Spiritual Direction

Time is primarily linear, disjointed and fragmented. All of your past days have disappeared; they have vanished. The future has not come to you yet. All you have is the little stepping-stone of the present moment. When the soul leaves the body, it is no longer under

living, pure friendship, useless beauty, or moments of communion with nature or anything.

The story, while quaint, gets at an important truth: too often we look for the Spirit in the extraordinary when God has promised to be present in the ordinary.

For a wise articulation of this point, see Michael Horton, Ordinary: Sustainable Faith in a Radical, Restless World (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2014).

The Bible has come to life for you in ways you’ve never experienced before. It’s almost like you’re seeing Genesis 1 and 2 for the first time, realizing that we’re made to be makers, commissioned to be God’s image bearers by taking up our God-given labor of culture-making. It’s as if someone gave you a new decoder ring for reading the prophets. You

To be human is to inhabit some narrative enchantment of the world. Christian worship fuels our imaginations with a biblical picture of a world that, in the words of poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, is “charged with the grandeur of God.”

You might think of Augustine as offering a hitchhiker’s guide to the cosmos for wandering hearts.