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. 

When we want to live a life that Jesus described as the “abundant life” most of us don’t really comprehend what the abundant life really means? Does this mean something about living in heaven? Does it mean I have to wait till heaven to really live? Just what is the abundant life?

Most of us have tried and are still attempting to live a life marked with the synonyms describing the abundant life: a rich and satisfying life; a life marked by grace, peace and love; a life of well-being and more.  But many of us are still trying to balance all of the competing demands and rivaling priorities we face day to day. There is the daily pressure each one of us faces. There is our busyness. There is our jobs. There is our family. And it all seems like a life we need to manage rather than a life we get to actually enjoy.