"Tight lines" is a blessing fishermen offer each other, a wish for lines taut with the weight of good fish. May God grant that the lines written here be taut with His blessings.
Wednesday, 30 June 2010 | |||
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Accepting Advice | |||
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"Spiritual direction" is a growing dimension of our pastoral community in the Covenant Church. A couple years ago I sought out a colleague with some training in spiritual direction and asked him to meet with me and offer some guidance. It was a helpful time with a person who asked good questions, listened well, and helped me find some peace at a difficult time in my life and ministry. Yet when it came to the actual direction part of the experience I think I found myself feeling a little like Naaman in our text for this week: II Kings 5:1-19a. During our second or third meeting, after having listened to my description of my current spiritual life and issues, my spiritual director handed me a photocopied list of Scripture texts as a prompt for prayers and encouraged me to use it in my daily devotions between then and our next meeting. I confess that my first reaction was to be underwhelmed. Like Naaman expecting Elisha to come out and offer loud invocations of God and wave his hands over his leprosy, I had expected spiritual direction to be a little more dramatic, a little more complex than an invitation to read some Bible verses and think and pray about them. Yet as Naaman's servants point out to him in verse 13, the simplicity and mundaneness of the direction should not count against it. God is throughout this story speaking to the Aramean (Syrian) commander in quiet and rather homely ways, beginning with the captured Israelite servant girl. For a belated Father's Day outing, my family took me Monday to see "Iron Man 2." It was an enjoyable diversion, yet a very clear reminder that we are taught by our culture and the entertainment we view to believe that life's problems are resolved by dramatic, explosive measures accomplished with heroic struggle and stunning brilliance. Yet true life, true spiritual life in Christ is not like that at all. As the Gospel lesson ( Luke 10:1-20) shows, the life of discipleship is a quiet plod from one place to the next, often meeting with rejection and failure and needing to move onto the next point in life. And when the dramatic does happen, when the leprosy is healed or the demons flee, Jesus says not to rejoice in those things, "but rejoice that your names are written in heaven." So when the advice I hear is to kneel down and do the same old daily prayers yet once more or open the Bible to read a verse I've read a couple hundred times before, I'd like to recall Naaman heading down to the muddy, ordinary Jordan River to dip himself not once but seven times over in its water. A great miracle of healing was given to him, but it came through AND was followed by a humble submission to an ordinary and less than spectacular spiritual practice. Writing to a fellow monk about how to study, the great Thomas Aquinas said, "Do not wish to jump immediately from the streams to the sea, because one has to go through easier things to the more difficult." It's good advice for spiritual life as well, and my hope is that you and I can accept such simple advice without scorn and follow it faithfully. | |||
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I am the pastor of Valley Covenant Church in Eugene, Oregon. I love to flyfish and hike along the beautiful rivers in our area. I welcome your comments as I share sermon work in progress and occasional other thoughts.
Thank you for visiting this blog. I invite you also to visit my web page.
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