Spiritual Formation

Spiritual Formation

Thoughts and comments on the whole business of following Christ.

Safety first?

After a fairly lengthy hiatus, we are back online and ready to add our two-cents about learning about and living out the grace of God. Are you glad we’re back? I wanted to start this new season of blogging with a thought or two that came out of our study on being pilgrims-aliens and strangers in this world. A couple of months ago, I was intrigued by the story of the…

Lessons Learned

Several weeks have passed since our last posting – a time in which some important things have been learned by the authors. These lessons in discernment came (as they often do) disguised in mundane, seemingly ordinary events. Let me digress a bit….animals have been a part of our lives for the 36 years we’ve been married….Katrina, Kaiser, Karmel, Caleb, Cody, Indy and…

Trust

Mention the word “trust” today and you may very well launch a lengthy and heated discussion on why we don’t trust (politicians, church leaders, spouses, God) or what trust does look like when it’s put to the test. This is an especially lively topic when its target is “the God we cannot see.” Intrinsic to all trust is the surrendering of something of ourselves to another.…

The Holy Spirit and a new sense of Christ

“The Sixth Sense” (M. Night Shyamalan) is one of my favorite movies. It’s a great story, and you think you know the outcome – until the twist at the end turns your point of view on its head. The main character, a young boy, turns out to have a ‘sixth sense’ that allows him to not only see, but converse with those who have died. Meant to be a fantasy thriller (and no, I…

"Word of God, speak!"

The song “Word of God, speak!” by MercyMe is not one of the chart toppers for this great Christian band. But the song has always reminded me of the power of the Scriptures to change my life. And it reminds me that we are not sub-standard Christians because we cannot see Jesus physically. We are not living on meager rations of food for our soul because we have to depend on…

Doctrine? Who, me?

Hanging around in the background of everything we plan to do in ADM is the conviction that the Holy Spirit needs a certain amount of information about God’s Word embedded in our lives to work the transformation God desires. Classes on doctrine, historic Christianity, or individual books of the Bible are the core of the strategy we have created. Yet many Christians…