Tall Monastic Guy:

March 28, 2011

Denver daily prayer...

I gotta share an encouraging development going on in my life and work in these past couple weeks. For years I’ve tried my hand at several ways of getting into a habitual rhythm of daily prayer. I’ve got a stack of books about daily devotionals. I’ve got prayer beads and a variety of great prayers I can pray with them. I’ve got candles on my desk, apps on my phone, etc. etc. The need to train my muscles for game time ministry is apparent but sticking to any sustainable discipline is hard.

What I’ve learned is that it’s difficult to sustain a regular rhythm of prayer if the plan isn’t 1) communal: Am I praying in the company of my community? 2) missional- Am I praying in a way that integrates with my life and work in the city?

After weeks of having it recommended, I finally grabbed Common Prayer: A liturgy for Ordinary Radicals, which spins the traditional Book of Common Prayer into a daily reading of scripture and liturgy that specifically emphasizes issues of justice and poverty. This has been an excellent resource and I'm grateful for all the hard work and contributions that went into compiling this!

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Posted at 10:28 AM in Access, Books, missional/incarnational, Neighborhood Stuff, prayer, Street Psalms | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

March 14, 2011

2011 Lenten Journey: The Discipline of Enough

Enough. I am enough. You are enough. My family is enough. My friends are enough. My job… My home… My car… My body… My God…

This Lenten season this is the discipline I’ve decided to take on. At least once a day I click on the notes app on my phone and mentally sift as I type in all of the experiences I can recall from that day and simply tell myself that they are all enough.

Why in the world would I even have to engage this in this particular season? I have a new beautiful 7 week-old-son, and that makes two beautiful sons for me and my more-than-enough-wife. We are being more than sufficiently provided for. My job is great. I actually get to do what I want to do. I come from a solid family. I have the best friends in the world. So, why do I struggle with this quiet recognition that what I have and who I am is simply enough?

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Posted at 11:28 AM in Access, missional/incarnational, prayer, Ryan's ruminations, Street Psalms | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

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