I was AOL rather than AWOL.
Absent on leave. I took some holiday after Easter and vacated the realm of cyberspace.
There's a wonderful freedom in doing so: but a price to be paid when you re-enter that realm, and find a mountain of (e-)mail piled up behind the metaphorical letter-box on your cyberspace front door.
Someone asled me Do you manage to switch right off? And when I replied that I do, they then went on to ask How? I was interested by that, because a number of other people had also been asking me questions - on all sorts of different themes - but alwasy the question was how?
They know what they ought to be doing. They just don't know how to be doing it.
I remember being warmly accosted, a long time back, after a Sunday service, by a good and godly young man, always full of encouragement, who said - You know, I really appreciate what you said today, and I know that's what I must do: but I need you to tell me not just what it is that I'm meant to be doing - I need you to tell me how to do it as well.
Practical application.
Remind me, yes, that I need to switch off: but tell me how to as well - because I'm not really sure how to do it: and therefore often don't.
Remind me, yes, that I need to forgive: but tell me how to as well.
It was C S Lewis who once remarked - “Every one says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive.” The theory's fine. It's the practice with which we struggle.
And, yes, it's the practice which is the key. None of these things comes naturally. We have to practise. And practise hard and long.
So you learn to play music by practising hard. You work at certain disciplines (called 'scales' I believe). They may not seem much fun at first. But you work at these irksome disciplines, and bit by painful bit you find that the music is slowly beginning to flow. It starts to come quite naturally.
It's the same with driving a car. All that reversing round corners. All those 3-point turns. A multitude of vehicular exercises, until driving the car is something you do more naturally.
The so-called 'spiritual disciplines' are that sort of thing. They're not an end in themselves. They're not a set of rules you keep to earn yourself some brownie points.
They're a set of practical steps you can take to help you start living the life of the kingdom of God: until your living that life like that comes altogether 'naturally'.
You remember the song There's a hole in my bucket?
The inept Henry pesters the saintly Liza (well, she must have been a saint to cope with the incessant demands of this man). With what shall I mend it? he asks. With what shall I cut it? And so on.
It's the How? question dear Henry is always asking.
I guess there's a Henry in most of us as well. We know what we're meant to be doing. We just aren't sure how to do it.
And a large part of learning to live out our lives as followers of Jesus Christ is getting to grips with the how? question.
'Til we start to live the new life in an easy and natural way.
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2 comments:
i know people who have made "suffering" an art form. having learnt that the more hardships we endure, the purer our spirit gets like gold in a furnace. so, they create their own suffering. they prefer to punish themselves with loneliness and bitterness so that people can't ignore their plight. they have taken life's wonderful lesson - practice makes perfect - and used it in a way that is twisted and unrewarding.
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