I've been reading the Spirit of the Disciplines by Dallas Willard. It's a slow read for me, but not because it's collegiate or overly heady. It's a slow read like a meal at Ruth's Chris is a slow eat. A dinner you don't want to race through. Almost as soon as I started reading it I began in my head to file through my friends to find one I could invite to read it with me so I could "talk through it" while I read through it in hopes I would be able to more deeply internalize it.

I grew up in church. When I went to college, I had this awareness that God was bigger than I had perceived up to that point. I can remember specifically as we sat by Taylor lake, that I felt tiny in the presence of a definite Someone Big. Since then, the journey has been facinating.

But several times in my odyssey of learning more and more about Jesus, I have had this inner pull to... change. To become more like him in practice without sacrificing my personality on the altar of religiosity. To have hands and feet in the world and do what he did: help, heal, lead. He embraced the marginalized. He confronted systematic religion, striving to give vision to the blindness of ivory-tower piety. He gave grace to the humble, wholeness to the broken, value to the discarded, justice to the oppressed, and clarity to the confused.

So much of what I know about him through 2 decades of learning somehow stops in the shallows of me. It is often head knowledge, and not heart awareness. It has been said that "you can't give away what you don't have." And though I know God loves me and accepts me, I still struggle with loving and accepting myself as easily as I do others. Which makes me wonder if what I feel for others is really love and acceptance, or just some kind of unbalanced envy.

So how do I keep from drowning in a puddle of knowledge without ever swimming in the depths? How do I grow roots in order that the soil, water, and sunlight in my spiritual journey can have the most effect in my life? How can I walk out, in a continuing depth of detail, what Jesus said I would do?

Am I alone in this? I don't think so.

The Church (speaking in a universal sense here) in my opinion has been sorely lacking in the area of regional-to-global impact. I agree whole-heartedly with Willard's idea that there is need for an ever-broadening transformation in our individual lives before there can be a global one. And I am convinced that this personal growth is our personal responsibility. It is training for the Olympics of Faith: where the business goes beyond the boardroom and touches the practical needs of the world. If my personal relationship with God and my religious practice is pictured solely by attending the service and never attending the starving, then I am living an empoverished life in the presence of the very definition of richness.

God help me to be practical. Starting now. Starting here. Denying some base cravings, not out of some masochistic self-denial, but in Jason Miller's words, "to become sourced in God."