Silent Night: Growing as a Disciple

Feeling a little overwhelmed by the holiday hustle and bustle? If you're like most it does not take just the holidays to keep your life hectic. The Psalms 46 command to "be still and know that I am God" gets lost in the swirl of the Christmas crush.

How do you survive and keep the your faith growing? Silence and solitude, the antidote for our Western culture.

Master’s Invitation
"Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light." Matthew 11:28-30

Disciplines of Silence and Solitude

Solitude—We purposefully abstain from interaction with other human beings, denying ourselves companionship and all that comes from our conscious interaction with others.
Silence—We close off our souls from “sounds,” whether those sounds be noise, music, or words.

What is Solitude?
Though often unaware of it, we have a need for solitude & silence. Jesus calls us from loneliness to solitude.

Loneliness:
· Inner emptiness
· Our fear of being alone drives us to noise and crowds.

Solitude:
· inner fulfillment
· state of mind and heart,
· Not a place, a portable sanctuary of the heart

Let him who cannot be alone beware of community....
Let him who is not in community beware of being alone....
Each by itself has profound pitfalls and perils."
-Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Is Silence Golden?
· Silence is hard for us to do because it makes us feel helpless.
· Who is going to speak up for us if we do not?
· How are we going to make others do what we want them to do unless we tell them until they do it?
· How are others going to know how to interpret my actions unless I tell them what I meant by what I did?
· Silence is intimately related to trust

-"Real Silence, real stillness, really holding one's tongue comes only as the sober consequence of spiritual stillness." -Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Steps to Take
· Little moments of solitude during our day
· Find or develop a "quiet place"

Self observation:
· Is our speech a frantic attempt to explain or justify our actions?
· Are our words few and full?
· Can we communicate without words?

Personal retreat:
· 3-4 hours (an evening) once a quarter
· recalibrate your life direction (1 & 10 yr goals)
· Listen to the thunder of God's silence - "listen to God's speech in his wonderous, terrible, gentle, loving, all-embracing silence."

-"It is in deep solitude that I find the gentleness with which I can truly love my brothers. The more solitary I am the more affection I have for them....Solitude and silence teach me to love my brothers for what they are, not for what they say."
-Thomas Merton

Recovering from Thanksgiving

My name is Doug and I have a confession to make! I ate too much at Thanksgiving! Of course it was not my fault, since the sheer weight of familial peer pressure is beyond my control. Right? Wrong. Just as it is easy to grow flabby physically, it is just as easy to grow flabby spiritually. Or, I believe it is even easier, because your soul is not evidently in ill health from looking in a mirror on jumping on a scale. As the band Casting Crown puts it: "...it's a slow fade, when you give your life away..." Sliding spiritually is a subtle affair that we can be lulled into before we realize it (if we ever do).

So how do you keep spiritually fit. You start with the body. What? That makes no sense from our perspective. But our problem is that we have inverted God's order of things. God has created our bodies to serve our soul and spirit. But in our fall, when sin come into play, we began allowing the needs of the body to direct and coerce the soul and spirit.

Why do we fast as a spiritual discipline? Is it to lose weight or purify our bodies? Although it can be of benefit in these areas, the main reason it is practiced as a spiritual discipline is to realign our body's role as the servant of our soul and spirit. Through our control of what we do with our bodies, we train it to hunger for God's presence as much as we do for a donut when we see a illuminated "Hot Now" in neon!