Discernment: Vision

A good Vision is not a flowery statement either. It’s a story you tell yourself about your best future self and future life. It uncovers all the dreams God has put on your heart.

A good vision is:

• Inspiring — It has to motivate you to action, to move forward
• Challenging — It can’t be too easy. It needs to be hard won.
• Specific — It can’t be all abstract terms. You need vivid details, action verbs, concrete nouns, and adjectives. It needs to feel real.
• Achievable — Meaning it’s something that can be done. Doesn’t mean it can’t be wildly optimistic, but it needs to be something that is at least possible to do. “

A vision is a story you tell yourself that sets your forward direction. (Insert vacation analogy here.) It’s a little like navigating by a star. Nobody expects to reach the actual star, but they do expect to make progress in that direction over time. A vision ensures you are not drifting but instead working in the direction God’s Little Plan is nudging you.

This would be the last chapter of the discernment section of my book.

Discernment: Mission

A good Mission is not a flowery statement you put on your wall. A useful mission looks more like a checklist, something you would use to ensure your plans cover all the really important things. It’s based on who you are created to be and the relationships you have and focuses on the Generative type of discipleship. Who do you serve? What do they need from you? And how, based on your God-given identity, are you going to fill that need?

Discerning your mission is a prayer exercise, like the prayer card above. But it will yield more things to pray over, more prayer cards if you will, as you understand each relationship you are here to serve. This is an important chapter of my book.

Set The World On Fire

Ultimately, knowing one’s identity is a call to examination of one’s life. A great prayer exercise, which I will work into the book.

Discerning a Group/Couple Identity

Sometimes when you work with groups, families, or couples, there’s a need to discern the collective identity to establish a basis for further planning. This will also be part of the book since it applies to families and couples quite well.

Discernment: Identity

Discernment: Achieving Balance

This is a key concept required for faithful futures discipleship. The card above represents a very important prayer exercise for those who want their plans to be sustainable and supportable. And this represents another chapter in my book for Christians who want to plan for the future.

Discernment: How To Find The Next Right Thing, part 1

This is a key idea for people of faith to plan for the future. It’s hard to imagine that our God, the very ground of all being, the author of all creation, cares deeply about the details of my small life. When I think at first about “God’s Will” I think about all the kinds of things God says he wants from all of us. How do I know what he wants from *me*? Jesus tells us to pick up our crosses and follow him, to feed the hungry, to welcome the stranger. That’s something all of us should do, sure, but what if I need to set my goals for he year or plan next month’s budget? What does that “God’s Will” stuff look like in my own life?

And there’s where I need to hold both the universal and the intimate nature of God’s presence at the same time. God has a plan for all eternity from the foundation of the world. And he at the same time cares deeply about my everyday choices. He sets the common “What” we all should do to attain Heaven, but he also wants to help us with “how” we live out His “what” in our daily affairs.

It starts by knowing what God intended when he created me. What he put me here to do. And the desires and hopes he has placed on my heart.

The card above is a summary of a very powerful kind of prayer. And this is a place holder for a very important chapter in the book I’m writing. Kind of the linchpin. Unless we can go from abstract language about “shoulds” to concrete nouns and action verbs, we can’t discern the “next right thing.”

Poem: Pick Up Lines

I pick up your earrings points of weight on my palm

that you took off last night

while bathing the kids

and take them back to your dresser.

As I go, with my toe

I snag that bra

the orange one that makes you grin

just to know you have it on

and fling it at that chair by our bed

with other things not-dirty-not-clean.

Then I snap up your nightshirt

that tee-shirt of mine you stole

and flap it straight for folding.

The one long hair on the sleeve

makes me smile.

It’s yours.

— RCC, 2003

Packing for the Future: Instructions by Lorna Crozier

Beautiful. As a futurist who sometimes helps people plan for the future, I can relate. Especially to the socks. People forget the consider the quotidian details when they envision the future.

Heart Poems

Take the thickest socks.
Wherever you’re going
you’ll have to walk.

There may be water.
There may be stones.
There may be high places
you cannot go without
the hope socks bring you,
the way they hold you
to the earth.

At least one pair must be new,
must be blue as a wish
hand-knit by your mother
in her sleep.

*

Take a leather satchel,
a velvet bag an old tin box —
a salamander painted on the lid.

That is to carry that small thing
you cannot leave. Perhaps the key
you’ve kept though it doesn’t fit
any lock you know,
the photograph that keeps you sane,
a ball of string to lead you out
though you can’t walk back
into that light.

In your bag leave room for sadness,
leave room for another language.

There may be doors nailed shut.
There may be painted windows.
There may…

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Move over Marie Kondo

I found an inspiring vision of the community of believers in the readings for the second Sunday of Easter. From Acts 4:32-35

“The community of believers was of one heart and mind,
and no one claimed that any of his possessions was his own,
but they had everything in common.
With great power the apostles bore witness
to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus,
and great favor was accorded them all.
There was no needy person among them,
for those who owned property or houses would sell them,
bring the proceeds of the sale,
and put them at the feet of the apostles,
and they were distributed to each according to need. ”

The apostles “bore witness” with “great power” by the way they lived their communal lives. Their example was inspiring and drew people closer to them and to Christ.

Conservatives are uncomfortable with this passage and it’s “communist” overtones. Some exhibit great creativity in rationalizing it down to spiritual vanilla pudding rather than taking it seriously.

But, not to worry. Too much:

“This passage from Acts does not attempt to impose on Christians a specific economic system. Rather, it shows that whatever economic system the followers of Jesus Christ espouse, it had better be a system that provides for the needs of all the people.” — Gerald Darring, Center for Liturgy

But we have some responsibility through our possessions and means:

“A well-ordered human society requires that men recognize and observe their mutual rights and duties. It also demands that each contribute generously to the establishment of a civic order in which rights and duties are progressively more sincerely and effectively acknowledged and fulfilled.

It is not enough, for example, to acknowledge and respect every man’s right to the means of subsistence. One must also strive to insure that he actually has enough in the way of food and nourishment.” — Pope John XXIII, Pacem in Terris,1963: 31-32

This ancient example of communal life inspires me to remember that, while I have property rights in a human sense, I do not have the rights to private use in the eternal sense. I should be able to look at each object I own and ask, “How can I use this to share with, care for, encourage, or love those around me?” Or “How does this prepare me to live a life for others?” Or, finally, “Who else might need this thing right now?”

That would be a great prayer for decluttering or Spring cleaning. Instead of going through each thing I have and asking if it “brings me joy,” Marie Kondo style. I could ask, “How does this thing serve others or prepare me to serve others?”