Jesus is calling you to slow down and simplify your life around the three goals of an apprentice: To be with your rabbi, become like him, and do as he did. To make apprenticeship to him the animating center of gravity for your entire life.

Miracles, emotional breakthroughs, and profound moments of radical change do happen, and need to happen, but they are not the daily path of discipleship. Like growth spurts or invasive surgeries in a child or adolescent, they are an essential part of our development as persons, but most of our growth is a slow, incremental but noticeable maturation

“The best decade of your life will be your seventies, the second best will be your eighties, and the third will be your sixties.” By best he did not mean the happiest (though I expect that too) but our richest and most joyful and helpful to others.

Jesus’ invitation to apprentice under him isn’t just a chance to become people of love who are like God; it’s a chance to enter the inner life of God himself. The ancients called this “union” with God, and it is the very meaning of our human existence—

Benedict was essentially saying, “Don’t waste your life on triviality. Remember what matters. Life is fleeting and precious. Don’t squander it. Keep your death before your eyes. Hold eternity in your heart.”

Cue the heart-wrenching stats on the number of abusers who were abused, cheaters who were cheated on, criticizers who were criticized, and so on.

Here’s the first thing you need to understand about spiritual formation, and it’s key: Spiritual formation isn’t a Christian thing; it’s a human thing.

We often start with the assumption that because someone isn’t a disciple of Jesus, God isn’t at work in their life. But what if we started with the opposite assumption? That God is all-present and full of love and drawn to sinners? That he is likely already at work in their life, gently inviting them in? In this paradigm, our job is just to look fo

Every rabbi had his “yoke”—a Hebrew idiom for his set of teachings, his way of reading Scripture, his take on how to thrive as a human being in God’s good world.