How to Cultivate Spiritual Friendships

“The gospel of Jesus Christ creates and calls us into spiritual friendships.”

 -Aelred of Rievaulx, “Spiritual Friendship”

“The Creator arranged things so that we need each other.” 

-Basil of Caesarea, 330AD

1. Grow in your own faith. 
One of my mentors in college said: “don’t think too much about the kind of spouse you want, what you want them to look like or act like, but devote your time to working on being the kind of husband God wants you to be, and the rest will take care of itself.” This is good advice for dating and also for friendships in general. Sometimes we spend so much time pining away for relationships that we miss living and growing now. So work on being the kind of friend someone would be blessed by. And pray for a friend or many who can be a blessing to you as well.

2. Don’t deny your need. 
We are all created for relationship and we need good friends in our lives. Even Jesus needed friends around him. Though Jesus is God he chose to be bound by friends even though that trust and dependence ultimately led to betrayal and death. And in the same way we are called to seek good friends. So if you are lonely that is not a sign of something wrong in your life it is a sign of something being right. You are feeling this God created urge for relationships. Sometimes we run relationships because we have been hurt, or we don’t want accountability, etc... but we are called to LET OURSELVES NEED PEOPLE, even though that hurts sometimes. The less that we want good friends is the less we want to be like Jesus.

3. Think about the kind of friend you need and want to be. 
This is connected with the first point, but it is good for us to think about the kind of friend we need to be and desire to be. Here are two exercises that can help you in this process: 
-Friendship Inventory: Draw a lifeline (how old you are) and divide it into seven- year segments. Put the initials of friends who have been important to you in each segment. What do you notice about your friendships? What kinds of friends do you tend to gather around? What does this tell about yourself? What kind of friends do you want to cultivate in the next parts of your life? Give your answers to God in prayer.
- Characteristics of a Spiritual Friend: Draw two columns on a piece of paper. Title one: “Characteristics of a Spiritual friend” and on the other “Characteristics of Myself as a Friend”. Now fill the columns with your observations. What did you learn about yourself? What holds you back from being a ‘spiritual friend’ (time, commitment, emotional investment, etc..)

4. Do the work. 
As anyone with good friendships know, friendships take a lot of work. God gives us the raw material, but as any artist knows when you get the raw material that is just the STARTING POINT. You have a lot to do from there to craft it into something beautiful. And that is the same with friendships. The word ‘koinonea’ which is the greek word for community, means TO SHARE. So to have good relationships we need to share. As we see in the scriptures, they wept, embraced, argued, laughed, struggled together through good and bad. They shared their feelings and their lives. And you simply can’t have spiritual friends if you are not willing to do this and intentionally commit yourself to this kind of relationship.

5. Take a leap of faith. 
Some of us may have friends like this and some may not. And some may have Christian friends but you have never really taken the step to become ‘spiritual friends’; to talk about your faith together, pray together, and seek to support each other in your walks with Christ. Yet if we want to develop these kind of friendships we need to take a leap of faith. It may involve gathering a few people to pray and study scripture together. It may mean encouraging your small group to share more intimately and be more vulnerable (which starts with you). It may just be asking someone that you are ‘friendly’ with to pray for you. It just starts with a leap of faith, so pray about it and follow Gods leading.

6. Try out some ‘friendship disciplines’.
We can never be a perfect friend. We have limitations and flaws. And we all have hectic lives, which can lead us from cultivating good friendships. So try these kinds of disciplines to be intentional about being a good friend and cultivating spiritual friendships:
a. Pray for your friends regularly. Write these down in a prayer journal to see when God answers them. Ask for prayer requests and follow through on praying for those.
b. Send an encouraging email or text occasionally to show you are thinking of them
c. Gather a small group to read a book together or to do a Bible study. 
d. Take a retreat together.
e.  Other ideas?

7 Seek a small tribe. 

In our age of social media often we look for quantity over quality when it comes to friendships. That those with the most friends wins. Yet I was convicted about this just the other day by a writer named Shauna Neiquiest, in her book “Present Over Perfect”. She writes: “It is better to be loved than to be admired. It is better to be truly known and seen and taken care of by a small tribe than adored by strangers who think they know you in a meaningful way.” So seek to find a few people that you can share life with and then seek to connect with the larger ‘tribe’ of the church and is committed to serving something larger than yourselves. And to be a place where the tribeless can find a tribe.

ONE LAST WORD....

“Friendships don’t just happen....they come out of what we love. This explains why some people don’t have many friends or if you are looking for friends and don’t find them. The very condition for friendships is that we should want something else besides friends. As the old saying goes: ‘those who are going nowhere can invite no fellow travelers’. That is why in Christ there are possibilities for friendship that outside would never have been possible. If we have experienced Grace we begin to love people we would never have thought about before. And we can build up friendships on a whole different foundation.” 

-Tim Keller, sermon on Spiritual Friendship 

#iGrowchallenge: Fasting On Good Friday

Over the past months we have been participating in a challenge to engage in practices that draw us to Christ and focus us on grace. As we end the #iGrowchallenge during Easter week I want to encourage you to practice another discipline that the faithful have been practicing throughout the millennia and that is fasting. As we approach Easter week and Good Friday I encourage you to take a Fast on Good Friday to remember Gods love in your life and also to give your concerns and struggles to God. 

WHAT IS FASTING?

Fasting is an intentional giving up of anything else that occupies our time.  Food is often the focus of a fast but there can be other fasts such as giving up TV, or social media, or other things as well.  Usually a person fasts during a specific period of time and is for a specific purpose. The Israelites fasted to repent, to mourn, to seek God, and to listen to God.  Jesus began his ministry with 40 days of fasting and the Newt Testament church fasted when they sought Gods will or needed the grace and strength to stay faithful to Gods work.  Lent has often been a time to fast in various Christian traditions.

WHY FAST?

James Earl Massey writes: “Fasting is important in Christian experience because it deepens within the whole self a sense of ones dependence upon the strength of God. Fasting is more than an act of abstinence. It is an affirmative act; it is a way of waiting on God: it is an act of surrender. “

Fasting is not a magical way to manipulate God into doing your will or a spiritual way to lose weight or control others. Fasting clears us out and opens us up to intentionally seeking Gods will and grace in a way that goes beyond normal habits of worship and prayer. When we are fasting we are opening up to God and offering him the time and attentiveness we might otherwise be giving to eating, shopping, or watching television.

Especially during Easter week or Good Friday fasting is a way to remember the church of how Jesus gave up everything –even his life-for us.  It is also a way to pray for your life, the church, or your world. During a fast we are reminded throughout our day of our need and during those times we can come to God in prayer or seek God in the scriptures. Adele Ahlberg Calhoun writes “Deny yourself a meal and when your stomach growls ‘I’m hungry’ take a moment to turn from your emptiness to the nourishment of Christ (Matt 4:4). Feed on Jesus the bread of life. Skip the TV, video games, or listening to music or podcasts and become aware of how fidgety you are when you aren’t being amused or diverted. Then dodge the remote and embrace Jesus who is the ‘bread of life’. (John 4:34)”

HOW TO FAST

There are many ways you could fast on Good Friday:

Fasting from food. Don’t eat anything for a 24 hour period or for a whole day. So you could fast from  after dinner on Thursday to breakfast on Saturday.  Or you could skip dinner on Thursday and fast till dinner on Friday.  So you could miss either two or three meals.  Make sure to drink a lot of water during this time and be aware if you are feeling sick. Do not fast if you are pregnant or have any medical conditions.  When you break your fast don’t do it with a large meal. Eat a smaller portion of food.

Fasting from media. Take an intentional 24 hour period without TV, or video games, social media, or music or the internet. Put away the phone or the computer for a whole 24 hour period.  You could do this from Thursday evening to Saturday morning.

Fasting from something else. If there is something else that you particularly hold onto or that you can’t go without for a day, spend 24 hours without that.

WHAT TO INCLUDE IN YOUR FAST

Use the time to draw near to God. If you are giving up food then use the time you would usually eat to pray and draw near to God. Take a walk and pray for those around you, read a devotional book or the scriptures, write concerns or thoughts in a journal.  If you are giving up media use the time you would be watching TV or surfing the internet to focus on God and listen to His leading.

Attend a Good Friday Service.

Praise God throughout the day. Relax and breathe deeply. Place yourself in the presence of God. Offer yourself and your time to God. Praise God for where He has come through for you Psalm 103:1-5 is a good starting point for praise.

Intentionally pray. 1. Pray for yourself and your needs. Repent of your sin, ask God to meet you in your need. 2. Prayer for friends and family. Pray that they might be blessed and know peace. 3. Pray for the church. Pray for the leadership of the church, pastors, elders, and deacons, and all who serve. Pray that the church might be a place people know Christ and are welcomed. Pray that our church is a body that cares about our community and seeks to follow Christ into the world.  4. Pray for the world around you and its needs. 5. Pray for your enemies and those you cannot forgive or who frustrate you.  If you have a hard time praying read the Psalms and pray those to God.  This Good Friday I want you to encourage you to participate in a practice that the faithful have participated in for thousands of years and that is fasting.

Look for Grace. All day as you are fasting just be looking for Gods grace. What grace has been shown to you today?  What circumstances or people showed you grace and what did not show you grace. Be aware of when you experience consolation and desolation and give those to God.

Fasting makes me vulnerable and reminds me of my frailty. It leads me to remember that if I am not fed I will die. …. Standing before God hungry. I suddenly know who I am. I am one who is poor, called to be rich in a way that the world does not understand. I am one who is empty, called to be filled with the fullness of God. I am the one who is hungry, called to taste all the goodness that can be mine in Christ.  -Macrina Wiederkehr

#iGrowchallenge: Centering Prayer

Centering Prayer is an ancient practice of meditative prayer that focuses on not saying things to God, but just being with God. This can be hard for some people because this form of prayer relies very little on words…..it is just focuses on being with God and giving Him our undivided attention.  Sometimes this type of prayer may not seem like ‘real’ prayer because we are not giving God our concerns of petitions, but when we pray this way we are concerned with ‘dwelling’ with God and letting God give us a greater awareness His work in the world.

I encourage you to use this type of prayer at least once during the week as a way of just sitting at the manger to glorify God and let God work in your life.  Below is a short method for practicing centering prayer.

1. Set aside a minimum of 15 minutes (increase the time if you can). Set a timer if that helps you to be less concerned about when to stop.

2. Settle into a comfortable position.

3. Intentionally place yourself in the presence of God, in the center of His love.

4. Choose a simple word, phrase, or verse of scripture that expresses your desire for God (e.g., love, peace, grace, Jesus, etc..) Let this word guard your attention.

5. Take time to become quiet. It is not unusual for the first minutes to be filled with many noisy thoughts. Don’t worry about them or pay attention to them. Let them go. Gently return your attention to the center of God’s presence and love by repeating your word. Let that word draw you back to Jesus. Just be with Jesus. Listen. Be Still. When distractions come think of this image to return you to Jesus:

-imagine that God’s river of life runs through you. Deep down the river is calm and slow, but on the surface it is raging and rushing with debris. Imagine that the distracting thoughts are debris floating down the current. You don’t capture these thoughts…..you just let God’s river of life take them away. Then gently return to Jesus with your prayer word.

 6. Rest in the center of God’s love throughout the time allotted. Trust that the Holy Spirit , who abides in the depths of you spirit, will connect you with God.

#iGrowchallenge: 12 Easy Steps to Increasing Your Anxiety

This is an old blog post from a friend of mine, Tim Blackmon. I think he captures well the ways we can nurse anxiety and let it grow in our lives. 

12 Easy Steps To Increasing Your Anxiety

By Timothy Blackmon, chaplain at Wheaton College

As a father, husband and as a leader of an organization, one of my biggest challenges in daily life, is handling anxiety. How do I prevent being maxed out, stressed out, freaked out and bummed out? Living without worry and anxiety is hard work. Living with worry and anxiety is even harder. If you insist on letting stress run your life, here are twelve practical steps that will guarantee high levels of anxiety and worry. 

1) Keep going. Don’t take time-off. Sleep as little as you can. Work on Sunday. Leave no time for quiet reflection and play. Keep the pace high and the margins narrow.

2) Try to fix tomorrow’s problems today. Even though you may already feel depleted and overwhelmed, start thinking about how you can solve tomorrow’s problems. When you are done, begin worrying about the problems of others.

3) Keep your daily focus on the worst traits of the most immature person around you. Focus on what is wrong with them. React instinctually to them. Commit to changing them. Find two other people who will criticize their faults and who will validate your complaints.

4) Focus on everything you do not have. Talk about it. Dream about it. Hone the skills of dissatisfaction and murmuring. Think about all the good experiences you are missing out on. Somewhere, someone is having a better time than you are. They have a nicer home, more money and a hotter wife. Think about it.

5) Nurse your grudges. Keep track of all the ways you’ve been wronged. Don’t reconcile, forgive or make amends. Keep your distance from the people that have wronged you. If necessary, cut them off. Plan to retaliate. Never admit wrong-doing.

6) Make sure you never let people see the real you. Keep your true self hidden from others. Through careful image management you should be able to create the illusion that you have it all together. Keep this appearance up at all costs.

7) Let the opinions of other people control you. Ask these two questions every day: What are they saying about me? Is there anybody who really loves me?

8) Let your imagination run wild. Every single, negative event is surely part of a never ending pattern of defeat and difficulty. Every positive experience is probably a fluke. Even though you have no definite facts, feel free to jump to conclusions.

9) Ignore small but crucial details. Expend energy in putting these essential tasks off until they are past due. Keep working on them in your mind but don’t do anything about them.

10) Betray your deepest sense of what is right and find a way to justify it. Act contrary to what you feel you should do. If necessary, blame others.

11) Stop breathing. If you ensure that your breathing is shallow, you will reduce the oxygen to your brain. This will certainly prevent you from having a calming response to the stressors in your life.

12) Do not ask for help. Not from anyone. Assume that you are to tackle all your challenges on your own. Do not depend on God, trust in God or ask God for help.

#iGrowchallenge: The Discipline of Service

Spiritual Practice for the Week: The Discipline of Service

Service is a way of offering resources, time, treasure, influence, and expertise for the care, protection, justice, and nurture of others. Acts of service give hands to the second greatest commandment: “love your neighbor as yourself”.  Practicing service as a discipline this week gives us a way to practice a lifestyle of service that we are called by God to live out as followers of Christ.

The spiritual discipline of service is primarily rooted in a different way of seeing: seeing others as God see’s them.  The spirit of Jesus is a compassionate, serving Spirit that always works for the good of others…..we are called to see as God see’s and then demonstrate that with our actions. This is not just religious rhetoric that we simply endorse as a rule of thumb. The Christian discipline of service is the way the world discovers the love of God. We are the way God blesses the earth.

This week, as you practice the discipline of service, here are a few practical suggestions. Feel free to try a few or think of some other way you could think/pray more about service and involve yourself in intentional work that benefits others.

1. Every morning for the next week or two ask your spouse, roommate, friend, or collegue, “what can I do for you today? Then do it. Talk to God about what this is like for you. What do you see about yourself?

2.  Divide a paper into three columns. Above one column write “for me”. Above the second write “for others” and above the third write “for God”. Review the past week or month and write down in each column the things you have bought and done for yourself, others, and God. What does this inventory reveal about your life?  Take time to read Luke 23. What has God given because he loves you? How would you like to see the columns change over the next months? Listen to your longings and God’s promptings.

3. Think through a monthly and yearly practice of intentional service that you could involve yourself in, such as a missions project or relief project.  Consider which type of project speaks to some of the longings in your own heart.

4. Ask those who know you this week what your spiritual gifts are. Plan a way of using your gifts to benefit others in the next week or month.

5. Get to know a missions organization or another organization helping those in great need either personally or over the web. Ask them how you could serve.

6. Give a small micro-finance loan of 20 euros or more to one of the poorest of the poor around the world trying to start a small business through www.kiva.org.

7. Sponsor a child so that they can receive schooling and the love of Christ in some of the poorest parts of the world through Compassion International: www.compassion.com (or compassion.nl).    

#iGrowchallenge: Slowing Down

Spiritual Practice For the Week: Slowing

Peter Kreeft writes: “If you can’t take time for nothing, you’re a slave to doing. Doing nothing is a radical, revolutionary act. It frees you from the universal slavery of the age: slavery to the clock. The clock measures doing but not being.” 

As we are continue through Lent we are reminded that we can do nothing to earn grace, we can only receive it. So, the discipline of ‘slowing’ is a way to stop and receive God’s grace in your life. This does not mean that we stop the necessary work of life, but only that we confront our inner hurriedness and addiction to busyness, and make space for God and others in our lives. Here are some suggestions for engaging in this discipline this week:

1. In the morning and the evening, before the busyness of the day begins and after the busyness is over, spend a few moments in silent prayer. This prayer may not involve words at all, but just being present with God and letting God love you and reassure you of His Grace.

2. As you conclude your prayer time in the morning, offer God three main tasks that you need to attend to during the day. Pray through them and give God your concerns.

3. This week, intentionally choose the slow lane, intentionally ride a bit slower to work or from work, intentionally get in the longest line at the grocery store or the bank.  Do this as a spiritual discipline and be aware of the times you rush through the day. Practice taking your time.  Be aware of the questions and feelings that arise in your mind when you do this. What is hard about intentionally slowing down? Relish the time and be in the presence of God.

4. When possible, focus on quality and not quantity. In your work and at home, try to do a task as well as it can be done, and ponder your work and job as a holy offering to God.

5. Intentionally sit longer at the dinner table. Play more with your children. Have longer conversations with friends and family. Don’t run to the next thing if you don’t have to.

6. Insert margins of rest and relaxation in your day. Avoid scheduling back to back meetings. Remember that is better to be unavailable than inattentive. Take deep breath before you pick up the phone.

7. When people ask, “so how you are doing?” refrain from entering into a litany of how busy you are.  Saying how busy we are reinforces the ‘revved up’ existence we are trying to slow down from.

8. Read slowly, for transformation and not information.

9. Counter gut reactions that come from feeling threatened or insecure by breathing slowly and deeply. Breathe in Christ’s presence. Breathe out your anxiety and fear.

10. Practicing pausing and thinking before responding in conversation or meetings. Practicing speaking less and listening more.

iGrowchallenge: Spiritual Friendships

“The gospel of Jesus Christ creates and calls us into spiritual friendships.”

-Aelred of Rievaulx, “Spiritual Friendship”

“The Creator arranged things so that we need each other.”

-Basil of Caesarea, 330AD

Friendships don’t just happen….they come out of what we love. This explains why some people don’t have many friends or if you are looking for friends and don’t find them. The very condition for friendships is that we should want something else besides friends. As the old saying goes: ‘those who are going nowhere can invite no fellow travelers’.  That is why in Christ there are possibilities for friendship that outside would never have been possible.  If we have experienced Grace we begin to love people we would never have thought about before. And we can build up friendships on a whole different foundation.”

-Tim Keller, sermon on Spiritual Friendship

Every week through the iGrowchallenge I am going to include various disciplines that can ground you in Grace and focus on Christ. This week I want to highlight the practice of Spiritual Friendship. Friendships, and especially friendships that focus on Christ, are essential elements of Christian community and they are some of the most powerful forces in our lives. They can lead us to incredible blessings or then can lead us into incredible deception and darkness.  

The Bible portrays that friendships are so powerful because we were created for friendship. We were created for relationship with God and with others. This is why Adam was created ‘not to be alone’.   We are not called to do life alone but to do things with God and with others and we can know this by the capacity of friends to hurt us….only something incredibly important and powerful has the ability to hurt us so much.

Chaim Potok’s the Chosen is a story of a friendship between two Jewish boys in Williamsburg in the 40s and at one point the father of one of the boys says to his son: “it is hard to be a friend.”  At first glance we might disagree with this statement. It is actually not that hard to be a friend. Many of us have hundreds, if not thousands, of friends on Facebook or hundreds of followers on Twitter or Instagram, and if you were asked you would probably say: “I have a lot of friends or I am a fairly good friend.”

Yet the curse of our age is false intimacy.  We may message friends all day long, comment on people’s Facebook posts or tweets, and interact with people all day long at school, or work, church, or the club, or other places. But just because we are friendly with a lot of people doesn’t mean we have a lot of friends, especially the kind of friends Jesus and Paul is talking about.  And when we talk about those kinds of friendships, then the father was right: “IT IS hard to be a friend.” Because the kind of friendships Jesus and Paul are describing involve sacrifice.

HOW TO CULTIVATE SPIRITUAL FRIENDSHIPS

1. Grow in your own faith. One of my mentors in college said: “don’t think too much about the kind of spouse you want, what you want them to look like or act like, but devote your time to working on being the kind of husband God wants you to be, and the rest will take care of itself.” This is good advice for dating and also for friendships in general. Sometimes we spend so much time pining away for relationships that we miss living and growing now. So work on being the kind of friend someone would be blessed by. And pray for a friend or many who can be a blessing to you as well.

2. Think about the kind of friend you need and want to be. This is connected with the first point, but it is good for us to think about the kind of friend we need to be. Here are two exercises that can help you in this process: 

-Friendship Inventory: Draw a lifeline (how old you are) and divide it into seven year segments. Put the initials of friends who have been important to you in each segment. What do you notice about your friendships? What kinds of friends do you tend to gather around? What does this tell about yourself? What kind of friends do you want to cultivate in the next parts of your life? Give your answers to God in prayer.

- Characteristics of a Spiritual Friend:  Draw two columns on a piece of paper. Title one: “Characteristics of a Spiritual friend” and on the other “Characteristics of Myself as a Friend”. Now fill the columns with your observations. What did you learn about yourself? What holds you back from being a ‘spiritual friend’ (time, commitment, emotional investment, etc..)

3. Don’t deny your need.  We are all created for relationship and we need good friends in our lives. Even Jesus needed friends around him. Though Jesus is God he chose to be bound by friends even though that trust and dependence ultimately led to betrayal and death.  And in the same way we are called to seek good friends. So if you are lonely that is not a sign of something wrong in your life it is a sign of something being right. You are feeling this God created urge for relationships. Sometimes we run relationships because we have been hurt, or we don’t want accountability, etc… but we are called to LET OURSELVES NEED PEOPLE, even though that hurts sometimes. The less that we want good friends is the less we want to be like Jesus.

4.  Do the work. As anyone with good friendships know, friendships take a lot of work. God gives us the raw material, but as any artist knows when you get the raw material that is just the STARTING POINT. You have a lot to do from there to craft it into something beautiful.  And that is the same with friendships. The word ‘koinonea’ which is the greek word for community, means TO SHARE. So to have good relationships we need to share. As we see in the scriptures, they wept, embraced, argued, laughed, struggled together through good and bad.  They shared their feelings and their lives. And you simply can’t have spiritual friends if you are not willing to do this and intentionally commit yourself to this kind of relationship.

5. Take a leap of faith. Some of us may have friends like this and some may not. And some may have Christian friends but you have never really taken the step to become ‘spiritual friends’; to talk about your faith together, pray together, and seek to support each other in your walks with Christ.   Yet if we want to develop these kind of friendships we need to take a leap of faith. It may involve gathering a few people to pray and study scripture together. It may mean encouraging your small group to share more intimately and be more vulnerable (which starts with you). It may just be asking someone that you are ‘friendly’ with to pray for you.  It just starts with a leap of faith, so pray about it and follow Gods leading.

6. Try out some ‘friendship disciplines’.

We can never be a perfect friend. We have limitations and flaws.  And we all have hectic lives, which can lead us from cultivating good friendships. So try these kinds of disciplines to be intentional about being a good friend and cultivating spiritual friendships:
- Pray for your friends regularly. Write these down in a prayer journal to see when God answers them. Ask for prayer requests and follow through on praying for those.
- Send an encouraging email or text occasionally to show you are thinking of them. 
- Gather a small group to read a book together or to do a Bible study.
- Take a retreat together.
- Other ideas?