Practicing the Way: Be with Jesus. Become like him. Do as he did.

As the poet Kahlil Gibran put it, “Work is love made visible.”

It’s exactly what it sounds like—a way of life.

Once you’ve tasted of prayer—true prayer—you realize that deepening your surrender to and honing your attention on God are literally the most important things in the world.

Saint Seraphim of Sarov once said, “Acquire inner peace and thousands around you will find their salvation.”

spiritual formation in the Way of Jesus is how each of us is formed to be like Jesus and, in doing so, to be our deepest, truest self—the self that God had in mind when he willed us into existence before time began.

This is the first and most important goal of apprenticeship to Jesus: to be with him, to spend every waking moment aware of his presence and attentive to his voice. To cultivate a with-ness to Jesus as the baseline of your entire life.

The danger with laying out a working theory of change is that we can be deluded into thinking, If I just master the right spiritual technique, I can form myself into the perfect person. Trust me, life will unmask that illusion for the cruel joke it is.

Stephen Covey once said, “We achieve inner peace when our schedule aligns with our values.” Because our schedules are so often not aligned with our values, many of us live with this electric current of anxiety pulsing through our nervous systems all the time; it’s just there, nagging at us and draining our energy reserves.

God is not a concept or an emotion, and he’s certainly not a doctrine in a statement of faith or a chapter in a theology book; he is a person, whose burning desire is to know and be known by you. And like in any intimate relationship, there is a kind of knowledge that goes beyond words—a kind you can get only by direct person-to-person experience.