Tag Archives: Growth

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Invest In Your Spirit

Investments You Need To Make For Growth To Happe

In a world that is inundated with the clanging noise of daily life, it can be easy to overlook the most important aspect of our being: our spirit. In the midst of the chaos, investing in our spiritual formation and well-being often takes a backseat. However, just as we invest in wisdom and in our physical health, nurturing our spirit is equally important.

Invest In Your Spirit

The concept of spiritual disciplines is core to Christianity, and has been since the beginning. We must create and maintain practices and habits that cultivate our relationship with God, and help us to become more and more like Christ. Digging through the pages of the Bible, we can find several such practices, and three are worth mentioning specifically.

However, our spiritual formation is of such critical importance that I find it necessary to identify and inspect many more disciplines and practices. For some time, I have been working through many of these disciplines in a series of posts entitled “Establishing Spiritual Disciplines.” Many of these are found in Scripture, and several more come from the rich traditions to be found studying the history of Christianity. All of these can be assets in our desire for spiritual formation.

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Invest In Health

Investments You Need To Make For Growth To Happen

Last year, I identified four areas in which we should invest in our lives, especially as leaders. The first area I identified was wisdom, which is the ability to gain knowledge, and then put it into practice. The second area where we should make an investment is into our health.

Invest In Health

I have to admit, this is not an area of life where I excel. I often have good intentions, and sometimes, I follow through with them. Most of the time, I don’t. This is an area where I must become more focused and intentional.

Why? Because our physical health has an impact on every other area of life, and when we make our physical health a priority, the effect is almost immediate. Our minds sharpen, our strength grows, our emotions stabilize, our relationships gain strength, and our spiritual life is impacted as well. Taking the time to address this quadrant of life has a tremendous ripple effect into every other area. And frankly, that amazes me every time I stop to consider it.

But the opposite is true, too. When I either neglect my physical side, or when I work it too hard, all of those other areas suffer as well. Taking the time to invest in our health has to be a top priority.

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Invest In Wisdom

Investments You Need To Make For Growth To Happen

Most of us long for personal growth and spiritual growth. Often, those two areas can overlap. If we want to grow, there are a few areas of life where we need to invest time and effort to make growth possible.

Invest in Wisdom

Luke’s Gospel gives us a brief glimpse into the childhood of Jesus when he tells of Jesus in the Temple at the age of 12. It’s an interesting snapshot of the childhood of Jesus, and helps us understand his purpose here on earth. But then Luke makes a brief statement that we can kind of overlook as just a summary of Jesus’ early life. If we look closer, this statement actually gives us four key areas in which Jesus was intentional about his growth, and we can follow that example in our own lives.

In Luke 2:52, we read, “Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and man.”

In one sense, that is exactly what we assume it to be: a summary of the life of Jesus between the age of twelve and the start of his public ministry. But a deeper look shows us four key areas of growth that we can pursue in our own lives, just as Jesus did. When we invest in these four areas, growth will follow.

The first area that Luke highlights is the area of wisdom. This is a critically important investment in our lives. And one that we need to be very intentional about pursuing.

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Spiritual Retreats

A Reminder To Seek Solitude

Life can get busy. And in those busy moments, it can be hard to remember to take the time to slow down and rest in the presence of God. It can be hard to seek solitude and rest.

Seeking Solitude

Slowing down is hard for me. I’m a doer, perhaps not by nature, but by a habit ingrained long enough for it to seem like it’s my nature. I like my routines. I’m pumped when I’m productive. I feel anxious often when I’m not busy doing something. It can be very hard for me to slow down.

Several years ago, I read Leading on Empty, by Wayne Cordeiro. In this book, he stressed the importance of getting away on what he referred to as Personal Retreat Days. After reading that, I jumped into that discipline with gusto, but over time, it kind of slipped to the side and was more and more neglected. I knew that I needed it, but it always just seemed to be something that got pushed aside by other, more “important” things.

Within the past two months, a couple of different things have taken place to remind me of the necessity of getting away for a time of silence and solitude, and to simply seek God’s presence.

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Life Update

The Current Circumstances Of Life

Sometimes, life gives you some unexpected circumstances and situations. That’s where I find myself right now; and I kind of expect to be here for a while. That’s not what I had planned for 2022, but it is what I’ve experienced, and have to deal with for the moment.

Broken Foot

On Christmas Day, I fell down our stairs and broke a bone in my foot, giving it a pretty bad sprain to go along with it.

But let me back up.

Last summer, I experienced a flare up of some lower back pain that sent me to the Emergency Room. They diagnosed it as a pinched nerve, and told me that it would gradually subside. And it did… to a degree. But it never really completely returned to normal. For a while, I walked with the help of a cane, but eventually managed to leave that behind me.

However, my leg was still mostly numb and unfeeling, and my foot had no sensation of whether it was off the floor or not, causing me to stumble frequently.

That’s what happened on Christmas Day. My foot drug, this time on the stairs, and down I went. We ended up in the Emergency Room that day, with a follow up at an orthopedic doctor the next week. A bone in my foot was broken, so I received a cast for a few weeks before moving to a walking boot. However, while in the cast, I developed a pretty significant blood clot in my leg. So now, we’re treating that as well.

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Reestablishing Routine

Intentionally Choosing To Eliminate

For the past year or two, it seems my routines have been out of whack, and it’s been more than a little frustrating. So what do you do when that happens? Eliminate those things that distract!

Eliminate

I am a creature of routine. I much prefer when things go the same way, every day, without change. Change messes with me more than I’d like to admit, and as I get older, I find myself more and more routine oriented… and more and more frustrated because of it.

Routines are good. They can be very beneficial. They can help you make the most of your time, utilizing your days for the most effective impact on your life, on the lives around you, on your community, and the list could go on.

But if there is one thing that is certain, it is that things change. Routine can only work up to a certain point, because the fact that things will change and shift is inevitable. Finding a balance between the two can be tough to do.

I have been in a season of life recently that has messed up my routine. This has impacted various areas of my life, including my desire to write more, to read more, and to study more. And honestly, I’m hard pressed to identify where the time is going that I used to invest in these areas.

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Looking West To Wilderness

The Need For A Spiritual Retreat

Colorado is probably my favorite place on this planet; and to be more specific, a small retreat center in the mountains west of Colorado Springs is my favorite place on this planet. And I go there every year.

Wilderness at Bear Trap Ranch

Recently, I have been writing about my thoughts and ideas concerning all the stuff in my life, and all the stuff going on in my life. I have come to realize that it is time for some simplification, some reorganization, and some reprioritizing of much of my life. That’s not always easy to do, simply because the regular pressures of the day to day grind can prevent us from taking the time to really evaluate where we are and compare that with where we want to be.

I have found that a spiritual retreat can be a very helpful tool to help accomplish this. This is something I have implemented into my life on a regular basis for several years, and have seen some very amazing results in my life. I do this at two different levels: Annually, I take a week and head to Colorado with several other people in ministry. It’s a time of refreshing and renewal. More on that in a moment.