Jan. 14 CQI - Personality's role in spirituality (Mul. ch. 5-6)

Claim 1: Mulholland argues (p. 50) that individual Christians are unable to achieve holistic spiritual health on their own, apart from active participation in the corporate body of Christ. This makes perfect sense to me logically, but as a super strong introvert, I tend to attempt just that – to look for everything I need within myself rather than being willing to rely on the (sometimes undependable) help of others. If I open myself up to relying on others, I am no longer in complete control (oh, there comes the judgment part!! [see "question 1" below]), and that is not comfortable for me.

Claim 2: People tend to begin viewing their personal preferences as the best or only way of going about things (p. 55; ch. 6). This is definitely true of me…. I think it is partly because people like me don’t want to admit our own weaknesses. If we recognize the value in other ways of doing things, it could potentially open the door to needing to be willing to be flexible in how we typically act and make choices. And that’s not always fun! Which leads right into the whole shadow thing he talks about.

Question 1: How much of me is the way it is because of how I was raised? Who am I really? (p. 62) I know I’m a super strong “I” and a strong “J,” but it is much harder for me to figure out if I’m an N/S or an F/T. I can see myself going both ways on both of them, and from some of the reading we did in this chapter I would keep flip flopping on what I think my natural self likes most. It’s hard to figure out how much of the way I practically approach these two is nature vs. nurture. (see below for more on this)

Insight 1: From the description on pg. 52, I had put myself down as an F because of the “need to please others” bit, even though my test results from the night before had put me as a T. But then I got to pg. 58, and his description of thinking people’s tendency to be “more ‘theological,’ more analytical and structural in their spirituality” fit me….well…to a “T.” As I’m sure I’ll talk about in my “Here I am” paper for Wednesday, my relationship with God in high school was definitely “slight[ing] the affective, emotional aspects of [my] relationship with God,” even though I felt a deep need and hunger for that. It’s like I was missing something and didn’t know how to fill the void I felt (see also pg. 60).

Insight 2: The “disintegration” of my one-sided spirituality between my thinking and feeling tendencies definitely led to some stagnation (pg. 63), as mentioned above. I was a super good kid – I memorized multiple whole books of the Bible for Bible Quizzing, knew a lot of the “right answers” about theology, read my Bible cover to cover when I was 11-12 years old, etc. But it was all a façade – It covered up a heart that was so hungry for a real relationship. I was dying of starvation for the feelings of love. I knew with my head that God loved me. The thinking side of me had that box clearly checked off. But I guess I was trying to sweep the feeling cravings under the rug – like I didn’t think that’s what a relationship with God was supposed to/could include. Until that day when God in His GRACE unexplainedly reached down and began pouring out His love into my life – but you’ll have to wait until Wednesday to read more about that.  :D

Anyway, going back up to the question I had earlier….I think a big part of this whole issue was that I was raised in a very conservative family that was not at all comfortable with the more charismatic practices of Christianity. The active, personal experience of God’s love and presence was mostly lacking from my life before I came to college. I think that’s because the kind of experiences I’ve had since are kind of scary to people who are trying to fit God into a system of boxes. It doesn’t feel safe to have emotional, affective experiences. And so we avoided them. There are still times I’m not sure what to do with certain things about charismatic practices. But I just keep praying to God that He would guide me into what is true of HIM – that my spirituality would not try to keep Him in some artificial box, but also that I would not start practicing in ways that are not true to His character. Sometimes all I can do is trust Him to be faithful to not allow a heart yearning for Him to go astray.

Capstone Seminar in Christian Life

I've never kept this blog as updated as I intended to (that's the story of the life of all my poor blogs...). But now that I'm in my last semester, I think I have a class in which I actually care deeply enough about what it is that I'm writing to post it so others can read it and perhaps be helped or blessed.

At John Brown University, "Capstone Seminar in Christian Life" is a senior-level course which all students are required to take. It is the bookend at the end of our college experience which is supposed to prepare us to be launched into the world.

I got credit for it by taking an honors course which integrates two upper division core requirements into one, two-semester class. But it naturally wasn't exactly the same. Then last fall I got to know Dr. Burch a little bit through working in the Biblical Studies Division (I also heard him speak at the student retreat in September), and I really wanted to take a class with him. It's hard to explain why - he just comes across as a very caring, very intelligent, but very down-to-earth guy. 

This semester he is teaching Capstone, and I had a few extra hours lying around in my last semester, so I decided to audit the class. Last Wednesday we had our first day, and I have never been more excited about a class in my life. Dr. Burch is going to be providing an opportunity for us to carefully and intentionally examine our spiritual lives and the journey we have been on and to look toward where we want/need to go. He's going to be having us do a lot of reflection, and I love that kind of stuff.

Anyhow, nearly every class period we will be turning in what he calls CQI's (Claims, Questions, Insights) over the reading for that day. Our reading will primarily come from Invitation to a Journey: A Road Map for Spiritual Formation by Robert Mulholland. And I am hoping/planning to post those on here. We'll see how it goes :)

HO Week 6 (9/30) - Calling

The Audience of One

Bucking the crowd. Marching to the beat of a different drum. Swimming upstream. These are metaphors I find myself identifying with on a regular basis. I’m not an average American 21-year-old (after all, I only joined the 21 club last Sunday). I wasn’t a typical high school teenager either. In Rising to the Call, Os Guinness encourages Christians to live and perform for an audience of one. So I’m on the right track, right?

Wrong. At least, not necessarily right. There are many audiences that the world encourages us to try to please. But the one I want to focus on here is the deceptive audience of one: myself. It’s fairly easy for me to be a maverick and proud of it. However, doing my own thing for the sake of doing my own thing isn’t where I want to be—because if I’m doing my own thing, my focus is off.

The audience of one is not me. The Audience of One is God.

Read that again, Esther. Read it again. {Big sigh} It’s not too difficult for me to do what I want to do, regardless of what other people are doing. What is much more challenging is doing what God wants me to do, regardless of what I want to do. Here I am, back to the same place God keeps bringing me this month: SURRENDER.

I may think I have my life all figured out. But at the end of the day, I am not my most important audience. God is. And when someday the curtain closes on the story of my life, I don’t want my own applause to be the only sound I hear. If there’s only one person clapping, that’s just fine…so long as that person is my Heavenly Father – the true Audience of One.

HO Week 5 (9/23) - Calling

Service vs. Devotion

“Beware of anything that competes with loyalty to Jesus Christ. The greatest competitor of devotion to Jesus is service for Him….The one aim of the call of God is the satisfaction of God, not a call to do something for Him.” ~~~Oswald Chambers

When I read this quote in Os Guinness’ “Rising to the Call” a lightbulb went off in my head unlike either of the other two times I’ve read the book. This quote is applicable to me because it’s a huge temptation of mine to easily get so carried away “serving God” that I have no time simply to be His as my room mate says.

This really dawned on me for the first time last January, I think on one of the days Jill Briscoe came to speak in chapel. Standing there singing, it suddenly dawned on me that there is never never anything I can do to earn my salvation. I shouldn’t try to earn God’s love, because it is a free gift! Everything I do should be a response of love and thankfulness, but not out of a sense of indebtedness. God doesn’t want my good deeds. He wants ME!

It’s super easy for us as college students to get caught up and to busy serving God. It goes back to that article “Human Flourishing” we read the first week. In fact, this issue is my biggest disagreement with that article. There are so many good opportunities for us to serve – especially at a Christian college like JBU. But our number one goal is to be fully Christ’s. We shouldn’t assume our good deeds earn our favor with God when what He’s really looking for is our hearts, yielded to Him.

HO Week 4 (9/16) - Calling

The Story of My Life

Anabel stared up at the mountain peak, just one of a whole range stretching as far as she could see. For days, this view had been on her horizon—threatening her goal by blocking her path. It was as though the mountains knew exactly what she wanted and were laughing at their ability to keep her from attaining it. How long ago had she started on this journey? The weeks and months of toil were blending together…and now suddenly it seemed to be at an end, here at the foot of an insurmountable obstacle.

Each one of us has ambitions. Each has a journey which has brought us to where we now stand. But we rarely see our lives like we see stories. Stories have meaning in every moment—there is rarely a wasted scene in a book or a movie. Thus, we look at our day-to-day existence and think it’s boring. This is the idea Donald Miller wrote A Million Miles in a Thousand Years to combat.

At the risk of sounding “over-saved,” I can honestly say that my main pursuit in life at this moment is to live the life God would have me to live. I know that the best life I could ever live is the one God has planned out for me. He has been reminding me all year that I can trust Him. Sure, I have ideas of the things I would like to do. But if they’re not in God’s plan, He’s teaching me that I can lay them down on the altar. He is my Master, I am His slave.

My life is a conglomeration of many typical story plots…and some which are very unusual. I’ve been impacted by the “good kid from a Christian family” story – the “homeschooled” story – the “love nature & the outdoors” story – the “mid-income, non-extravagant lifestyle” story. Those don’t make me too unique…but then there’s the “I lived in China with my family for seven months when I was in 6^th grade” story. While it was a long time ago…while I was rather young…while I don’t think about it every day…still, this story has had a huge impact on me. God uses all of the stories He has written into each person’s life to create a book that is beautiful, special, and unique. I can trust Him, knowing that each piece of the puzzle that is “me” fits together to create a picture of the “me” He has had in mind from eternity past.

HO Week 3 (9/9) - Calling

[We're reading Donald Miller's A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, and the prompt was to write about a scene of our life depicting a single memory]

Life as a Movie

June 22, 2003—I remember the day well. It was a Sunday morning unlike any of the past 36 Sunday mornings. That morning, I walked through the doors of my home church for the first time in nine months. {I had not been there while my family and I lived in China.}

There was one thing I wanted to do more than anything else – see my best friend, who had promised to email me every day and had faithfully done so. Glimpsing her walking in the hallway, I moved to intercept her. Evidently she had seen me when I saw her, because she had rushed into the auditorium just as I slipped out. She chased me down and we reunited in a joyful hug there in the hallway.

I can still see it in my mind’s eye – I can still remember my almost euphoric happiness that things had finally reached a conclusion – I can still point to the exact spot where it happened. There have been times since when the building has been deserted that I have returned to the spot and relived that moment. For me, it brought the saga of my Chinese experience full circle. Now, at last, I felt truly home.

Those feelings are what make the moment stick in my mind. The relationship and kinship I felt with my friend are what gave those brief moments poignancy. There was a period of time, however, when the memory was bittersweet – when the happiness of the time was dulled by the regret of the present.

A couple years after our reunion, my friend and I had pretty much gone our separate ways. We still saw each other, but I no longer counted her as a close friend. Just this summer, thanks to her initiation, we finally reconnected on a deep level. Suddenly, I again feel that close bond I felt with her so long ago, and I am thankful. It’s a reminder that things don’t always stay the way they are…but that I shouldn’t give up easily on something good either.

Questions about Chapters 1-10:

1. On page 7, Miller says "You get a feeling when you look back on life that that's all God really wants from us, to live inside a body he made and enjoy the story and bond with us through the experience." What do you think of this theologically? I just heard something else like this today...maybe in Integrated Theology...about how God became incarnated to share our experience of life with us.

2. "Without story, experience are just random," Steve tells Don (27). Later, Miller talks about a man who changed his daughter's heart towards him through story. "He realized he hadn't provided a better role for his daughter. He hadn't mapped out a story for his family" (51). We clearly don't want our lives to be meaningless, but to what extent should we try to plan/map out the story of our lives? How does God fit into this picture?

HO Week 2 (9/2) - Human Flourishing

What is True Success?

The school year has started up again, and with it comes another semester of mentoring for Honors Orientation! Here's my blog post responding to the first article for that class.....

College students are busy people—super busy. I’ve been told “College is such a great time of life, you should take advantage of it and experience everything you can!” However, juggling too many balls can result in a feeling of being completely overwhelmed. The arms flail, the balls fall out of control and scatter.

We aren’t supposed to be in control of our lives. Part of the Fall was choosing to believe we know better than God, so the flesh will always struggle to convince us to take things into our own hands. When we yield to the quest for worldly success, we enter into an unending cycle of trying to claim to the top of an ever-extending ladder.

Danielle Sallade says basically the same in her article “Human Flourishing.” She says our work is to be centered on service to Christ and others rather than our achievements. While I agree with her, it’s important for us to also realize that it is just as easy to run ourselves ragged by participating in too much. If I try to serve in every capacity, I will feel just as exhausted as someone constantly striving for human success.

The danger of over-serving is not something Sallade really addressed in her essay. That is what I often find myself caught in. I love helping people. But I am not called to fill every need of each person. That’s Christ’s role, not mine! Sallade does talk about how we should look at our gifts and see how we can best use those in Christ’s service. We are to offer our abilities up to Him, to use as He desires to accomplish His plan. Searching out the will of God and trusting Him is the only way to find true satisfaction in life—not trying to gain all the secular or Christian accolades for being a “successful” person.

{If you're interested in reading more, this is simply the abridged, HO-sanctioned (ie, closer to 250 words) version of a post on Thrive80, where I am a contributor. You can see it "here"}