a drop of water

With the turning of the year I’ve been trying to formulate questions to evaluate the health of different areas that I consider crucial to inviting (and discovering) God into my life.  All of these areas are interrelated and sometimes difficult to separate, but trying to understand them individually helps me better understand their influence on each other.  This list is by no means exhaustive (and there is no implication by order), but intended to be a concise list of questions to poignantly touch key issues in our lives today.

Spiritual Health

1. What are the prayers that I have prayed?
2. Where have I grown more dependent on God in my life?

Physical Health

1. How much time do I spend creating and cultivating with my mind and body versus consuming and condemning?
2. How can I grow and mature in my physical intimacy with my wife?

Resource Health

1. Where are am I giving, saving, and spending finances, time, energy and creativity?
2. Where am I undercommitted and where am I overcommitted?

Educational Health

1. Where and from who am I learning from and being inspired by?
2. Who am I teaching and investing in, hoping to inspire?

Work Health

1. Am I satisfied with my level of dedication to work?
2. Am I bringing good to my coworkers, customers and managers?

Relational Health

1. How am I intentionally loving the people most important in my life?
2. How am I intentionally loving the people in my life who I would prefer not to love?

In Chapter 3 of Prayer, Richard Foster describes the Prayer of Examen.  He starts out by noting that there are two parts of this prayer, 1. The examen of consciousness and 2. The examen of conscience.  He describes each separately but ends with the understanding that they are much more like two overlapping circles, always influencing with each other.

He describes the examen of consciousness as the method “through which we discover how God has been present to us throughout the day and how we have responded to his presence.”  It’s implication is that we become more aware of our surroundings and that “God wants us to be present where are.”  I know that for me I am often asking God for and about tomorrow, completely ignoring what is infront of me today.  God becomes limited to the servant who is preparing and providing for my tomorrow (which he is), but I forget that he is the God who is present with me right now, today.

The examen of conscience is the process of inviting the Lord to search our hearts to the depths of the psalmists words in Ps 139:23-24, “Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my thoughts.  See if there is any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.”  We uncover those areas that need cleansing, purifying and healing.  Foster mentions two dangers to deep introspection without God: 1. “If we are the lone examiners of our heart, a thousand justifications will arise to decalre our innocence” and 2. “If left to our own devices, it is easy for us to take one good look at who we truly are nad elcare ourselves unredeemable.”

It is easy to be upset and want to end the evil and sin that is outside of ourselves.  What if we had the same kind of feelings towards the actions within ourselves of the same ilk?

When we are sick, we often go to the doctor for a diagnosis.  They have the knowledge of the how the human body works and know the current remedies for our ailments.  God has the knowledge of not only how our human body works, but how our heart and mind work.  It makes sense that we should go to the great physician regularly to stay healthy.

These three points in Dallas Willard’s, Renovation of the Heart helped me process my thought life.

1.  Pride and overconfidence in ideas, images, or bits of information  simply because they are “ours” or “mine and I am (we are) in the habit of relying on them.

2. Simple ignorance of fact which can be combatted by “constant openness and learning”.

3. Allowing our desires to guide our thinking, especially the desire to prove we are right or have the approval of others in “our crowd”. 

I believe that the most competent leaders rely humbly on their advisor’s knowledge and understanding of their fields in order to make judgements.  Likewise, God is the expert in any field that we might engage, from programming to cooking, from friendships to romance.  We must not let our pride and overconfidence, our habit of relying on our own understanding to skip the cornerstone of relying on God for our ideas, images and information.  (We also can not trick ourselves into thinking that God needn’t be bothered or relied on for the simple daily tasks of our lives.)

Always being in a posture of learning (and growth) allows us to make ignorance a motivational fuel instead of a humliating stumbling block.  When we apply ourselves to something, whether it be the study of theology or photography or apologetics, we often puff ourselves up as self proclaimed experts.  Then we look back down from where we have come, from the top of our hill, and fail to see the mountains all around us that we are called to climb.

It seems really difficult to keep our desires from influencing our thinking.  I guess this is partly a result of crowd mentality, where it is easy to conform to the crowd’s movement and direction.  We don’t want to be alone in our thoughts, we want community to validate our ideas and thoughts.  We become accustomed to the approval of man instead of the approval of God.  Sometimes we end up associating the approval of Godly men and women as the approval of God, but that shouldn’t be our goal.

All three of these aspects allow us to leave space for God to speak directly into our lives through our thoughts.  With less pride in our own self-reliance, we can rely on God as the expert in everything we attempt to do.  With constant openness and learning we can let God break down the wrong ways we’ve been doing things.  With seeking approval and rightness in God’s eyes, we allow God to break the pressures and expectations that culture has put on us.