When Faith Becomes Sight (eBook)

Opening Your Eyes to God's Presence All Around You

Beth A. Booram, David Booram (Autoren)

eBook Download: EPUB

2019
InterVarsity Press (Verlag)
978-0-8308-4837-9 (ISBN)

Infos

- 2019 IVP Readers' Choice Award Where can I turn to see God? How can I more clearly recognize God's nearness and initiative in my life? These are vital questions if you desire to know and experience the living God. As spiritual directors, Beth and David Booram have guided many people into deeper awareness of this living, present God at work within their lives. When Faith Becomes Sight will help you grow in confidence that God is attentive to you and involved in your life as you learn to recognize God in and around you, reflect on your experience, and respond faithfully to God's presence and action in your life. Along the way you may venture across new streets and encounter unfamiliar terrain as you notice how God is speaking and what God is doing. In those silent, shimmering moments, you will be invited to greet the One who has been seeking you your entire life-the Divine Presence who is all around you.

Beth Booram is the co-founder and director of Sustainable Faith Indy, an urban retreat center in Indianapolis, where she leads The School of Spiritual Direction and offers individual and group spiritual direction. Beth speaks around the country on topics related to spiritual formation and Christian leadership and has been involved for more than thirty years in a variety of ministry roles on the college campus and within the local church. Beth is a deep feeler who loves to think, an extrovert with a penchant for solitude, and an artist who sees the hand of God in even the smallest encounters with creation. She and her husband David live near downtown Indianapolis in their 100-year-old home and retreat center. She has authored several books including Awaken Your Senses, Picturing the Face of Jesus and The Wide Open Spaces of God.

Autor

Beth A. Booram is the cofounder and director of Fall Creek Abbey, an urban retreat center in Indianapolis, where she and her husband David lead The School of Spiritual Direction and offer individual and group spiritual direction. She is the coauthor of Awaken Your Senses and the author of several books including Starting Something New. David Booram is the cofounder and director of Fall Creek Abbey, an urban retreat center in Indianapolis, where he and his wife Beth lead The School of Spiritual Direction and offer individual and group spiritual direction. He is the founder of Direction 4 Life Work, through which he is a career counselor.

Textauszug

Preface

THE DOORBELL RANG ABOUT 11 A.M. one Tuesday morning. I (Beth) opened the door and welcomed Rick into the foyer of Fall Creek Abbey, our home and retreat house. I’d met him before, but this was the first time that we would meet for spiritual direction. Seeing him again reminded me of my previous impressions—that he was a gentle, soft-spoken, kind man. I asked if he’d like a cup of coffee or tea. “No,” he responded. “I’m fine—already had my quota.”

I showed him to my office, a small room off the living room. Rick sat in the chair opposite me, looking out the window into our backyard. We took a few minutes to exchange small talk. Once I sensed that he was comfortable, I asked how familiar he was with spiritual direction. He explained that he’d heard about it for some time, liked the sound of it, and because of all that was going on in his life, felt it was time to seek some support.

We began with a brief period of silence in which I suggested that Rick ask God to help him identify what he should focus on during our time. He agreed. I watched as he bowed his head and closed his eyes. I did the same, praying silently a simple prayer of dependence.

Finally, Rick broke the silence by beginning to speak. His voice was soft and speech was slow. He told me about the last several years as the senior leader in a nonprofit organization. He was chosen for this role after a tumultuous season when the founder was asked to resign. For the first few years Rick felt empowered and energized by the work and confident in God’s calling. Yet for the last year and a half, he’d begun to wonder if he was really the man for the job, if he really had what it took to do the job well.

This wasn’t all, Rick explained. He’d had some health issues that made him feel fatigued and not himself. One of his adult kids had struggled with depression, and he didn’t know what to do or how to help. And his prayer life; it felt empty, meaningless and dry. It hadn’t always been that way. But for some time, he’d begun to wonder where God was for him. Why God seemed so silent and distant. He processed out loud how this stage of the Christian life wasn’t what he’d expected. And he was at a loss as to how to make sense of everything.

I listened intently, praying to discern which thread of his story to give a tug. I finally asked, “Rick, if you were to say in a sentence or two why you’re here today, what would you say?” He paused for a long moment. And then he said, “Even though I’m disappointed with God and life, and God seems so far away, I still want to be close to him.” His eyes glistened at this admission. I nodded my head, feeling the integrity of his response. “Rick, what if the very longing you feel is an indication of the Spirit at work, awakening you more fully to God?”

Rick’s countenance lightened a bit. He confessed that it was something he’d never considered. “If that were true, Rick, what might that reveal about how God is being toward you right now?” Again, he took his time to answer. And then he said, “It feels a little frustrating. I wish he would just show up and speak clearly or do something for me rather than just make me feel so desperate for him.”

“Yes. That’s understandable.” I responded. “Why might God want you to feel so desperate for him? Is there anything in your desperation that might be important to experience?” This time, there was no pause. He blurted out with more conviction, “I think my desperation for God is making me seek him more than ever—more than anything. I think that’s probably a good thing, right?” He grinned.

“What do you think? Is it good?” He exhaled a reply, “Yes. It’s good. I guess it even feels good to want to be closer to God in a way that I haven’t for a long time.”

This conversation, though specific to Rick and his life situation, had a familiar ring to it. Not only did it remind us of the many stories we’ve heard in hundreds of hours spent in holy listening, it also resonated with our own lives and experience of God. We are two people who know what it is like to feel disillusioned, to struggle because the Christian life we’re experiencing doesn’t match what we had pictured life to be as a follower of Jesus.

EYES TO SEE

We’ve written this book out of the harvest of more than four decades of following Christ and a decade’s time of offering spiritual direction. We hope you will benefit from the generous framework we offer—one large enough to hold the things that are perplexing, disturbing, and incongruent with reason and rationality. In short, rather than trying to fit God and life into a system of beliefs, this book suggests that we can find God by paying attention to our own lived experience, that we can, as St. Ignatius said, “find God in all things.” Not that God causes all things but we can discover God present and available to us in the midst of all. To do so, what we need most are eyes to see God.

At first, that statement sounds as though some of us have “it” and others don’t. As if some willfully choose blindness over sight. But our observations suggest that most people truly want to know whether God is present and active in their lives. So the lack of seeing is not out of stubborn refusal but rather out of simply not knowing what to look for or not recognizing unfamiliar expressions of the presence and action of God—like desire and desperation, as Rick discovered.

The intent of this book is to help you gain assurance that God is with you and is actively involved in your life and world by growing three capacities: your capacity to recognize God, reflect on your experience, and respond faithfully to God’s presence and involvement in your life.

Here’s a brief description of what we mean:

Recognize. There are two things that must be true for you to recognize God. God must want to be experienced and you must be looking for God. For the divine to be experienced, your encounter will invariably be mediated. In other words, God will come to you through something else: a “burning bush” in nature, an inner quiet prompting, a dream or vision, an evocative Gospel story, a recurring theme, or through some much-needed provision. The medium is not always tangible, but it is sensory. In other words, through your human senses, including your emotions, you perceive God through the experience. So, for you to recognize God you must have eyes to see God and expect to see God through a variety of holy, ordinary, and sometimes extraordinary showings.

Not only is learning to recognize God’s mediated presence necessary for your assurance, so is a repeated experience of God’s presence. When you have an experience, it is never isolated or simply episodic. It is an experience that builds on the past. You recognize an oak tree because you’ve had a past relationship with oak trees in which you noticed their particularities and logged their appearance in your library of botanical memories. The same happens when faith becomes sight. Through repeated noticing of God, your faith is strengthened as you become more adept at identifying Christ’s invitations and overtures of love toward you.

Reflect. Once you gain the skills to track the Spirit’s movement in your life, you will learn the value of reflecting on your experience. Reflection takes time. Reflection requires intention. Reflection is what takes the encounter into you, allowing it to affect you, to find a place of resonance within you. It’s what allows an ordinary event in your life to become deeply personal, spiritual, and transforming. These kinds of experiences deepen your assurance of God’s nearness as they become windows through which you see the activity of the divine.

Respond. Not only will you be encouraged throughout this book to learn to recognize God’s presence within and all around you and reflect on your experiences, you will also be prompted to notice your response to God in your experiences. We are rarely aware that as we perceive God’s initiating presence we also respond to it with some variation of openness or resistance. Paying attention to your response will help you assess if that is how you want to respond. If that is what it means for you to respond faithfully and fully to God’s initiatives.

Rick had an initial reaction to God when he realized that God might be in his desperation. He felt frustrated. Why didn’t God make it easier on him by being more deliberate in his actions or by speaking more clearly? Fortunately, once he reflected on his desperation, he began to see the gift in it. His desperation and the feeling of God’s silence or absence made him want God more, thirst for God more earnestly. And in that increased thirst, he developed a more resolute surrender to his desire for God and commitment to seek God alone.

A word about how this book is organized. It’s divided into three sections and will invite you to consider your experience of God through three distinct directions of focus: looking for certain phenomena in your experience of life, looking through several conscious and unconscious lenses you may have, and looking within your own interior life of emotions, sensations, and spiritual movements. May these three vantage points help your faith become sight as you open your eyes more fully to God’s presence all...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 19.11.2019
• Verlagsort: Lisle
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Gesundheit / Leben / Psychologie ► Esoterik / Spiritualität
• Themenwelt: Religion / Theologie ► Christentum ► Kirchengeschichte
• Themenwelt: Religion / Theologie ► Christentum ► Moraltheologie / Sozialethik
• Schlagworte: Christian Life • christian living • Discern • Discernment • Divine presence • God hunt • God is Near • God Is Speaking • god moment • God sighting • god's presence • God's voice • is god near to me • is god present • is god speaking • living in god's presence • recognize god • shimmering moment • Spiritual direction • spiritual director • Spiritual Formation • sustainable faith indy • The presence of God
• ISBN-10: 0-8308-4837-1 / 0830848371
• ISBN-13: 978-0-8308-4837-9 / 9780830848379