Bringing Faith to Life
writing
Can God speak to us through our bodies?
010 months
God speaks to us through our bodies.
Why is that so hard to believe? We say that 70% of communication is non-verbal. Why do we insist that God speak through our listening ears? What do we perceive non-verbally?
Well, this may sound nonsensical, because in normal conversation, what we mean by non-verbal is messaging though “body-language.” What do their facial expressions say? What does their hand-positioning tell us? their posture? their movement? This is the language of their bodies? God doesn’t have a body — at least not one we can see and touch. At least not me.
What if God is speaking God’s nonverbal expression through MY body? Uniquely and specifically to me? How would I listen? How would I interpret? How would I attend to what God is speaking? If am not aware of God, is there something getting in the way and scrambling our communication?
Much depends on my relationship with my own body. So what does you body say to you when you address it? is your body telling you?Do you find yourself in any of these? here?
- the avoider: I don’t want to talk about that. Let’s change the subject. let’s talk about something else. So, how are you doing…?
- The excuse maker: I don’t speak that language. (I’m not coordinated, not good at sports, never got picked for the team, really not very competitive.)
- the ashamed: I can’t talk about that. Am uncomfortable talking about my body. am ashamed, embarassed, have been hurt of abused.
- the guilty: There’s nothing wrong with what I am doing. Nothing to see here. Move along. unaware or blind to the connection between body and God, in denial
- the arguer, reasoner/rationalizer: The Bible says the flesh is bad, but the spirit is good. I choose to focus on the spirit. After all, this body of mine is just a temporary possession. gonna perish anyway.
Avoiding, excusing, shaming, denying, and arguing are all ways we step away from this conversation. In doing so, do we miss a blessed, poignant and personal way God created for us to be aware of Him? Forfeit an intimate connection? Miss perhaps 70% of what God is speaking?
Perhaps this is the most essential message of the coming of Christ: fully divine AND fully human, incarnated. Here in the flesh. God, knowing our reluctant selves, argumentative, avoidant, shamed and guilty selves, said, I can live in that body. When I do, I can take the helm, if you give it to me. I will speak course correction, signal change of heading, chart the course, and apply the rudder. Heck, I can even still the winds blowing us off course.
The keys are two: attend to My touch and apply my direction. Use your body’s awareness of me to accept my guidance. (like horse and rider)
Try: ask your body to respond to these commands/instructions:
- slow,
- calm,
- focus
- look
- listen
- breathe
- imagine
- attend
- release
- turn
- wait
- GO!
These commands are activated in our flesh, through our physical nature. God speaks to us, so God can speak through us.
Of course, one can only be guided when one is moving. Nothing (but God) can correct the course of something that refuses to budge, arms crossed. Movement in any direction, God can work with.
Folded hands which signal I’m not budging is something God refuses to override.
We are made to move. Our bodies — heart, soul, mind, strength and spirit — remind us of this everyday. It’s the way God intended to get and keep our attention. It’s why God gave us a body — to incline us to follow Him in this earthly lifetime.
*(This is the thesis of my book, Made to Move: (learning to) Knowing and Loving God through our Bodies, find it here.)
Stretch to strengthen: pain of a healing sort
01 year
by wlebolt
in Body, Call to Action, church, Deeper Sensation, faith, In Action, Made to Move, prayer, witness, writing
No one really wants to be stretched. At least not too far, and definitely not when the stretching goes beyond what feels comfortable.
There’s just a certain out-of-control-feeling when someone is pulling you and you don’t know how far they will go, or even if they will stop. If you have ever had physical therapy after an injury or surgery, you know exactly what I’m describing. It’s painful but it’s pain of a healing sort. It helps recover your range of motion, and once you have that, the strengthening can begin. Then you’re on the road to return to action.
While there lots of ways to strengthen — exercise machines, dumbbells, pulleys, weights — it’s likely that when you earn your discharge from the PT gym you’ll be sent home with a lovely parting gift called a resistance band. It’s meant to be your home exercise companion. And it comes with a wonderful secret: When you stretch it, it strengthens you.
I know that sounds a bit counterintuitive, but it’s true. When you pull, it resists, gently. As you pull harder, it stretches, slowly. The harder you pull, the more it stretches and the more that strengthens you. This feels very much like life these days and, to me, very much like the life of faith. Body and soul engaged in a give-and-take which feels very much like exercise.
Apparently, my approach is a bit atypical. While most faith-folk tend to start with the soul and then invite the body along, when I begin with body, my soul always comes along for the joy ride. *
Try for yourself. Here’s a simple prayer routine using the “exercise” band and the words to the praise song, Spirit of the Living God. My daughter Stephanie’s lovely voice accompanies me.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mse98SpD1v4]
The movement is prayer. The words are prayer. The music is prayer.
But even better, even after the prayer-exercise is done, the sensation of prayer remains… in the body! The muscles that moved the band — the effort, the stretch, the exertion of prayer — reverberate and reiterate: melt me, mold me, fill me, use me. Literally, the prayer is still there.
This is too good to be true, right? Try it again. Become aware of the energy, the symbiosis, the connection of stretch to strengthen. Let your body prayer become fluid, flowing one motion into the next. Body and soul, together. Who could conceive of something so powerful and yet so simple?
*My thanks to the folks at the Upper Room for honoring my unusual approach and inviting me to join them to lead worship at SOULfeast 2013.
I wanna be that kind of book
03 years
I pick the book up from its assigned resting spot and attempt to flip through its pages. Each one sticks to the next. I can’t for the life of me get them separated. I fiddle with the edges. I try and slide the corner. I gather a handful of pages hoping the random shuffle will loosen the page I want. No luck. Thunk, thunk, thunk, go the chunks of text.
Clearly, no one has freed this book from its hot-off-the-presses status. But how… without licking my fingers? Such a Pre-Covid thought, that. In my bag I have a contraband water bottle, perhaps some moisture from that? Or maybe my gloves with fingertips designed to slide a screen would do the trick, but where are the?
Oh good grief. Yes, yes I did it. Surreptitiously, I dot my index finger with a dab of saliva and successfully work one page away from the other. Crinkle, crinkle, slide. There it goes. One page down. Only 373 more to go.
(I had the same experience at Harris Teeter yesterday, trying as I might to release the grip of the plastic bag opening without defaulting to stripping my mask from my nose and mouth and licking my fingers. Suffice to say, after setting my two gala apples on the cart left by the produce manager in order to recruit both hands for the task, I finally gave up and set both the apples and the unopened plastic bag in the bottom of my basket.) But I digress…
Today I pick up the same book from its assigned resting spot, but this one is in a different location. A more traveled location. A more popular spot. This book, I know right away, has had many visitors stop by for a visit. Its pages fall easily, one from the other. Its surfaces are crinkled and easy to grip. Its printed words seem to invite me in:
Look here and over here. Turn to this page, now that. Oh, here's something you'll like! Wherever you want to go, I am with you. Just as I have been here for all those who have sat where you are sitting and accepted my invitation to excursion through my pages.
I had what seemed an odd thought just then…
I would much rather be this book than the other, the one so seldom opened. I prefer risking a ragged interaction or two to sitting idle in a forgotten corner or at arms reach from an uninterested patron. I would rather be a book that’s read, that’s sung from, that’s paged through. I would rather be dog-eared, crinkled, scribbled upon or even mended after a bout of overly enthusiastic use, than pristine and shimmering, on display in some out-of-the-way spot gathering dust but inspiring no interest, no interaction, no comment.
Yes, me and that Velveteen Rabbit, we’ve done some communing over the years.
A toy, played with, is beloved. Real, even.
A book, read and re-read, beloved, too. Alive, even.
I wanna be that kind of book.
No structure, big problem
04 years
I’m a writer.
We operate in silence. in solitary. in fact, we like this. because as soon as someone interrupts us, we are done. Have to start ALL over again. from the beginning.
We are self starters. i mean, who is gonna start us? we, the people, who are here by ourselves.
Lonely? not us. we like it this way. usually. but it’s not as easy as it seems. have you noticed?
Creating a structure for yourself is a monumental effort. Not a soul in the house to tell you, “GET to WORK!” Nobody holding you accountable. No one demanding billable hours.
Just you. and the screen. or rather you and your thoughts before a screen.
So many have said, “you’re so lucky! You have no one telling you what to do!” no annoyance. no interruption. Pure, you-time. Well, now we all have you-time. Whatchu doing with your you-time?
I’m constantly looking for mine. Not kidding, it’s a 24 hour search.
And all that unstructured time you used to envy me for? all that time that I was free to spend however I wished?
Ah, now we’re all in this together. you and me and every we.
How’s that structure coming? now that we have to supply it. No structure, no problem?
No structure, big problem.
Ask a writer. we specialize in long, empty days that we fill with whatever comes. when it comes.
A lot has come.
The Space Between Gratitude and Glory
0“You can make people feel,” he told me. That’s high praise, coming from a world famous poet and a marvelous compliment coming from a person who is in touch with “all the feels.”
But it’s not me “making people feel.” The stories I share and the way I share them is thanks to the people who have inclined me to open the door to my feelings and offered a safe space for me to feel them. It’s my gratitude for these lessons learned, messages communicated, insights shone, and perspectives gained that spills onto the page.
My new book, Made to Move: Knowing and Loving God Through our Bodies comes out in February. It is a “devotional workbook” for individuals and small groups but not your typical book of devotions. It’s not a daily, Jesus Calling, kind of reading to assure you that Jesus loves you and God will never leave you, though I subscribe to both of those beliefs.
No, this book is really, well, I guess its the product of the practice of writing thank you notes that my mother began in me all those years ago. It started me writing notes to people who I thought deserved a thanking. And not just the canned version:
Thank you for ______.
I’ll use it for _________.
I really appreciate it.
Thanks again.
Fondly,
Me
Photo by PIRO4D from Pexels
But the real version — the “felt” version — written with the Lord’s guidance, letting a heart that was truthfully grateful take the lead. Somehow, gratitude lets us turn the knob on the door to a passageway we didn’t know existed. It opens onto the hallway of feeling. All feelings. None prohibited. It is a safe zone where trust can abide and healing reigns.
Because feeling can be hard. It can be gut-wrenching and head-spinning, earth-shattering and life-altering. But, it can also be breathtaking and awe-inspiring, heart-healing and life-giving. Life offers us the opportunity to turn the knob and enter in, not knowing what we will find on the other side.
The courage to do this doesn’t come from the author who invites you in, but from the Author of Life who is there to facilitate your discovery. Whatever you find there, I will help you handle. Whatever you need there, I will supply. Because I will be with you in the feeling, the you who emerges will be changed.
I don’t “make people feel.” I invite people, through words birthed in gratitude, to experience their feelings and then to be healed by the only Healer I know whose work lasts forever.
My book is a thank you note to the world. Each page, a person. If it “makes you feel,” I am grateful because I know God’s grace is at work in that space between gratitude and glory.
A love like no other
1
Sometimes there is a friend, early on, say, in high school, who writes in your yearbook. Pages and pages, continued here and then over there, with a message that defies time and space.
Dispensing with the cursory, superficial gibberish, this friend heads straight for the truth with words so profound that, at 17 years old, you actually transcribe them so you can call on them again and again. Each time you do, they speak something new.
They planted a seed in me then, and now they reverberate through the ages. It’s as if Jesus Himself spoke to me through this friend.
Today, I have a special prayer for you: I hope that you find fulfillment, and that you are at peace with yourself and God. Because that is what I think is most important, what gives meaning and direction. His love is so great, Dear One, that the very thought of someone who loves me that much, in spite of the cursory lip service and lack of time I give Him makes me cry almost in shame and in joy.
There are so many pressures. After all, you will only be happy if you get straight A’s, hit .400, play at every game, go to every party, attend every Prom, lose 10 pounds, get accepted to five colleges, win a scholarship that covers tuition, room and board, and more or less win honor and glory in every endeavor.
But you don’t have to. Even if you hit .155 or sit in McDonald’s on Homecoming night, or fail every class, God loves you and is proud of you anyway. And that alone is enough to give you courage to stay up an extra hour studying, or keep running for office, or whatever. Someone who loves you so totally deserves never to be let down.
All of my love.
Imagine a love like this…
Poetic Justice … you can take it with you
0Journalism reports yesterday’s news.
Like the weather,
it needs no re-cap.
No sense keeping that around.
Fiction tells a good story.
Entertaining, but unless
those characters make a home with us,
one and done.
yet…
Poetry bears telling and re-telling,
reading and re-reading.
Poems speak newness,
reading into us, as we are new.
The one we are (the me who reads)
is new, with each reading.
Yesterday’s poem
holds no sway over today’s me.
Perhaps, a look and see
at how it affected me.
How I landed there. then.
But today lifts off into a new wind,
under new weather conditions.
Today the poem is a completely new flight.
New flight plan, same pilot.
There is no quenching living words,
they continue to speak:
to draw the heart out
to fill the soul up
to still, no activate, no ignite, no…
distill … can’t make up my own mind,
must let it make itself.
These are powerful words that propel me:
to places I’d never go otherwise,
with people I’d never meet otherwise,
except
that I came to the poem,
and it met me there
but didn’t leave me there,
didn’t leave me at all.
It stayed.
What is a poet
but one who lives a life that speaks?
Your life speaks.
It’s poetry
as you write it —
see how it changes you,
as you write
and they,
as they read.
Write that.
Being Brave: Powerful New Devotional Book by Kelly Johnson
2
These days, being brave is not optional; it’s imperative. And the bravery I’m talking about doesn’t come from girding your loins and bucking up your confidence. It can’t be bought because it’s not for sale. But it is available. In fact, it’s essential to the life God wants you to lead. This is the message of Kelly Johnson’s new Christian women’s devotional book, Being Brave: A 40-Day Journey to the Life God Dreams for You. (Abingdon Press)
Her inspiration launches from a conversation with her young daughter who, sensing her mother’s frustration at not being able to solve the events of a day she found particularly overwhelming, said, “Mommy, I just need you to tell me I’m a brave soldier.”
We all need to put on our brave. But how? Where does it come from? Where can we find it? Where should we look? Johnson is clear: God names us brave. “The Spirit God gave us does not make us timid, but gives us power, love and self-discipline.” ~ 2 Timothy 1:7
Johnson cleverly uncovers an acronym that she uses as the backbone of the 40 day journey. The building blocks of brave are being:
- Bold
- Resilient
- Authentic
- Vulnerable
- Engaged
God’s spirit of Power helps us be bold and resilient. God’s spirit of Love helps us be authentic and vulnerable. God’s spirit of Self-discipline directs us to be engaged and empowers us. This devotional offers us the opportunity, through daily readings of scripture, story, prayer and reflection, to tackle what is holding us back and to discover what calls us forward. Our BRAVE says, Go on, take the Leap. I am with you in this.
As my mom used to say to me, “You’ll never know until you try.” When the stakes are low, that works, but when the stakes are higher, we need to hear someone tell us we’re brave. This devotional book will help you hear those words spoken to you in your own voice.
As I read TIME magazine’s powerful article detailing the stories of “the Silence Breakers,” whom they chose as this year’s Person(s) of the Year, I see this kind of BRAVE. In coming forward, they had everything to lose: yet, they were bold, resilient, authentic, and, while incredibly vulnerable, chose to engage with the world in a way that has ushered in incredible power. No timidity in sight. It’s why we believe them.
That’s what brave does. We don’t know what we can do until we try. After digging into Kelly Johnson’s book, you’ll be willing to try, too.
Find Kelly at her author page here.
The Longer I Wait, the Deeper I Know
0J.K. Rowling first dreamed up Harry Potter in 1990, while on a train from Manchester to London. She finished the story in 2007 with the final book in the seven novel epic. Now, that’s a long story. Those who followed it all the way to its conclusion were held in suspense until the very last pages. We were all surprised by the ending — all of us, that is, except J.K. Rowling. She clearly had planned it all from the very beginning; she always knew how it would end.
This is the wonder of a great story and the gift of the great storyteller. They plot everything precisely and then make us wait for the surprise ending. While we wait, our anticipation grows, preparing us for the BIG finish! In the end, what we couldn’t possibly have imagined happening surprises us, and we’re completely gob-smacked by the satisfaction we feel. If we had skipped ahead to the conclusion, it would be empty. We’d have an ending, but no resolution.
It’s tempting in today’s world to want to fast forward things. Our technology and consumer conveniences make it possible to skip the lines, avoid the traffic, and tape the game so we can fast forward through the commercials. Stories aren’t meant to be experienced this way. They take their time, just like our lives do. That’s a good thing, right? Who wants to rush to the end?
But really, why not? If what God has promised is so much better than what we’ve got, why not fast-forward us to the good part? Perhaps because the God who is able to do immeasurably more than we could ask or imagine (Eph 3:20), is still working on us.
Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen. ~ Ephesians 3:20
God, the great storyteller, is telling His story by His power that is at work within us. For the satisfying resolution to make sense to us, we have to read all the way through to our last page.
We’re not meant to jump to the end of our lives without reading the middle parts. Something of God grows up in our lives as we learn to lead them. It will allow us, with all the Lord’s holy people, to stand before the love of Christ that is so much more than anyone could ever ask or imagine and find ourselves completely filled by it. (Eph 3: 14-20) Hard to believe, right?
Definitely. Yet, if Ms. Rowling had told me in Book 3 how Harry’s story would end, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have believed it either. It took four more books to develop the breadth of things which ushered me into the only ending that made sense.
So, even though from my vantage point on this side of my life story, the path to a happy ending may look narrow and perilous, to the God who conceived, wrote and is still writing it, it’s a broad expanse. It’ll take a lifetime’s filling of His Spirit for me to see and believe just how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ for me. Surprise!!
Perhaps this is what the late Steve Jobs saw on his deathbed as he uttered his last recorded words: “Oh Wow. Oh Wow. Oh Wow.” Can you imagine what would make an inventor, creator, and visionary like Jobs say that? Yeah, me neither. Guess we’ll just have to wait.