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June 22, 2009

Comments

Laura K

Ryan,
Very insightful!
As with most stage theories, I find myself able to relate to them all-even the ones I don't want to-and moving back and forth within them even within the same prayer, day, or week! :)
Laura

Ryan

Hey Laura, thanks.
Hagberg says, and I agree, that we'll have symptoms of all the stages throughout the course of a day, but we operate most consistently out of a home stage. It does feel weird to read those beginning stages and realize I've displayed several of those characteristics already today. Yuck!

Doug Nolte

"Bam. . ." as Emeril would exclaim!

First, your contemplation of the other work to weave it to your own is very commendable.

I happen to be a Kansas junkie (music group) and Kerry Livgren in his day with them wrote "The Wall". The lyrics seem to give some additional insight to the Outward Journey.

But perhaps you shed light on my journey as a way of figuring out in the spiritual map of life, "you are here". I can understand why some might think you can identify with each stage, however you are dead on in the concept of a "home stage."

I operate in Stage Five right now. I can say that not in any form of "look at me" way, but there is a compassion that I have for people and that has become a driving force. Trust me, as I type this some might be tempted to think, "Nolte sure thinks he has it figured out!" But the reality is, I don't have anything figured out based on my life. Rather I have my place in my Father's Kingdom secured. That allows me to say, "gosh, don't have a clue about that."

There are some great conversational in roads here. This is non-threatening, door opening conversation into how a individual relates to God.

This is important stuff. I would love to see how you took the individual stages of the authors and blended it with your own thought.

Keep it up brother. Planning on being in Colorado in October, perhaps this could be the trip that I can connect in person!

DN

Ryan

Thanks Doug, I'm continuing to develop this stuff, so I'm glad you saw it as a beneficial tool. Exactly, it's meant to be a map.

I'd caution folks from trying to locate their spot on the grid too quickly, because my main objective is to simply provoke people to think and begin to ask questions about their identity and faith.

I'll see you in October.

Doug Nolte

In your assessment, have you considered giving the reader some tools to help place them into the grid?

I imagine that as you wrote this, you relied heavily on your placement by experience. While others such as I might be able to do so, is there a way to unpack that more?

I am running into to many people who are in the conundrum of figuring out where they are and what to do. I have attached a link to an article in our local paper the other day. give it a read and let me know what you think.

http://www.kansas.com/living/religion/story/869541.html

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Words make Worlds...

  • "It becomes so clear to me as I grow older that people who change, and keep changing, are the only people who grow up." -Richard Rohr
  • “An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.” -Martin Luther King Jr.
  • "Failure is not fatal, but failure to change might be." -John Wooden
  • "Receptivity without confrontation leads to a bland neutrality that serves nobody. Confrontation without receptivity leads to an oppressive aggression which hurts everybody." - Henri Nouwen
  • "Spirituality is not a formula; it is not a test. It is a relationship. Spirituality is not about competency; it is about intimacy. Spirituality is not about perfection; it is about connection. The way of spirituality begins where we are now in the mess of our lives." -Mike Yaconelli
  • "But that doesn’t mean community is easy. For everything in this world tries to pull us away from community, pushes us to choose ourselves over others, to choose independence over interdependence, to choose great things over small things, to choose going fast alone over going far together." -Shane Claiborne
  • "Nothing that we despise in the other man is entirely absent from ourselves. We must learn to regard people less in the light of what they do or don’t do, and more in light of what they suffer." Dietrich Bonhoeffer
  • "Imagination is more important than knowledge. For while knowledge defines all we currently know and understand, imagination points to all we might yet discover and create." Albert Einstein
  • "Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive." Howard Thurman
  • "A nation that continues to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death." -Dr. Martin Luther King
  • "Our relationship with each other is the criterion the world uses to judge whether our message is truthful--- Christian community is the final apologetic." -Francis Schaefer
  • "It is not allowable to love the Creation according to the purposes one has for it, any more than it is allowable to love one’s neighbor in order to borrow his tools." Wendell Berry
  • "All wars are civil wars, because all men are brothers. Each one owes infinitely more to the human race than the particular country in which he was born." -Francois Fenelon
  • "Ministry cannot be about maintenance, but it is about gathering, about embrace, about welcoming home all sorts of and conditions of people; home is a place for mother tongue, of basic soul food, of old stories told and treasured, of being at ease, known by name, belonging without qualifying for membership." -Walter Brueggemann
  • "Many poets are not poets for the same reason that many religious men are not saints: they never succeed in being themselves. They never get round to being the particular poet or particular monk that they are intended to be by God." "In order to become myself I must cease to be what I always thought I wanted to be." -Thomas Merton
  • "God spoke to Balaam through his ass, and God's been speaking through them ever since. So, if God chooses to speak through you don't think to highly of yourself." -Rich Mullins
  • "We must become holy not because we want to feel holy but because Christ must be able to live his life fully in us." Mother Teresa
  • "I am deeply convinced that the Christian leader of the future is called to be completely irrelevant and to stand in this world with nothing to offer but his or her own vulnerable self." Henri Nouwen

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