In January 2017, I decided to invest an entire year of my life on the journey in discernment (doing the Ignatian Exercises).  I found myself at a critical crossroad. My work, my marriage, my heart needed attention and care. The future felt looming and did not excite me.I decided to do an ancient, year long, proven way of deepening my own heart and experience with God that helped me; renewed my heart and is rekindling love in my marriage.  I think I've morphed into a new place; a new space and a new way of living my life and expressing my faith.I did this because:

Potter’s Inn Ministry is in transition.   This is actually a transition that we have planned for and are excited about walking boldly into the future. We are moving from a property centric model of offering soul care to leaders in the marketplace and ministry to a message centric model.   

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” -Rainer Maria Rilke

Living the questions of life, love, purpose, and faith is about wrestling through issues, perspectives, and views until some type of clarity comes—or maybe does not come at all. Finding our way in life and knowing God’s will for our lives is about holding questions in our hearts without an inner urge to answer too quickly or with all assurance that we’ve settled a matter, once and for all. And in all of the question asking and answer finding, we need to practice holding both loosely in our hands.

The holidays and life itself have been great reminders for Gwen and I about the need for soul care. It’s been a lot—perhaps too much.  For us, we were with all of our kids and their kids. We travelled to some while others came to us. Travel brings its own stress these days.  There were meals to prepare; presents to open; and hanging out with one another.  It was full. It was sweet and it was a rich time. But we came away exhausted.  We need to re-coup! I need to find “my” life that I seemed to have lost in a busy family time. But what if there’s no time to re-coup? That’s a problem!

400 years ago, Ignatius of Loyola crafted a genius way of prayer. His method helped  a person reflect back upon their day and their life in terms of how one experienced God.  He developed a prayer called, The Daily Examen. It is both a challenging and comforting way to trace the movement of God in one’s life. After having spent a solid year in study, reflection and prayer using Ignatius’ method of prayer, I’ve come to the conclusion that Ignatius was a genius. I only wish now that I had known about this decades earlier. Never before, had anyone in the history of the church, shared such a bold new way of spending time with God, ourselves and our own hearts.  This Great Annual Examen is based on Ignatius’ way of reflection and prayer.

We need a new way to live. We have mistakenly believed that we can set more goals and by achieving our goals, we will arrive at this “new way of living” which promises to be better, more efficient and more rewarding.

It may not be as much about setting new goals as it is a whole new way of learning to live.

The great need at this juncture of world wide violence, cataclysmic events and disturbing addictions to busyness is one that no material thing can provide and no human leader has the capacity to offer.  It is for men and women to accept God’s invitation to sit quietly with themselves and alone for some time to reflect, ponder and experience the love of God.

In my work with leaders in ministry and the marketplace there is a dire need for us to learn the spiritual discipline of solitude and the other spiritual gift of silence.  In a noisy world and living at feverish speeds, the soul’s great need is for some slow time and some quiet time. 

In the recent Potter’s Inn Journal posts, I have been sharing with you our need to build a new platform to live. We layout this new platform—plank by plank. Nothing good is done in a hurry and developing a long time view of change and transformation is needed. Through time, we unlearn some things. In time, we can deconstruct some old ways of living that simply are not working for us anymore.

The apostle Paul reminded us to “work out our salvation”, and so we do this plank by plank. Each plank helps us build this new platform that we learn to stand upon to live the life described by Jesus as a life of abundance.

It is impossible to live an abundant life if we are always seeking to balance our lives.  Because we are so, so, so busy, we find ourselves in the perpetual “hunt” for how to make life work better.  We build paradigms and construct illusions that ‘if we can find the secret of how to balance our life—then and only then, will be able to be happy.’

While working with leaders in the marketplace and ministry, I often hear the same complaint: “The life I have built is not working well. My marriage is in trouble. I’m not happy and no one knows it and I can’t tell anyone how miserable I really am.”

So, with this kind of confession and invitation for help, we begin to lay out a new platform for building a whole new life.  We can’t just start being happy or start living a different kind of life. We need to build a new platform—a new foundation for living the life we want to live.