#incarnational

[dramoor]

Practicing His Presence

“It is only by remembering that ‘Another lives in me’ that we can die daily to that old, false, usurping self, and that we can continue to be drawn further in and higher up into the life of God.  To ‘practice the Presence’ is to continually call to mind this great reality.

Once again we see that the secret is incarnational.  One dies to the old self and lives to the new by continuing to receive of the Other Life.  Even our prayers, in true prayer, are really His prayers.  He speaks to Himself through us.  And it is the same with all the virtues and all the fruits and gifts of the Spirit.  All are equally derivative.  We must never forget this, and we must always practice this Holy Presence, even though we can do it only for moments at first.

This really is the whole of Christianity.  Christianity isn’t a covenant or a law but it is a life - it is Another Life being lived in and through us.  Our human spirit, when in union with this Holy Other, is the higher self.  The ‘practice of the Presence’ leads to the knowledge of this higher self, and away from either the wrong kind of self-love or self-hatred.  It is in this New Life that we find our souls as well as our spirits - indeed, the whole of our nature - raised.

This is why we do not need to fear our intellects, our imaginations, our emotions, our intuitive beings, or our bodies.  We simply offer them wholly to God and find them revitalized and redirected.  By the principle of the incarnation the Highest is transposed into the lowest, and man finds himself resurrected in every faculty of his being.  This is the true, the whole self.”

~Taken from THE REAL PRESENCE IN THE WRITINGS OF C.S. LEWIS, by Leanne Payne, © 1979

[fiveminuteobservations]

Three doors. A diner. A highway. A social media post. Three stories that have nothing in common, except me showing up, paying attention, and then getting out of the way. Which one stayed with you? Link in bio.

Three Doors In

[fiveminuteobservations]

He called me by name in the breezeway. I almost kept walking because his new glasses threw me off. Same guy. Different man. Often, the most important conversations happen in between buildings. Not in conference rooms. One three-minute conversation that I almost missed. Read today's Five Minute Observations. Link in bio.

Between The Buildings

[jgibson430]

Mandating vs. Modeling

Are you mandating or modeling?

I have a love/hate relationship with authority. While I was a fairly obedient child, as an adult, I’ve not been a huge fan of rules. Sometime in my teenage years, I realized that a simple prohibition of something because “it’s wrong” or “I said so” did not hold water for me. Like an inquisitive toddler, I constantly asked the question “why,” more often to myself than out loud. Authority and…

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[digitalpreacher]

Do you want to know what God is like? The form in which God reveals himself? Look in the mirror. Look at your friends. Look at your spouse. Start here. A human being with eyes and ears, hands and feet, eating meals with friends, walking to the store for a bottle of milk, hiking in the hills and picking wild flowers, catching fish and cooking them on a beach for a breakfast with friends. There was work to do. Carpentry and masonry and fishing. Prayers were prayed. He walked in and out of houses and synagogues and the temple, just as we walk in and out of houses and schools, Wal-Mart's and churches. He died and was buried, just as we will be. What this means—and by and large, Christians have insisted on it—is that Jesus is not a principle or a truth, nothing abstract, nothing in general, nothing grandiose—when God revealed himself to us, he did it in a human body, an incarnation.

Eugene Peterson As Kingfishers Catch Fire Audiobook Ch 36, 15:18

[digitalpreacher]

Gospel invites us into a world of God's creation and salvation and blessing. God in human form in action on the very ground on which we also live. It is an incarnational story—that is, a flesh and blood on the ground story—a story worked out in actual lives and places, not in abstract ideas or programs or inspirational uplifting anecdotes, but a story in which we recognize the action of God in the everydayness of a local history in our stories.

Eugene Peterson As Kingfishers Catch Fire Audiobook Ch 35, 3:42

[davidbrazzeal]

Embody Me

This weekend I’ve been deeply, deeply touched by this simple poem of Rainer Maria Rilke, having read it at least a dozen times. May it touch you as well.

God speaks to each of us as he makes us, then walks with us silently out of the night. These are the words we dimly hear: You, sent out beyond your recall, go to the limits of your longing. Embody me. Flare up like flame and make big shadows I…

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