Barb Totterdell August 12th 2018 ~ Who are You Journeying with?

This week I’ve enjoyed reading a book called Sensible Shoes: A Story about the Spiritual Journey by Sharon Garlough Brown. It’s about four women at very different points in life, who all join a spiritual formation group at a retreat centre. The book describes their engagement with some spiritual practices and each other over the months that follow, and the way each grows in her relationship with God.As I’ve been reading Sensible Shoes (and have now moved onto the following books in the series!), I’ve been very thankful for the people who I journey closely with in my faith journey and those I’ve journeyed with in the past. These are people who share deeply of themselves and how God’s at work in them, who give strong encouragement and challenge to me to journey more deeply into what God’s doing in my life, and who allow me to speak into their lives. Some of them are part of this church community. I wonder who those people are for you and what it might look like to invite them in a bit more, to share with them a bit more of the things that God is doing in your life?I also wonder what contexts and inputs you have that are helping you along on your spiritual journey at the moment. How are you engaging with the Bible? What other spiritual practices are part of your daily, weekly or monthly rhythms? How are you paying attention to what God is doing in your life? And how are others journeying with you in all of that, supporting you and holding you accountable? Also, how are you offering that space to others?In my experience, these things often go through seasons and what has been useful in one season isn’t necessarily the helpful thing in the next. It’s easy to get stuck doing the things that have been useful, or to get a bit lost between seasons, too. It’s one of the reasons we need honest and real relationships with each other in the Body of Christ - people who can encourage us to keep pursuing God and what He has for us in the ways that He’s inviting us to in a particular season of our lives.God longs for us to walk closely with Him, with each other and, also, with people in the world, who desperately need Him. To do all of these things, we need to be intentional in creating space for them to occur, make active decisions around what it will look like and choose the discipline that will enable us (with God’s help) to hold to those decisions. It happens by taking the one next step on your journey. What might that be for you this week, who might you talk with, what might you read, what practice might you embrace, how might you create space?Of course, I or other staff members would be very willing to have further conversation with you around these things if that would be helpful.Blessings,Barb