Getting Back to Practise

Living the Christian life we always wanted

Interacting with John Mark Comer’s Practicing the Way content has really got me thinking about the walk of faith.

I viewed spiritual formation practices as good things to do for a long time. Coming from an Anglican context growing up, the concept of liturgy, structured prayer, etc., was familiar. And as I walked the faith through my 20s and 30s, I did many spiritual practices, many times to varying degrees of success.

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

But into my 40s, I have found that the way I lived my life seems to not sustain me in the light of the demands of life. I find myself increasingly lacking and unprepared for the demands of parenting teenagers, being an entrepreneur in a struggling economy, managing the stresses of life when lots of things hit you at once, etc.

Comer’s been banging the drum of spiritual formation for a while, but it was the simple presentation of: Be with Jesus, become like Jesus, and do what Jesus did, which really brought it home for me.

That, together with an interview with Jon Tyson where he talks about the practices he needs to cultivate resiliency (I’ve hyperlinked to him talking about this in the below YouTube video. It’s a six-minute section)

For 23 years, Tyson has lived a rhythm which he says helps him just to be the man he wants to show up in the world as every day.

Where to start?

What’s really hard is when you’re starting with no momentum on something; it just feels daunting. Comer has a tool on his website for a Rule of Life. It basically helps you to map out the kinds of spiritual practices you want to do. It looks like this:

And then it maps it out for you, like this:

The hard thing is that all the things I want to do give me a long list, and then it feels daunting. James Clear and his Atomic Habits book is a really useful tool for removing friction from habit forming. So I’m working through what to start with and how to sustain it.

It's broader than just spiritual.

Listening to Comer interview Andy Crouch from Praxis Labs, I found out that they have a Rule of Life for the entrepreneurs they work with too. You can find the one-pager here.

And so I realized that the way we work, the way we parent, the way we show up for friends also depends on practices.

It’s about transformation.

It’s the realization that we want an endpoint, but we don’t necessarily want the work done that produces the endpoint. It's also the fact that the practices often aren’t directly connected to what we want.

So, if you want to be a blogger. Here is a checklist:

1. Register on Substack.

2. Get 10 people to subscribe.

3. Write articles.

4. Grow an audience.

5. Start an opt-in subscription writing service.

6. Make money.

This seems logical, right? Here’s the catch: in order to write content that I am happy with and you want to read, I need to spend a lot of time listening to podcasts, reading, thinking, planning, praying, and writing.

And the discipline of that is hard, just like the above Rules of Life are hard. Which is why I have had a start-stop relationship with journaling and writing for other people when it’s not commercial.

But in order to become the people we want to be and get the answers we want, we need to do the practices that transform us into those people.

And that’s hard, but worth it, they tell me. Wish me luck.