I started a devotional today called “Emotionally Healthy Relationship Day by Day” (subtitle: “A 40-day Journey to Deeply Change Your Relationships”). This is written by the same author who wrote “Emotionally Healthy Spirituality,” the super convicting book I read at the beginning of my time in Orlando.
A Great Devotional
Unlike typical devotional books, this book introduces users to a spiritual discipline called the “Daily Office.” It’s the idea of, instead of just doing one devotional in the morning and get “filled up,” you hold the “Daily Office” at least twice a day, turning to the Lord to be with Him (not just get stuff from Him). It is an eight-week guide to help cultivate the attentive-ness to God’s presence throughout the day – in the midst of all the work and business.
I’ve only done the first devotional, but I already recommend it. Each Office contains 5 elements:
- Silence and Stillness – each Office begins and ends with a time of silence before the Lord. The difference between that and meditation (which the author addresses) is that meditation has the goal of emptying yourself to nothingness, whereas silence before the Lord is focused on sitting in God’s presence and being filled with the Spirit. Silence is a rare commodity, and today I realized that silence is difficult to find in our society today.
- Scripture – a short passage of God’s Word, because “less is more.” To be read slowly and prayerfully.
- Devotional – the author curated material from all over the spectrum, from contemporary pastors to monks to ancient spiritual writers. Also to be read slowly and prayerfully.
- Question to Consider – just a single reflection question related to the devotional and scripture. Very poignant and worth journaling about.
- Prayer – a written prayer, to be used verbatim or as an inspiration.
The author stresses that the components and duration of the Office are flexible. The five components are to bring you into your time with God, and sometimes you’ll spend time doing only one or two, and other times you will want to do all five. Sometimes, one spends forty-five minutes sitting in silence, while one may finish all five parts in ten minutes. I think it’s really cool to have structure and flexibility as the Spirit leads.
I started my work day with the first Office, then proceeded to work on the San Francisco Winter Conference app. The platform we’re using is not the best, and by lunchtime, I was pretty frustrated by the requests that were simply inexecutable on the platform. As I was heating up my lunch, I whispered, “God, I’m so frustrated.” I almost surprised myself; I haven’t been so conscious of God’s presence in a long time. Not saying that this devotional is the magic pill to always being attentive to His omnipresence, but it is helping me be more focused Him throughout the day.
My First Office
When I got home, I did the second Office. This quotation in the devotional really hit me:
“To love someone is not first of all to do things for them,
but to reveal to them their beauty and value,
to say to them through our attitude:
‘You are beautiful. You are important.
I trust you. You can trust yourself…’”
– Jean Vanier, from Brokenness to Community
Jean Vanier was a Canadian Catholic philosopher, theologian, and humanitarian who founded L'Arche, an international federation of communities for people with developmental disabilities and. He wrote the above quotation as he first started working with adults with mental illnesses. All they wanted was a simple friendship, but this seemingly benign request revealed the hardness of his heart. And who am I kidding, my heart is just as hard.
This definition of love is so challenging because it is not about a feeling. It’s not even about an action. It is about the attitude of the heart. I don’t have to think a person is beautiful, valuable, or trustworthy to give them gifts, do acts of services, or speak words of affirmation to them. On the outside, it may seem like “love,” but do I deeply believe this person – an image-bearer of God – is beautiful and important? It’s not about the works of my hand or the words of my mouth, but the posture of my heart.
This is not a good segue, but my word of 2020 is “focus.” Think about a photographer taking a picture with a camera lens. When a lens is focused, the resulting picture is clear and sharp: the subject is sharp and draws the most attention, while the background is often blurry and much less important. I want God to be the subject -- center of my activity, attraction, and attention. I don't want to be distracted and entertained by the transient things of this world. My prayer for this year is that through my focus on the Lord, my attitude, and subsequently my words and actions, can be slowly more aligned to my Father’s. I want to see people the way He sees them and have the right attitude towards them.
In Focus
What is your New Year’s resolution? How do you want to see the Lord work in your life this year?
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