Spiritual Formation:
Is the spiritual life a series of successes and failures in which we hope to outweight failures with successes? Or is it a journey that keeps Christ as the direction we are traveling.
“Think in terms of the direction of your life rather than your most recent failure or success. We certainly want you to think of faithfulness to God in terms of Jesus’ emphasis on relationships rather than rules. We want you to sense that your own faith needs to be dynamic, growing, and maturing every day rather than worried because you don’t have everything fixed, nailed down, and perfected. We’re trying to get those things fixed in our minds too.”
-Rubel Shelley and John York The Jesus Proposal
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It’s been weeks and this one still bugs me. My inner Pharisee tells me that I must not break even one small rule, my inner spiritual Hippie tells me that I’m on the right path and the infractions don’t matter so I shouldn’t try to fight them. Maybe the answer is in trying: not worrying about the tiny infractions but still striving to reach completion/perfection. I’m trying to picture someone with a self-righteous scowl on their face wearing a ‘Free Love’ tie-dyed t-shirt.