Day 19

Three weeks left. That's kind of heartening. Three more Mondays. Three more Tuesdays. Put in that perspective, I think this is going to get easier. It hasn't been extraordinarily hard, but getting closer to the half way point, I think it will be much easier as I start counting down.

I know I've talked about the spiritual struggles with this, and I still struggle with that, but at this point I have to admit that for me, I guess it's become a bit of a challenge, like I'm relying on myself and testing myself to see if I can do it. That's probably not the healthiest thing.

I don't think I posted it, but there was a chunk in Messy Spirituality that really spoke to me.

A couple of years ago, my wife and I sat across the table from a woman we highly respect, a deeply spiritual lady who had profoundly impacted our lives. This woman spent most of her life resisting the noise and activity of the world to seek God in silence and solitude. She had spent hundreds of weeks in silent retreat. This was a woman so saturated with her faith, you could almost smell God when she came into the room.
We were talking about prayer. "It's embarrassing to be sitting with you," I blurted. "You spend days, weeks, even months in prayer. I'm lucky if I spend ten minutes. Compared to you, I'm not very spiritual, I'm afraid."
Her eyes, flashing with anger, caught mine, and she fired back, "Oh, Mike, knock it off. First of all, you don't spend every day with me. You don't know me at all. You are comparing what you know about yourself to what you don't know about me. Secondly, I battle depression daily, and it has won during several periods of my life. I never told you about it. I don't have a family; I like to be alone and silent. Trust me, I am just as 'unspiritual' as you are."
Then she said gently, "You think about God all the time, right?"

"Well, sort of," I said.

"Thinking about God is being with God. Being with God is spirituality. Thinking about God is praying. So shut up with this guilt stuff; you have been praying most of your life! You are a spiritual person!"

What? I've been praying most of my life? What was she talking about? It never occurred to me that Paul's "pray without ceasing" might actually be possible. It never occured to me that praying could include thinking, that praying could be done with my eyes open, that praying could be done standing, sitting, driving, dancing, skiing, lying down, jogging, working. How could anyone accuse me of praying all the time when I didn't pray all the time... unless my friend was right, unless I was praying without ceasing.

How could anyone accuse me of being spiritual unless spirituality comes in unlimited shapes and sizes, unless spirituality looks like whatever you and I look like when we're thinking about Jesus, when we are trying to find Jesus, when we are trying to figure out what real Christianity looks like in the real world?

Spirituality looks like whatever you and I look like when we're thinking about Jesus, when we are trying to find Jesus, when we are trying to figure out what real Christianity looks like in the real world.

That encourages me. It says to me that I'm not crazy. It wraps Christianity up into my life in a way that Karl Barth and John Shelby Spong never did in the Contemporary Theology course I had to take back at Augsburg a few years ago. (I'll honestly admit that while a good part of the reason I failed that course was because of everything going on in my life at the time, I had a hard time dealing with the subject matter in a way that it probably deserved. I had a lot of derision for the professor, and she of me. Apparently she wasn't fond of the Lutheran church I grew up in, and I wasn't too fond of the Lutheran church she went to where they had just installed a lesbian pastor. I REALLY don't want to go there, so don't dig into it, it's just a statement of what was going on at the time.


Anyway, I feel like even if I don't have all the answers, God is listening and understanding that I'm a mess and can work through me anyway. If that's the only thing I learn during this fast, I think that sense of 'being' is more than enough.

Weight this morning. 229. I thought my gastro-intestinal issues were gone yesterday but they came back this morning. We'll see how long they last. I'm guessing it went away because I didn't drink any of the V8 Fusion juice yesterday and I think the additional fiber in that was acting correctively. I'll drink some more of it tonight.