God doesn’t want you to live your spiritual life in private exhaustion. Like Moses, you may tell yourself that “it all rests on me”, or that “I’m the only one who can do this”, but that is simply not true. The truth is, a reluctance to allow anyone to come along side you will, eventually, work against your spiritual vitality. It will leave you spiritually depleted and exhausted.
Formation
Responding to Rejection
Why do we give such credence to one negative comment rather than a plethora of encouraging statements? Logically we know this shouldn't be the case. We know we should rest in encouragement and love rather than in negativity. But we can’t always guard against rejecting comments, and when they come, they shake us in the deepest part of our soul.
God Bless the Incompetent
Ministry isn’t about competency or prowess; it’s not about maximizing our endeavors or achieving some ever-increasing public recognition. In the life of faith, we never rise above our own frailty. In fact, the places where we feel foolish, weak turned-around, or less-than, may be where God’s blessings are most fully revealed.
Crafted and Called.
Moses had spent years defining himself by the lack of external validation. Everything he went through told him that he was not useable by God; that was his identity. But the answer of our identity is never one we must create; it is one we receive. Moses was so busy describing how he saw himself, that he failed to hear how God viewed him.
Beyond Pass or Fail.
In the life of faith, we sometimes use the language of “testing” to describe God’s interactions in our lives. We might even say something like “God’s not troubling you, He’s testing you”, to describe life’s difficulties. But have you every wondered what we mean when we talk about God testing us? Is God the heavenly equivalent to a disgruntled driving instructor?
Walk in what is Good
I don’t want to play for the algorithms. I don’t want to put my writing on hold so that I can appeal to publishers. I don’t want to seek an audience or a platform. I simply want to walk in the way that Jesus leads me. For me, the good way is to uplift those who are discouraged and to live into that encouragement myself.
Deflating my spiritual spare tire.
Are we as attuned to the dynamics of our spiritual life as we are to the physical? Do we notice the presence of “spiritual spare tires” – the weights and burdens that sap our strength and keep us from living the life that Jesus invites us into?
There was a man sent by God. His name was Kyle.
You are not your followers. You are not your success or your shares. You are not the memes that you post. You are not the thumbs-up you receive, or the comments you gain. You are not what today’s algorithm says you are, or what tomorrow’s metric will try to force you into. You are sent by God.
Forsaking my Inner Curmudgeon
Somewhere, amid our frustrations and discouragement there is a voice that speaks words of life and healing. Even in crankiness God is present, and because God is present, God’s grace-filled utterances are both reliable and trustworthy.
Playing Spiritual Games
In 1937, a man named Frank Laubach described what he called “The Game of Minutes.” The game expressed Laubach’s desire to be mindfully focused on God’s presence “at least one second of each minute.” You read that correctly; one second every minute. Given that there are 960 minutes between the hours of 6am and 10pm, the Game of Minutes naturally calls us to turn our attention to Jesus 960 times.
Reverend Kyle Norman 