to Pray the Hard Way


A stained glass window in the Church of the Nativity, Bethlehem, Israel. This is in a grotto underneath the church where Jerome translated the Bible over the course of 30 years into Latin.

I recently paraphrased something I read on what it takes for most Christian leaders to finally realize their deep need for prayer:

“It can be nearly impossible to teach new pastors or missionaries the importance of prayer before they have been in ministry a while and have become painfully aware of their own inadequacy. Most of us must first try and fail to satisfy our own thirsts in many misguided ways before we finally become more open to a steady life of deeper communion with God. This level of dependent brokenness can enable us to feel our deep hunger for God so profoundly that our attention to Him becomes more and more steady.”

I think of when I started out in ministry. If someone had tried to give me a day of solitude and silence when I was a high school intern at Sunrise or a first-time pastor at Rocky Peak, I’m not at all sure how I would have responded. By the time I hit 1989 and experienced some ministry brown-out, I was quite ready.

The kind of person who has tended to be drawn to The Journey is a person who has been readied by practical experience. They are hungry people, and that hunger has often come to the surface because of burn-out, discouragement, tiredness, disillusionment, or some other “negative processing” (as Bobby Clinton would call it).

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And here is the original quotation I paraphrased: “Florence Allshorn speaks of trying to teach missionary candidates to pray before they have gone to the field and been broken by their utter inadequacy and she confesses that it is almost no use for ‘they have not come to the end of themselves.’ Most persons must first have tried and failed to fill their hunger at other pitches before they unconsciously or consciously become open. It is only when they have “come to the end of themselves” that desire mounts to the point where the attentiveness of the contemplator can be held steady.” (Steere, Douglas. Work & Contemplation. New York: Harper & Brothers, Publishers, p. 47-48).

[From the web: Florence Allshorn [1887-1950] was an Anglican missionary and trainer of missionaries. Born in Sheffield, England, Allshorn was orphaned by the age of three and was brought up by her mother’s governess. She studied art and domestic science and came into active Christian faith through contact with the cathedral in Sheffield, where she later worked. In 1920 she went under the Church Missionary Society (CMS) to Uganda, where she taught in the girls’ school at Iganga, Busoga. The relationship with a senior missionary was very difficult, and this highlighted for her the need for love between missionary colleagues. On leave in 1925, she was found to have tuberculosis and spent two years in treatment. The CMS then invited her to run their training college for women missionaries, which she did until 1940. Her emphasis was very much on spiritual life and where such emphases could be continued, she founded St. Julian’s Community, now at Coolham, West Sussex, which continues to the present day. A guesthouse and retreat center, it draws mostly unmarried women, many of them connected with CMS. In the training of CMS missionaries, Florence Allshorn’s concerns have remained important.]

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Classic Prayers: Growth in Grace


This is a prayer from the church father Irenaeus (died 202 C.E.) asking for growth in grace:

“Give growing maturity to beginners, O Father; give intelligence to the little ones; give aid to those who are running their course. Give sorrow to the negligent; give fervor of spirit to the lukewarm. Give to the mature a good end; for the sake of Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.” 

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The Shape of Child-Like Faith


Some time back, I read an extended portion from Henri Caffarel’s Being Present to God that was a timely word for me. In it, he recounts an interview with a simple pastor of a small church in a mountain village. I thought some of you might appreciate it as well:

“For so many people, the Christian life is synonymous with effort, tension, contention, performance, records. [To stress and give nuances to his thought, the pastor seemed to take pleasure in this accumulation of words.] But it is really much less muscular, visible, external. It is something in the depths of one’s being, something tenuous, delicate, subtle, relaxed, an act of the soul, an acquiescence of our interior freedom.

“Below, far below our religious acts, our clumsy generosities, our sensible fervors, our vehement desires, and our short winded aspirations, there lies within us a zone of freshness, innocence, virginity. The harshnesses, anxieties, meannesses, and impurities of life cannot touch it, pollute it, contaminate it. That is where our child’s soul lives–young, fresh, pure, intact, inviolate. But among practically all people, the girl child is shut away.

“To be a Christian is first of all to liberate the captive girl child, to bring her to the light, to untie her fetters. And then she breathes and begins to sing a limpid, crystalline song.

How I wish we could cry out to so many church going men and women:

‘You’ll never get to heaven with your self important airs, your moralistic reasoning, your stuffy virtues, your spiritual bookkeeping and spiritual investments. You’ll be obliged to throw all that overboard. But with the soul of a child, yes. Led by this little girl child, if you consent to take her by the hand, you will enter the kingdom of heaven reserved for young children and for those who resemble them.

‘It never ceases to astonish you–and no doubt to scandalize you in secret–that Christ promised heaven at so small a price to the public sinner, to the adulterous wife, to the thief who hung on the cross next to him. The reason is, that when they came into contact with him, the child soul of each of them was suddenly liberated, and murmured this very simple word, this word of love, this “Yes!” that orientates a destiny.’

“It’s really so simple to be saved–but that’s just it! One must consent to its being simple. Our eternal destiny unfolds not at the level of edifying actions, conformist virtues, or great undertakings, but within the innermost recesses of the soul. It seems to be only a breath, a modulation. It seeing insignificant, but in fact nothing is more powerful, more efficacious. Our eternity is decided by a certain childlike smile of our soul–candid, pure, trusting, boldly confident. That’s it. I think a certain unique quality of smile wrested the Son of God from the Trinitarian Life, and drew him irresistibly into the womb of a young girl named Mary.”

Then I asked my pastor friend, “How can we recover our child soul and restore its gusto for life, for song and for smiles?”

“I know of nothing more effective than mental prayer,” was his answer. “Provided, of course, that the adult stops talking, and becomes the pupil of the emancipated girl child. But if we were to make inquiries …

With that the speaker definitively closed our conversation, which I was so eager to prolong. (Caffarel, Henri. Being Present to God. New York: Alba House, 1983, p. 170-72).

(Repost from February 2007)