Three Birthdays

September 5, 2011 Daniel Harris

Three birthdays (of sorts) have taken place recently in our house. In reverse order of importance:

Due to my lack of consistency in posting on this blog over the past couple of months, I missed the fact that the blog turned a year old on August 1. In the big scheme of things, this is not a big birthday. But I've really enjoyed this project over the past year, and it has been a hugely important year in the life of our family, so even if it's almost a month and a half late, I'll still throw a small inner celebration in SalvationLife's honor.
MUCH more important: my son turned three last week.
And my son would never have been turning three if my wife hadn't married me ten years ago last week. Yes, this is usually called an anniversary, but it's late and I'm trying to string a blog post together for the sake of getting something up.

I've got more to say about every one of these, but for now, a few thoughts on each of them in actual order of importance:

Being married to my wonderful, beautiful wife for 10 years is a big deal. It's really hard to believe it's been a decade. A lot of life has happened in these ten years together:

We've lived in three different places (Georgia, Guatemala, and Texas),
each begun and finished graduate school,
made lots of new friends along the way and said goodbye to quite a few as well,
lost people whom we loved dearly (including Chepe, four grandparents, a baby we never knew, and my Dad),
been overjoyed by welcoming a son and a daughter into the world,
and really enjoyed living our lives together through all of it.

I may not ever be accused of being an overachiever in anything related to my work, but I seriously overachieved in marrying the girl I did. If there's ever a "How in the world did he get her?!?" Hall of Fame, I'll be a first-ballot inductee.

Our son's third birthday was a big day for all of us. It's the first year that he was really able to anticipate it, and we all really enjoyed the day. Last year on his birthday, we caught ourselves sometimes being too busy with preparations for celebrating his birthday to actually enjoy doing things with him. "Sorry, buddy, I can't play with you right now because there's too much to do to celebrate the fact that you're alive" didn't seem like much of a way to help a toddler know how much he's loved. So, we were more intentional about taking time with him this year, and it was a good day for all of us.

One thing that surprised me on his birthday was how much I missed my Dad. I still never know what's going to hit me and what won't. I missed my Dad on his own birthday and Father's Day, but neither of them really got to me. Yet two of the days his absence has hit me the hardest have been my kids' birthdays. He loved his grandkids, and I would have loved seeing him with them.

And then the blog's birthday... Not too much to say about it, but because I'm a statistics nerd, I was curious to see which posts have been read the most since the blog's launch on 8/1/10:

Sabbath's Good Slow Work in Us

August 25, 2011 Daniel Harris

In our family, we are Sabbath novices, but we've come to love the small tastes of it that we've experienced so far. We had been out of the rhythm of a weekly Sabbath for a while in the weeks right before and after our daughter's birth, but life is now getting a bit closer to having normalcy again, so we've enjoyed jumping back in to our experiments with Sabbath.

Last week, we had begun our Sabbath together as we normally do with supper and unplugging ourselves from email, text messages, etc. And since it was one of the two nights each week when we're allowed to water our grass in the local drought-time water restrictions, I went out into our yard after supper to get our sprinklers running. (Some of you from other parts of the country will have no concept of this. You always have green grass without working for it. The tradeoff is that while your yard could stand to be mown every 5 days or so, I've only mowed twice this whole year.)

As I went out to set up the sprinklers, my son wanted to tag along as he often does. So he played while I got things going. Then, after a bit my wife also came out with our baby girl and they rocked on our porch swing. It was a good, slow evening of pushing my son in his new swing set while knowing that there wasn't anything else that I needed to be accomplishing on that night.

Eventually I went over to sit with my wife and baby on the swing. (Thankfully, the yard is big enough for the sprinklers to be running and not getting us wet while we're doing these things.) As I walked over, I could see his eyes looking at the sprinklers, with an idea brewing in his two-year-old mind. I told him, "Bud, go ahead and run through them if you want to." He got close enough to get a little wet, but wasn't very sure what else to do.

I sat down on the swing next to my wife while he stood there getting a little wet. He asked me to come play in the sprinklers with him, and although I was in a good, slow Sabbath mode, it hadn't progressed far enough to let me lower my resistance to getting soaked in my clothes, and I declined the invitation.

About a minute later, my wife said, "Oh, why not?," handed me the baby and went to give our boy a lesson by example in how to get thoroghly soaked by your back yard sprinklers.

They were both laughing as hard as I've ever seen them, and it continued for a while. The longer it went on the sillier they got, with our son eventually losing himself in belly laughs while my wife carried him around encouraging him to shake hands with the leaves on our tree as the sprinkler continued to soak them. I enjoyed watching their fun as much as they enjoyed having it.

There are seven days each week, but we're finding that stuff this good is much more likely to happen during one of them when we're in the rhythm of practicing the Sabbath.

It's a 24-hour period when we set the boundaries around ourselves to entrust whatever hasn't been accomplished into God's hands. This reminds us that regardless of how hard we work during the other six days, our work is really only a very small piece of all of the good that God is working to accomplish in our world; his kingdom actually survives just fine even when we lay the striving aside for a day.

It's a 24-hour period when loving and enjoying each other are among the highest priorities on the things we have to do. All of the emails that need our responses, all of the blog posts there are to write, and the myriad of other things get laid aside once each week. And we're falling in love with it.

P.S.: If you're curious, or looking for a way to become Sabbath novices in your house too, Ruth Haley Barton's chapter on Sabbath in her book, Sacred Rhythms, was one of the main things that opened the door for us.

Big Changes in My Work Roles

July 12, 2011 Daniel Harris

This post is of a different nature than most of the other things that I put on here. My family and I have been going through some fairly drastic changes in our lives, most of which have been of our own choosing. So particularly for any family and friends who have been affected by them or think that we've lost our minds, I thought I'd explain a bit of our motivations.

In February, my Pastor and my church very generously offered me a three month Sabbatical from my work as Director of Discipleship. There were several reasons that the break came at a very needed time, but they can really be boiled down to two things: First, after my Dad's death in December of last year, there were a lot of things to take care of and questions to answer regarding his business and what direction our family would go with it in the future. The break was a great opportunity for me to make a big dent in sorting those things out, as well as some space to grieve his death.

The other major factor was that after two and a half years in my position at our church, it had become very clear to me that there were some parts of my role which I loved and did effectively. Unfortunately, though, most of those things did not fit within the majority of my responsibilities. Much of what I was hired to do (and the church really needs someone doing well) were things I cared about deeply but managing them wasn't a match for me.

Although perhaps we shouldn't expect to work within our strengths all of the time, I read an author recently who proposed that we seek to work 80% of the time within our areas of strength and the other 20% in areas that are mostly learning for us. More than two years of having that reversed (really feeling like I only worked about 20% in my strengths and 80% was a steep learning curve) had really taken its toll on me.

Those factors combined with grieving my Dad's death resulted in me not being in a very good place emotionally, and although I was aware that things weren't good, I don't think I knew the extent to which they had drained me until I was a couple of weeks into the Sabbatical. I felt really good for the first time in a long time. My wife and closest friends said things like it was good to see me being myself again, they hadn't seen me that good in a while, and that they didn't realize how bad I must have been.

So, it didn't take being on my Sabbatical for very long to realize that some of the changes needed to stay and that I couldn't go back to doing things the same way as before. I sought a lot of help through those months, by meeting with a grief counselor, meeting with a spiritual director, and having good conversations with family, friends, and my Pastor.

As the Sabbatical came to an end, I sought to reorder my work life in a way that works much better, and I couldn't be happier with how things have turned out. So, particularly since several of our friends at our church have asked, here's a description of what I'm doing now:

I'm still on staff at First United Methodist Church of Midland, but now in two different part-time roles, both of which are in areas I enjoy and feel like I do well. On one side, I get to continue to be involved in the Spiritual Formation ministries of our church, by leading retreats and spiritual formation groups, as well as teaching classes. The other role is with our internet-based communications, as I'm currently working on building a new website for the church which will launch this fall. One of the best parts of my new roles at church is the flexibility I have. I no longer have my own office there, but mostly work from home.
I also have taken over managing my Dad's (and Granddad's and Great-Granddad's) farm and ranch business. During the Sabbatical, I was surprised to discover how much I enjoyed getting my feet wet in those tasks. I often don't know what I'm doing, but I like it! Thankfully, I have very capable and dependable people helping me and knowledgeable friends to ask questions of when I'm out of my league.
What I'm viewing as the third part of my work is to get to do things I've wanted to do for a long time, especially writing. Most of that takes place through this blog, but I've also submitted a book proposal and have some other projects in mind which I'm looking forward to pursuing. Writing doesn't do much to help me pay the bills, but I really like the process of doing it, even if it ends up that hardly anyone beyond my wife and Mom end up reading something.

This is no way proves that we haven't lost our minds, but hopefully it at least helps any of you who may have wondered about us to know a little bit more of the story.

Something Blogging and Marriage Have in Common

June 2, 2011 Daniel Harris

Today is my wife's birthday, and it's already been a good day even though it's had some funny pieces to it. First, she read the message that our two-year-old son wanted me to write on his behalf in her birthday card: "Thank you for my birthday." I'm not sure what he thought he meant by that, but he definitely owes her his gratitude his own birth.

The next interesting part of her birthday was that I was asked to play guitar and sing at a graveside funeral service this morning. I was happy to do so, and was very glad that she was willing to go with me, but this is certainly the first time that we have included attending the funeral of someone whom neither of us knew as part of a birthday celebration. I guess if a funeral is for remembering a life that is past and a birthday is for celebrating another year of a loved one being alive, we can find some meaningful connection between the two (but we still may not make it an annual tradition).

Then, since my wonderful in-laws are in town and offered to provide childcare so that the two of us could go out for a birthday meal, we went to the new Japanese steakhouse in town. It was a really nice place, and the food was even better. The funny part of our lunch, though, was that (because we don't have much of a Japanese population in West Texas) most of the chefs we saw in the building didn't look very natural in the Japanese outfits they were wearing. Ours was named Rodrigo. Regardless of his name or nationality, the food was good and we had a very good birthday lunch together.

With her birthday today, Mother's Day a few weeks ago, and all that she's going through being within a couple of weeks of our daughter's due date, I've certainly been thinking a lot about how much I appreciate about her, and I've noticed that blogging is helping me to learn much-needed lesson about marriage.

I have all kinds of thoughts that (in my opinion) can be turned in to great blog posts, but now that I've been putting effort into this blog for a while, I've noticed something consistent about all of those blog post ideas: the only ones that count for anything are the ones that I actually write and post. If I don't do that, I never get the joy of writing them and no one else can ever read them. Search engines have no way of indexing the content of the ideas in my head and bringing visitors to my blog just based on the thoughts that I've had; they can only bring visitors based on what I actually publish.

So here's the marriage application: I think it's common for men (especially introverted men) to fall into the habit of thinking about the things we appreciate about our wives, but not ever letting those words come out of our mouths. And since I think most men are like me in the sense of always being in favor of finding things to give ourselves credit for, we tend to believe that thinking that our wives are gorgeous, or that they're great mothers to our kids, or that they do so many things so well, or how much we enjoy being around them, or how thankful we are that they still haven't figured out that they could have married someone much better than us... we give ourselves good husband-credit for thinking those things without ever getting around to saying them.

In other words, if our marriages were blogs, most men like me wouldn't ever get around to publishing anything. Blog posts that I never publish can't help anyone, and neither do all of those things we think about why we love our wives so much help her at all, unless we get them out of our mouths so that she can hear them.

I know this isn't easy to do. I much prefer thinking to talking, but I've experimented with this lately. I recently listened to a very helpful audiobook called [amazon_link id="1590525728" target="_blank" ]For Men Only: A Straightforward Guide to the Inner Lives of Women[/amazon_link] by Shaunti and Jeff Feldhahn, and one of the things it mentions is that men have something like a 30-second window from the occasion to take the thought that entered our minds until we need to let our wives hear that thought before it loses value for her. So, this morning as we were getting ready to leave for the birthday-funeral and she walked out looking celebratory in an appropriate way to attend the funeral of someone we didn't know, the thought entered my mind, "Wow, she looks nice." Because I've been experimenting with these things, I also had the wisdom within the 30-second window to say, "You look nice."

My conclusions after a couple of months of experimenting with this:

First, I still have way too many times that I hang on to a thought and it never crosses my mind to say it with my mouth. I really have no idea why this is the case. I guess it's just as true that new habits are hard to develop as old ones are to break. But, I do say things to her more often than I used to, and that has led to the second conclusion:

She likes it. If I analyze it thoroughly enough, this makes sense. She really wants to know she's loved, and I really want her to know that she's loved, so I want to further my experiment and be sure and tell her the next time that I notice how much I like her eyes or her smile (or other things), or how much I appreciate her doing any of the million things she does to keep our lives going pretty smoothly. I need to tell her when I think all of these kinds of good things about her.

And I need to publish the blog post.

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Something I Really Want, but Haven't Learned Yet

May 24, 2011 Daniel Harris

I first encountered Ruth Haley Barton's book, Sacred Rhythms, a few years ago. It's a great book (which is why I've included it on my Spiritual Formation Recommended Reading List), and is one of those few that is worth hanging on to over the years in order to read and re-read each of the chapters. As good as everything is that she covers in the book, one of the chapters immediately captivated my attention, imagination, and longing. In it she describes a practice (or, I've really come to appreciate her language of rhythms) that I've longed for all my life, even though I never knew I was longing for it until I read her book. I was already familiar with many of the other rhythms that she described, but this one seemed completely other-worldly to me, and I've deeply wanted to make it a part of my lifestyle since then. What is it that I want so badly? Sabbath.

Like most evangelical Christians my generation or younger, I didn't grow up practicing Sabbath, really had no idea that I could, or what doing so would be like. If you would have brought this up to me 15 years ago, I would have said, "Sabbath? I'm not Jewish." (This glib response completely ignores the fact that while it is true that I am not Jewish, the Jesus after whom I'm patterning my life was very Jewish and practiced the Sabbath, just as did everyone else who wrote the Scriptures which I would have told you were the ultimate authority in my Sabbath-less life.)

So if your first response to the thought of practicing Sabbath would be anything like mine was, I'd like to give you some assurance. If this post doesn't resonate with you, there's no need to panic, because I'm sure you'll still make the cut past the pearly gates without ever practicing Sabbath... but I think we should all still give it some consideration for this simple reason: it is a very rich gift from God that is very good for us. After all, it was the Teacher, Jesus, in the midst of redefining what the Sabbath was and was not, who said, "the Sabbath was made for humankind..." (Mark 2:27).

After reading more about Sabbath since that first encounter in Sacred Rhythms, it appears that many Christians (particularly in generations before mine) grew up with a culturally mandated version of the Sabbath which boiled down to meaning it was the day of the week when they couldn't do anything fun, as the focus was only on things not to do on the Sabbath. That's not very helpful, rich, nor good for us. I'm thankful that Ruth provided a very simplified but dependable framework for shaping what Sabbath could be for each of us, as she uses these three words to describe the things we should engage in on the Sabbath: rest, worship, and delight.

I'll let you read her teaching on it for yourself for further thoughts along each of those categories, but mostly for my own benefit I'd like to write out some of the things I would like to characterize my own practice of the Sabbath (together with my family, of course), as we seek to learn to experience the goodness of this gift of God to us, in no particular order:

I want to have one day each week when I am advertised to as little as possible. James Bryan Smith says that in an average day we receive 600 advertising messages! Even if we think we pay no attention to them, that much encouraged consumerism has to take its toll on our souls. Freeing myself from the majority of those 600 advertisements isn't easy, but it is simple: don't go places or do things that are likely to push a bunch of advertisements on me (stores, radio, TV, internet, etc., etc., etc.)
I want to have one day each week when my focus is intentionally on being grateful for the things I have already been given, and away from things I don't have but would like to get. I want to give thanks for always having been provided for, rather than having any concern about where the next provision will come from.
I love reading, but most of my reading has a feeling of accomplishment to it. I want to read on the Sabbath, but not to check any books off of my list or have any sort of "should do this" feeling to it. Instead, I'd love to just read things that are rich, simply because I'll like reading them (the first thing that comes to mind is The Chronicles of Narnia).
It's easy to let technology become rude and intrusive in our lives without ever noticing. I would love for my Sabbaths to be days when technology isn't given any implicit nor explicit permission to intrude. If there's some way that it can be helpful (like talking on Skype with friends or family), then great. Otherwise, I'll enjoy a day of freedom from iPhones, iPads, text messages, etc., etc., etc.
The days of my life when I feel the most fulfilled are the days when I have a sense of fully enjoying my family. If I'm not mentally in another place, but am able to revel in the gifts that my wife and son (and soon to be daughter) are to me, it's always a good day. I want my Sabbaths to be a weekly cultivation of enjoying each other.
I want to do something outside. Particularly as I've spent most of my working life inside buildings, sitting behind desks, etc., sometimes I find myself starved for being outside. On my Sabbaths, I want to see nature, because it reminds me both that God is much bigger than I am and also much more interested in every detail that makes our universe work.
I want to begin this day each week with a slow dinner with my family (and sometimes also with friends), when we can light candles to remind us of God's presence with us and passion for us and say things that we are grateful for, and when I can affirm to my wife and children the blessing that they are to me and ask for God's blessing upon every part of their lives.
I want to see the sunrise and/or the sunset. West Texas can be glorious two times every day, and I miss 99% of those times. No reason to miss them on the Sabbath.
Ruth puts rest first in her three categories, so I will love taking a nap.
I've really come to benefit from the rhythm of fixed-hour prayer (using a prayer guide to guide me at specific times of the day, such as morning, mid-day, evening, and night), and I'd love to have plenty of room to indulge in those prayers at any pace I want once per week.
If opportunities come up to enjoy being with friends in ways that work with things written above, I'm all for it. (i.e. Don't invite us to do something at the mall. If you have rocking chairs we can sit in... invite us. ...Okay, those two examples actually apply 7 days per week.)
No hurry allowed.
Realize that, on this day, if I'm doing nothing I'm doing what God most wants of me. What gets done before the Sabbath begins gets done, and what doesn't, doesn't. Christ's kingdom will in no way be at risk because of my 24 hours of un-productivity, and I need drastic reminders of that. You might need them too.

Any Sabbath veterans out there with suggestions? Or anyone at all with other things this makes you long for?

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You Never Know What Someone Will Remember (so take the chance to do something good)

May 21, 2011 Daniel Harris

One evening during the two years that my wife and I were missionaries in Guatemala at New Life Children's Home, I spent a couple of hours in the room of the little boys (they were 6 - 10 years old). We played for a while (they loved putting on my shoes), and then I read to them from a Bible storybook. I'm a bit saddened that I only read to them like this during one evening out of my two years there, but it was a lot of fun and is still a good memory. I have a lot of the boys to whom I read stories that night, but it's a memory of one of them from two years after we moved back to the States that blew me away.

One of the little boys who lived in that room was Juan David, who was 8 at the time. (He's in my shoes in the top picture, and in the navy blue Penn St. shirt in the second picture.) Juan David was a little boy who came from a very painful past yet had a great sense of humor and was a delight to be around. He came to live at the home during the time that we were there, so we were privileged to be able to witness how the other children welcomed him and the difference that came as he realized he was in a safe place with people who loved him. I'll never forget watching him during his first Christmas, when my father-in-law took this great picture of him:

We were able to return to NLCH with a group from our church exactly two years after we moved away from there. We were very eager to see all of our friends there again, but after having been gone for two years, we weren't sure how much the younger kids like Juan David would remember us. Everyone there was very welcoming and kind to us and made us feel like we had returned home again, and we were having fun trying to restart new friendships with the younger kids.

One night during this return visit we had dinner with the little boys, and I was happy that my seat happened to be next to Juan David. While we were sitting and waiting for our food, he leaned over to me and said, "Daniel, do you remember when you came into our room and read stories with us?"

I couldn't believe that memory was still in his mind. With some of the other groups of kids, I was able to have regular times of reading with them, but with the boys in Juan David's room, I only did it once. Really happy and really surprised, I told him I definitely remembered reading stories in his room. But then he took my surprise to another level. He said, "I know where that book is!", and he got up from the table and came back with the same storybook from which I had read stories to him and his friends almost three years earlier.

I couldn't believe it! I was simultaneously filled with joy and gratitude for how that one evening had apparently been meaningful to those boys and I also felt remorse over not having spent more of my evenings reading stories to them.

I never thought that Juan David would remember that evening, but the truth is that we never know what people are going to remember about their time with us. As I reflect on the people who have made a difference in my life, I remember some small things that only happened once in my time with them as much as I remember big things, or things we did often.

This experience with Juan David really challenges me, because I know that I will have chances today to do something small for people to show them they're loved- people close to me as well as people I barely know, possibly things that I'll remember but more likely ordinary things that I'll soon forget. Yet regardless of how well we know the person, and how big or small the thing we do for them might seem, you and I never know what someone else will remember.

One difficult thing about our relationships is that they are more capable than anything else of exposing our selfishness, and at some point today, I'll have to make a choice about what to do with my time. When that moment shows up, one of the options available to me will always be to do something somewhat selfish, and another option will always be to be more loving. I have way too many times that I've chosen the selfish thing; Juan David's challenge to us is to make a habit out of choosing to be loving.

An Ever-Available Option that We Can't Afford to Choose

May 5, 2011 Daniel Harris

Several years ago, I had lunch with one of my wisest friends, Richard. I consider Richard wise for several reasons; among them are that he's found a way to make a living as an artist (not easy to do), he has a great beard, he's generally happy, and he lives his life very differently than most people I know, who aren't generally happy.

Among our topics of conversation that day was why, even among people who participate faithfully in Christian churches for the majority of their lives, some people grow to take on a significant amount of the character of Jesus and others never do. We disagreed on why this happens.

My case was, because churches generally do not do a very good job of leading people to learn reliable ways of living in the Kingdom of God (focusing more on getting people ready to die than getting them ready to live), that people are pretty much doing the best they can but have been given poor guidance. If we were to offer more reliable guidance, I thought that almost everyone would be ready and willing to walk the path of whole-life discipleship to Jesus.

Richard thought differently. He thought that people's lack of growth comes from their simple choice not to grow. Through God's grace, the opportunity has been made available to everyone, and most people just choose to say, "Thanks, but that's really not for me right now."

Now it's nearly a decade after that conversation, and I think that the best answer is somewhere between our two opinions. I absolutely still believe that churches must do a better job of seeing themselves as training centers where people learn to take Jesus' invitation to live in God's kingdom. We have to experience and teach deeper, fuller, and more reliable answers than "pray, read your bible, and go tell everyone you know about Jesus." Or, as Henry Cloud summarizes what we usually hear in church, "God is good. You're bad. Try harder."

Yet although the lack of reliable guidance is true, Richard's point is also true: God's grace (that builds Jesus' character in us) is already available to everyone, and many of us simply choose to say "no, thanks."

So, what's the explanation that accepts both sides of our conversation?

The option of not growing will always be available to us.

I continue to shape my ministry around the assumption that if leaders in churches can live, model and offer a more reliable way of living in God's kingdom, many more people will willfully and thankfully enter into it than we're accustomed to see doing so now. My dream for churches is that among the people committed to them, lives overflowing with the love, joy, peace, and hope that were characteristic of Jesus would become the norm rather than outstanding exceptions.

But, at least in our culture, I've also become convinced that the option of living another kind of Christianity will always be available. This other kind of Christianity accepts a mediocre kind of life (with one foot in the kingdom and one foot happy to remain outside) as the acceptable norm. It sees getting into heaven as the point of Christianity, rather than getting heaven into us (or, staying out of hell rather than getting the hell out of us.) It's a way for us to do enough religious things to feel like we are paying our dues or doing our duty, but to still avoid entrusting ourselves, here and now, to Jesus, his kingdom, and his way of life.

Dallas Willard calls this kind of Christianity "Vampire Christianity." In his article, "Why Bother With Discipleship?", he says, "One in effect says to Jesus: 'I'd like a little of your blood, please. But I don't care to be your student or have your character. In fact, won't you just excuse me while I get on with my life, and I'll see you in heaven.' But can we really imagine that this is an approach that Jesus finds acceptable?"

As I read the gospels, I don't see that Jesus ever intended to leave this option open to us. Rather, the only kind of life he describes and invites us to is one of being his disciple (student, follower, or apprentice), with he being our Lord and Teacher, as to how we live our lives.

Perhaps a large part of the problem is that we don't really understand how good Jesus' way of life really is, and how much we miss out on by not living it. The option of not growing will always be available to us, but we cannot afford to take it. It costs us too much life.

In one of his most often-quotes passages, Willard says:

"...the cost of nondiscipleship is far greater – even when this life alone is considered – than the price paid to walk with Jesus. Nondiscipleship costs abiding peace, a life penetrated throughout by love, faith that sees everything in the light of God’s overriding governance for good, hopefulness that stands firm in the most discouraging of circumstances, power to do what is right and withstand the forces of evil. In short, it costs exactly that abundance of life Jesus said he came to bring." (From his article "Discipleship: For Super-Christians Only?" in [amazon_link id="0060694424" target="_blank" ]The Spirit of the Disciplines[/amazon_link]).

You and I both have many choices today, and as we make them we will be headed down one road or the other: either toward a life ever more full of the character of Jesus himself, or toward something less. The good news is that God's grace and our relationships with one another provide everything that we need to consistently choose wisely, beginning right now.