The Companioning Center Blog
Roomy. That’s how I told her I felt, not a little more room but wide-open space. As soon as I said it aloud, I knew spaciousness was where I had been headed for quite some time. Where I longed to be inside and outside.
For most of my adult life, I’ve valued friendship in theory but struggled to live it well. It wasn’t easy to prioritize when parenting a young child and getting through college. In ministry, friendship felt complicated by the demands of leadership. And I’ve sometimes thought of it as frivolous or indulgent. It’s not. We need trustworthy companions to become our most authentic selves and connect more fully with the Holy. Bono calls friendship a sacrament as holy and transformative as the bread and wine of communion or the waters of baptism. I wonder what might shift for us if we considered friendship as a means of receiving (and offering) divine grace.
A few years ago, during a creative prayer class at a Companioning Center conference, I received a picture that helped me enter into a transformed relationship with fear. I’d just completed spiritual direction training and had begun working with a few clients as I continued ministering as a local church pastor. But I had also sensed that the Spirit was guiding me to offer the gifts of spiritual direction outside my congregation and Christian context. Aware that this calling would lead me beyond the safety of any established institution and out into an entrepreneurial realm, I was terrified to cross the threshold. Just thinking about it activated my anxieties. Who did I think I was? What would people think of me? Was it selfish to ask for payment? Was it even possible to run a “spiritual business?” Perhaps you’ve experienced similar concerns about stepping into or expanding your spiritual practice, direction, and leadership.
Do you ever wonder about your view of God and spirituality? Have you ever taken the time to notice the contours of what you hold as a reality in a life lived by faith? Or even noticed how your understanding has been shaped? These are questions that many of us neglect as we hold onto what we accept to be true and, often, discount what others believe about God, faith, and the world. Those of us who have studied spiritual formation and sought out an experiential relationship with God have discovered that we don’t experience God as we once thought. Our old ways of thinking and practicing our spiritual lives stop working as they used to. In this, God invites us deeper – to understand ourselves, God, and the world through a different lens. Cindy Lee’s book Our Unforming: De-Westernizing Spiritual Formation offers this gift.
Discerning God’s guidance is one of the most universal needs of the spiritual journey. We invite you to rediscover ancient wisdom that you can apply to complex issues in our day.
More than a dozen years ago we planted a tree in our front yard. A plum tree. It’s pretty. It provides shade. And it falls over every single time a storm blows through. It doesn’t just bend, it literally falls over, trunk to the ground. With neighborly help, we’ve rescued our tree time and time again. We’ve dug the hole deeper, staked it to the ground, trimmed off the top-heavy branches. And still it falls. How long will we have compassion on this tree?