Month: August 2026

4 Steps To A Great New Life!!!!!

[Before we get to our 4 Steps To A Great New Life – or maybe it it simply part of building a great new life – I want to share what I’m noticing in our Bible In A Year passages in Ezra. Over and over, like the chorus of a song, he writes, “the gracious hand of God was upon us.” Things happen because of this “gracious hand of God.” I love the lenses through which he sees the world. He isn’t making anything happen, not making blessings or manufacturing miracles, the Source of everything is God and His “gracious hand(s).” We could all probably use more of that sort of perspective. Now, the 4 STEPS THAT WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE!!!]

[…Well, not yet. I am using this title and putting it in a caps lock because I, generally, have a giant suspicion towards the entire library of this type of self-help industry. 4 (or 7 or 105) steps won’t change your life, there’s no magic pill, no cast iron formula for transformation. I use these words mostly as satire…but, only mostly. There is some truth in practice. Sometimes, we can find universal characteristics that help to point us in a certain direction. Eating dinner together as a family isn’t always going to lead to connection and foster beautiful close-knit relationships, but there’s a very good chance it will. So, in Sunday’s message, we discussed 4 ways we can cultivate an environment in which we can grow closer to (or, to use the word from the 2 Corinthians passage: know) God. Now, we’re ready to jump into these 4 STEPS THAT WILL…you get the point.]

STEP 1, Read your Bible. Through His Word, we can begin to discover the Story, the character of God, Who He is, and who we are in Him. We see this is a divine chase: He made us, we ran (and run) away, and He pursues. He loves. He is graceful, the “gracious hand of God” is upon us, no matter what kind or size of mess we can make. This is information, data, facts, head knowledge, as foundation. If we stop here, maybe our lives don’t change, but that leaves us to the 2nd BIG AWESOME STEP: Contemplate.

We read, pray, ask The Spirit to show us, to connect the dots, tie the clouds together. In our reading, we learn about Abraham, Elijah, Jonah, John the Baptizer, the man on the cross next to Jesus, Judas, and Thomas. And in the contemplative space, with the Spirit’s guidance, we learn that we are each of them. We get frustrated at the Israelites living the same tired loops, and have our eyes opened to our own loops that we live. The Story jumps to life and we can more and more easily see that these words, written thousands of years ago, are our words, too. The Spirit teaches, removes the scales from our eyes and hearts, as we see our place in this Creation.

STEP 3 (easy to disregard in our arrogant independence) is Community. We were never meant to be alone, even before the Fall, it is “not good,” so we are given the beautiful gift of each other, of The Church. We reach out, care for and are cared for, and in this, we begin to see the image of God in each of us. The us/them fallacy is exposed as pure, utter nonsense rooted in fear. There is only just us. And in STEPS 1 & 2, we have seen that God’s favorite method to bless us, to show His amazing, limitless love, IS us. We get to practice kindness, forgiveness, goodness, peace, joy, love every moment. In other words, in relationship, we get to practice living in His Kingdom.

The last STEP TO A GREAT NEW LIFE!!!!! is Mindful Awareness. In other words, this world is crackling with the energy of the God of the Universe, of His Universe, if we only have the eyes, ears and hearts to see, hear & experience it. Soooo, we need to pay attention! We have to notice His Kingdom all around us. If you are walking, totally distracted, you might not realize that I’m walking beside you. But if you do, you can hold my hand and we can walk through this life together.

That’s 4 STEPS!!! I wrote earlier that there’s no cast iron formula for transformation, but if there was, it might be this one. I guess it depends how you define a GREAT NEW LIFE, but a new perspective on our own lives, the world around us, and The One Who holds it all together, a terrific group of people to walk with, all of us finally awake, sounds like one to me.

Spirit

We have a prayer ministry at the Bridge. (I think every faith community should have a prayer ministry, where people can come together, share their burdens, requests, and celebrations, and then take them to the feet of Jesus together. So we do.) We’ve also added a short time before that to discuss what we’re reading in the Bible and/or other questions we might have about our faith. It’s a safe place to be vulnerable and explore. I sometimes picture us in the 1st century receiving letters from apostles, reading and wrestling with these new mind-blowing concepts in someone’s living room. And I usually take my shoes off, because we’re on holy ground (in a holy space, a holy posture).

This week, the conversation centered around the Holy Spirit, the Third Member of the Trinity Who receives relatively little mention in our lives. Maybe that’s because we’re confused about His/Her (often, The Spirit is given feminine characteristics and imagery) role, or that we’re simply used to using the Names of The Father, God, and The Son, Jesus the Christ. It probably doesn’t matter why or even if we use the Spirit specifically, as long as we recognize & acknowledge Her* enormous impact on our lives, impossible to understate.

(*or His, if you prefer – sometimes the words we use can be a huge obstacle, due to any and all sorts of human baggage. In that case, change the words. I’m certainly not interested in keeping obstacles. However, we must never abandon the principle and certainly not The Person based solely on an traumatic experience and negative semantic connotation.)

We are blind and The Spirit opens our eyes, deaf and The Spirit opens our ears, breaks our heart and heals it. When Jesus ascended, He left the Advocate/Counselor/Helper/Holy Spirit in us as a constant Divine presence. The prompts we receive to call that person or do that thing or whatever, that may be the Spirit leading us. The songs on the radio that connect to the passages we read earlier that “happen to” connect to a decision in our lives, there’s a great chance that’s The Spirit, too. Maybe you hear Her as an audible voice or a subtle nudge or a whisper or a shove, the way She moves is as different for each of us as it is for us at different days, times, situations in our own lives.

So, when I see the hosting site’s prompt today, “Scour the news for an entirely uninteresting story. Consider how it connects to your life. Write about that,” I can’t help but to see an obvious (though likely unintended) parallel. The uninteresting story, about other people doing other things in other places, does connect, we just can’t always see it. The prompt slows us down, asks us to focus, breathe, and look for connections. That the other places aren’t as “other” as we initially think, the other people definitely not “other” at all. What could possibly be unrelated or uninteresting?

I’ve heard this sort of exercise called “tying the clouds together,” and it absolutely isn’t something we do by ourselves. On our own, we divide and categorize, we look for trivial criteria to evaluate & compare. We fight and de-humanize. If (and when) we hear The Spirit, we can erase all of those walls, hope to forgive, and begin to love each other. Connection instead of separation, peace instead of war, kindness instead of violence, enough instead of more, you/we instead of me – these are all the work of The Spirit.

I don’t care too much about the story we find when we “scour the news,” but I care A LOT about the connection, and I’m pretty sure that’s the work of The Spirit, too.

What Brings You Joy?

“Describe one habit that brings you joy.” That’s the hosting website’s writing prompt for today, and I wanted to pass it along to you. What is one for you? What brings you joy? What brought you joy today?

[I opened my computer to write about something else entirely. (Maybe it’s not so different, we’ll see.) Yesterday, as an aside, to illustrate the “requirements” of falling in love with & following Jesus, and the relationship between salvation & sanctification, I asked my oldest son what he’d do if I bought him a Lego set. He said, “Thank you, and build it.” Our response to His gifts are just like that, we are grateful, say “Thank You,” and we live full lives of love, joy and peace. Those are the “requirements.” The Angel wasn’t in the service, and when I told her that our son absolutely preached, it was more and more simple and profound. And I wanted to talk about it again, here. But now we have a new question to consider…]

We are often confronted with some variation of this question: Where do we find joy? It reminds me of the feeling I have when I read the story where Jesus comes upon a blind man who is calling out to Him. He stops, asks, “What do you want me to do for you?” Now, in this story, the man asks for his sight, so Jesus gives it to him.

I don’t think we’d do the same, necessarily. Faced with Jesus, I think we’d be afraid to ask for anything, hedge our prayers, feel some kind of way asking for something so personal, and instead ask for a new cane or sunglasses to better deal with our blindness. Or, worse yet, if Jesus asked us what we want, what He can do for us, and we couldn’t answer Him because we didn’t know. I get to ask this question to quite a few people, in vulnerable places, and it is crushing when they can’t answer. They usually answer after a long pause through watery eyes.

What brought you joy today? Anything? Or everything? (Maybe that’s a lot to ask. Work on a Monday morning might not be the most joyous experience.) What if we don’t know? What if there hasn’t been any joy today? What if there hasn’t for days and days? Weeks? Years?? Then what?

[Now, as I suspected, these 2 thoughts aren’t unrelated at all.]

Are we spending so much time obsessing about what we have to do, about the “requirements,” that we’ve forgotten what we get to do? And what if they’re the same thing, with the only difference being our perspective? We often don’t know what we need, and we often become so blind to the shine on His gifts that we lose the joy of the simple, beautiful response: gratitude and building.

Maybe that guy’s response to Jesus is ours, too, because usually, the only difference between joy and emptiness is our ability to see. Maybe He can give us our sight, so then we can finally see what (and Who) has been there all along.