This is a new feature on the blog where each week I will provide 7 things I think might be of help and interest to men who are doing the quiet work of formation in their life and some tools that can help them do it.
It’s narcissistic to think that yours is the only generation that is facing the biggest crisis in the history of mankind as this article form Trevin Wax points out.
If you are looking for some excellent book recommendations, take a look at Five Books. These are the top 5 recommended books by experts on a variety of different topics.
6
This year, my wife and I are planning a monthly micro-adventure. Although we are adjusting this to meet our current needs, you can find out more about what this is from Alistair Humphries, whom I believe came up with the idea.
Over twenty years ago I lost a friendship because someone spoke the truth to me and it made me angry.
I was angry because my desire to go into vocational ministry was not manifesting in my life and I was basically griping about it.
My friend, who was, and still is, a full-time vocational minister said, “You know, maybe no one will ever call you pastor…”
That was all I heard. I am sure he went on to say some encouraging and loving things because that’s the kind of guy he has always been but I didn’t hear anything he said.
I was too offended.
My friend wasn’t unkind, rude, or cruel. He was honest. In fact, what he said was the most loving thing he could have said at that time and it turns out, he was absolutely right.
The problem was that my offense made me deaf to his encouragement.
I cut him out of my life for a while. I’m not proud of that.
When I realized that I was carrying bitterness in my heart against him I asked to meet him for lunch and asked him to forgive me.
As a brother in Christ, he did and there was reconciliation between us of a sort. But it was never really the same.
When something someone does or says touches a place of deep pain in us, we recoil and maybe even lash out.
“That hurts!!”
The mature and wise thing to do is to question those overreactions. To dig a little deeper. When our reaction is out of proportion, it is a signal. Something deeper is being touched, and it deserves our attention
I was not mature enough at the time to do that. I am trying to be now.
Don’t let offense make you deaf. Don’t let it harden you against the men who care enough to speak with honesty. A true brother tells you the truth in love. When it touches a place of pain, press in. Do not retreat.
For as long as I can remember, going back to at least the age of 9, I have wanted to be a vocational pastor.
And but for a few brief stints in vocational ministry roles, it has not happened. Every time it was like a revolving door. Just when I thought I was in, I was back out again and wondering what happened.
Recently, I have come to the realization–and perhaps I have always known but never wanted to admit it–that I am never going to be a vocational pastor.
Even that is hard to write.
But it’s true. It’s never going to happen. The desire, the sense of calling, is still there, but I know it will not be fulfilled.
And I have been mourning that loss. And I have been struggling with a sense of self that is no longer valid. And I have not been sure what to do with that. For the last couple of weeks I have been walking around in a bit of a haze.
I know people say that if God gives you a desire it means He will fulfill it. But that doesn’t line up with Scripture. There are many in the Bible with deep and abiding desires that are never fulfilled.
I don’t understand that. But I don’t really have to. God does not need to explain Himself to me. I am His and He can do whatever He pleases. And I can trust that whatever it pleases Him to do is good and right and perfect.
And I can trust that He loves me.
But I think my time for mourning the loss is at an end. I love this quote from John Piper…
Occasionally, weep deeply over the life you hoped would be. Grieve the losses. Feel the pain. Then wash your face, trust God, and embrace the life he’s given you.
I still feel called to shepherd souls but I am coming to believe that my calling is to shepherd souls from inside the arena.
I am not completely certain what that looks like yet. I’m praying and thinking through it. And of course, journaling a lot.
I just know that I want to help other men my age and younger to live intentional lives that honor God. Lives of character and purpose. Lives where everything they do is done in love for God and love for others.
In a way, I am still mourning the loss of something I thought would always be and am now realizing will never be. But I have washed my face, I am trusting God, and I am embracing the life He has given me.
Although I may not have articulated in this way, this bit from from James Marriott’s newsletter this week is one of the reasons why I restarted and continue to work at writing a blog and why I try to post my own stuff, lousy as it may be. It’s a desire to be more of a creator than a consumer.
Everything is television.
In an insightful piece by Derek Thompson, he argues that “a great convergence is happening” in the media. Everything is becoming television. In a recent court case Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook argued that it is not really a social media company at all. People aren’t talking to their friends on social media the way they once did. Increasingly all anyone does on Facebook is watch short videos:
Only a small share of time spent on its social-networking platforms is truly “social” networking—that is, time spent checking in with friends and family. More than 80 percent of time spent on Facebook and more than 90 percent of time spent on Instagram is spent watching videos, the company reported.
Video is everywhere. TikTok, YouTube and Netflix are video apps, obviously. But so, increasingly, are Reddit and Twitter. Most successful podcasts now broadcast in video as well as audio. Meta and OpenAI recently announced they are rolling out “AI social networks where users can watch endless videos generated by artificial intelligence”.
Most of what people are doing online nowadays is watching videos.
On top of this the experience of using the internet is becoming increasingly passive. Where people once used social media to post their own pictures and interact with friends, it is increasingly the case that the vast majority of content on social media is produced by a tiny minority of influencers for whom posting online is a professional or semi-professional endeavor…Apparently, “94 percent of YouTube views come from 4 percent of videos, and 89 percent of TikTok views come from 5 percent of videos.”
So if there is any encouragement in Christ, any comfort from love, any participation in the Spirit, any affection and sympathy, 2 complete my joy by being of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. 3 Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. 4 Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. (Philippians 2:1-4, ESV)
I have the joy of preaching on Philippians 2:1-4 at Southpoint Fellowshipin McDonough, GA this Sunday and in my study and preparation, I came across these 7 principles from Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I won’t be using them in my sermon, but I still wanted to share them.
To eradicate selfish ambition in Christian community, Christians, Bonhoeffer says, should…
hold their tongues, refusing to speak uncharitably about a Christian brother (or sister),
cultivate the humility that comes from understanding that they, like Paul, are the greatest sinners and can only live in God’s sight by His grace,
listen ‘long and patiently’ so that they will understand their fellow Christian’s need,
refuse to consider their time and calling so valuable that they cannot be interrupted to help with unexpected needs, no matter how small or menial,
bear the burden of their brothers and sisters in the Lord, both by preserving their freedom and by forgiving their sinful abuse of that freedom,
understand that Christian authority is characterized by service and does not call attention to the person who performs the service.
As an everyday example of how this Enlightenment-era machine metaphor persists comes from a friend who has a daughter with Down syndrome. My friend heard someone observe that a classmate was ‘low-functioning’ in comparison to my friend’s child. This well-intentioned comment made my friend realize that talking about any person’s abilities in terms of ‘functions’ is dehumanizing because it serves to ‘compare them to a machine.’ When we use language such as ‘functioning’ to describe human beings, my friend wrote, ‘we play into the dehumanizing rhetoric of modernity.’ We treaty ourselves as Abraham Joshua Heschel writes, as if we were ‘created in the likeness of a machine rather than in likeness of God.’ – Karen Swallow Prior, The Evangelical Imagination
My professional career is in Training and Development, which is a part of Human Resources, a term I have never liked. There was a time when HR was called Personnel. I had a colleague who had the habit of referring to his employees as “resources.” As in, “we have ten resources at that account.” To which I usually replied with something like, “You mean human beings, right?” This usually elicited an eye roll from my colleague, but I was serious.
We see this dehumanizing language everywhere…
That’s just the way I’m wired.
I need to reboot.
That does not compute.
We’re working like a well-oiled machine.
I need to let off some steam.
I need some time to process that.
As I thought about this a while, I realized that I don’t have language to replace it with. This kind of dehumanizing language that diminishes the dignity of being made in the image of loving Creator has become such a part of the way I think and speak, that I don’t know what to say instead.
I’ll admit that changing the way we speak is a challenge and may even make us look a little weird. But hey, if we’re Christians, we’re weird already so why not really lean into it?
Of course, instead of referring to people that work for us as “resources” we can simply say, “employees” or, what I like to use is, “team members” or “colleagues”.
Perhaps, the way we speak about ourselves and others will change based on the way we see and think of ourselves and others.
Self-optimization has become a go-to euphemism for what used to be known as self-help. The word’s evolution foregrounds the perfectionism that was always inherent in more rigorous forms of self-help while deftly leveraging the therapeutic elements of self-care, thereby lending the whole operation a moral sheen.
According to the school of self-optimization there exists an ideal version of you, and your main assignment in life, as an adult of substance and value, is to enflesh that apparition by whatever means necessary. It is time, in other words, to become the person you were always meant to be, the main difference being that you now have smart-tech to monitor your every step and ensure that you are taking the most well-informed and efficient route to the new you. Self-optimization is a data-drive approach to self-realization.
Self-optimization is almost always a solo act. Nearly everything we do to get our numbers up – of books read, of REM hours slept, of miles run, or meditation minutes logged – involves doing things on our own. The self-absorption isolates even further from one another at a time when loneliness reigns over every demographic of the population. The church of self-optimization imprisons us in our skull-sized kingdoms when what we need most is connection. It advocates a very narrow form of self-care, which is really not care for oneself (or others) at all.
I worshipped at the false church of self-optimization for many years and always found it isolating and that it brought me nothing but death-dealing shame. There was no way to become my “optimized self” and I honestly wasn’t sure what that looked like anyway. The standards were constantly changing based on whomever was popular at the time as an “expert” on self-optimization.
The deer in Psalm 42 feels desperate and afraid and alone. His soul is “downcast” and “in turmoil” (v. 5). He is being taunted by his enemies (v. 10) and is reminding himself to hope in God (v. 11). He desperately wants to be in God’s presence because he feels forgotten by him (v.9). We often pull the first two verses out of the context of the rest of the Psalm, and imagine a nice little deer who is thirsty and finally getting to a take deep drink from a river or lake. I feel like the author’s have made that mistake here, but I also think the question itself is valid and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.
When was the last time I felt truly DESPERATE for God? For HIM. Not for what he can do for me or give me or change for me, but just for him.
Like many/most Christians my personal prayer life is filled with requests for myself and others.
Lord please do… Lord please give… Lord please heal… Lord please provide…
There is nothing wrong with that. As Spurgeon said, “Whether we like it or not, asking is the rule of the kingdom.”
We are not God and we are utterly dependent on God. We do not take a breath without his allowing it to be taken. We must humble ourselves before him in prayer and ask for what we need and want and trust him to do what is best in answer to those prayers.
But is that all our prayer life is? Asking for things?
Exodus 33:11 is a beautiful verse and I love it.
Thus the LORD used to speak to Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his friend. When Moses turned again into the camp, his assistant Joshua the son of Nun, a young man, would not depart from the tent. (emphasis mine)
Joshua did not have the incredible pleasure of God speaking to him “face to face, as a man speaks to his friend” but even after Moses left the tent of meeting, Joshua wouldn’t leave. He wanted to stay right there where God had been speaking to Moses. He just wanted to be with God. God didn’t even have to speak to him, Joshua just desperately wanted to be in God’s presence. He didn’t ask for anything. He just stayed.
I also think about Mary sitting at the feet of Jesus, hanging on his every word (Luke 10:38-42). She didn’t ask for anything. She just wanted to be in the presence of the Lord she loved.
What would this look like in our lives, I wonder? What would it look like to pray just to be with God? Without asking for anything at all?
I think it looks a lot like worship.
The Psalms are filled with prayers of supplication and intercession. There are also Psalms where the writer doesn’t ask for anything. He just writes a Psalm of worship. Many of these are the Psalms of Ascent, which were the songs the people of Israel would sing on their way to worship in Jerusalem. There are Psalms that are proclamations of God’s goodness and holiness and kindness and steadfast love. We can read these Psalms and meditate on who God is and all that is beautiful and wonderful about him.
When we go to church on Sundays and sing songs of worship and praise, we can enjoy God’s presence with our brothers and sisters in Christ just for the joy of being with God together.
Another verse I love is Mathew 13:1. “That same day Jesus went out of the house and sat beside the sea.” Full stop. The next verse has great crowds gathering around him but the whole thing begins so simply and quietly. Jesus just went out of the house and sat by the sea. I wonder how long he sat there before people found him and wanted something from him. How long did he just sit by the sea in the presence of his Father?
We can go out of the house and sit in nature, quiet and still in the presence of God. I doubt great crowds will be looking for us, so we can just be in God’s presence in worship and fellowship.
There is nothing wrong with asking God for things. In fact there is something very RIGHT about that. But we have an anemic prayer life if that’s all we do.
God is incredible and worthy of worship because of who he is. He doesn’t have to do anything other than just exist. There is no end to God. There will be no point in all of eternity where we will stop being astonished by him. We can get a taste of that now.
Sometimes it is good to simply “be still and know that [he] is God.” (Psalm 46:10)
Be quiet my soul, you’re talking too much. – Guigo II, The Carthusian
I am quieter now than I was as a younger man. That may shock some people who know me, but it’s true. I used to talk way too much, dominating conversations, showing off, trying to be the center of attention, and keep everyone entertained and engaged…with me, of course.
My journey to keeping my mouth shut started when I was playing Bible Trivia with a group of friends in college. I regaled them all with my knowledge of the Bible, answering every question correctly. No one stood a chance.
The problem is that I had not been invited to join them. I just inserted myself into the group and started playing. Another problem was that I wasn’t giving anyone else a chance to play.
Yeah. I was THAT guy.
Finally, a girl in the group, clearly tired of my bombastic attitude shut me down hard. Glaring at me she said, “This would be a lot more fun if someone didn’t take over and we all had a chance to play!”
No one contradicted her and no one defended me. They just looked at me. Clearly, they all felt the same way.
I offered my apologies, and made a hasty exit, tail tucked between my legs, my face red from shame.
Could the young lady have handled the situation in a more gracious and kinder way? Of course. But she wasn’t wrong. I was an unwelcome guest, and worse, I was a rude guest.
The event caused me to think about how I came across to others and that I did not make room for them. Bottom line: I talked too much and listened too little. “[L]et every person be quick to listen, SLOW to speak” James reminds us. I was the opposite.
I wish I could say I learned the lesson once and never had to learn it again, but that would be a lie. I still have to remind myself to be still and quiet and to make room for others. To welcome others to open their hearts and let me truly HEAR them for a while. And in doing that, I am loving them.
A quiet soul helps us live a quieter life. A life that makes room for others. A quiet soul also makes room for God. It’s hard to hear the voice of God when our soul is talking too much.
I was on my way to church, where I was scheduled to preach as part of our Summer series, Saved: Stories of Redemption and Grace. I was wrestling with an illustration I included. I wasn’t sure it should be in there. It felt contrived to me but I couldn’t convince myself to cut it. I was beating myself up because I assumed I was being prideful (which is not a bad assumption to make, really) but I could not get a peace either way.
Finally, I quieted my soul and listened for a moment.
And that’s when I realized that the story was fine. It was just missing a piece. It was missing the part where I pointed back to Jesus. Once I realized that I gave thanks to God and used the story with a sense of purpose and peace.
I just had to be still and quiet enough to listen.
A quiet soul, the one that hears God’s voice, is one that is still.
Stillness is the quiet space where God migrates from the periphery back to the center, and prayer pours forth from the life that has God at the center.
Prayer, that conversation between us and the one who created us and loves us.
A still and quiet soul is hard. It has always been hard, but it seems even more difficult in our cultural context. As R. Kent Hughes writes.
Americans seem obsessed with the need for unending sound…But silence slows the frantic pace and gives time for reflection and individual dialogue with God.
When was the last time you sat in stillness and silence? No screens, no people, no projects or books or journals or music. Just still and silent?
A dear friend of mine said he tried that recently for just two minutes and he felt overwhelmed by the experience.
It’s harder than you think. But everything worth doing is.
Of course, being still and silent does not magically make God show up and speak to your heart and mind. He is God. He cannot be coerced or manipulated or forced. He will do what pleases him and what pleases him is always right and perfect and loving. What we are doing in stillness and silence, is making room for him. We are making him the priority. We are letting him set the agenda.
Brennan Manning was telling his friend Larry Crabb about a silent retreat he had coming up. One that he did every year. Crabb questioned him about the retreat.
“What does God show you on these retreats? What has he said to you in your silence?”
“You know…I don’t think God has ever spoken to me during one of these retreats.” Brennan said.
“Reading takes time. You have to make it a non-negotiable part of the day.
This precious time must be guarded! Some thinkers, as they rise in prominence as a result of their interesting ideas, gradually devote less time to reading and more time to lucrative opportunities.
This is a mistake. They are neglecting one of the core habits that made them so interesting in the first place.
Similar to a gym routine, it must be built right into your schedule and must become an unthinking custom.”
Inside the Armory 