If you weren’t able to attend, let me know if you’d like to talk through the slides to get a better understanding of the flow of our conversation.

The Story of God, the Story of Us — I recommended this book to everyone in a Sunday gathering sometime last year, but it’s worth another mention. It is a retelling of the entire scope of the Bible story in an easy to read narrative. It ties important themes together, leaving the reader with a helpful understanding of the larger context of the stories in the Bible. It’s worth reading alone, or with older children.

The Wisdom of Stability — We live in an ever mobile, ever changing culture. Jonathan Wilson-Hargrove writes about the significance, intimacy, and meaning that comes with being devoted to a place and the people that inhabit it. It is challenging and encouraging at the same time, and helpful for framing both short-term and long-term life decisions.

The King Jesus Gospel — Scot McKnight is the rare academic that can write deeper theological insights that are understandable by non-academic readers. He gives a richer, fuller understanding of the gospel, connecting following Jesus to much more than what happens after we die.

Daily Examen

The Daily Examen is a reflective practice first developed about 500 years ago by Ignatius of Loyola. It is time of prayer as the day comes to close. There are many variations to the Daily Examen, but here is a simple example of processing through five movements:

1. Become aware of God’s presence.
2. Review the day with gratitude.
3. Pay attention to your emotions.
4. Choose one feature of the day and pray from it.
5. Look toward tomorrow.

This particular form of the Examen comes from a website called Ignatian Spirituality, and more description about each of the steps can be found here.

Yearly Reflection

We introduced the Daily Examen, but our main goal in discussing reflective prayer this week was to allow us to be intentional about the closing out of a calendar year. We were all encouraged to set aside some time in the coming weeks to journal through the following questions:

• What have been the high points this year?
• What have been the difficult times this year?
• How have you grown this year?
• In what ways have you not grown this year? Or even gone backward?
• Where have you seen God at work this year?
• If you project this year forward, who will you be in five years?
• Who do you want to be in five years?

We won’t set aside a Sunday for practices in December, but we will return to these questions, and our own learnings from them, for our practices Sunday in January.

We began with an image of a city with the word Prayer somewhat lost in the middle of it. While prayer is often accompanied by images of nature, the reality of prayer is that it exists in the everyday, as we learning engage with God not only to the sounds of chirping, but of street traffic.

While I don’t like the idea of turning the mysteries of prayer into some kind of formula to follow, it was helpful to break down prayer into the unique ways we experience it. Prayer can come in many forms and postures, and our hope was to understand them to see how we tend to engage with God most, while also recognize where we might be able to develop.

The broad strokes of prayer that we looked at were:

1. Praise – The contemporary experience of praise is often through music in a church service, but praise is any form of prayer that recognizes the goodness and glory of God.
2. Petition – This may be the most common understanding of prayer in our culture (and therefore it also may be the most misunderstood). Petition is the practice of turning over needs and concerns to God, with an expectation that God will act coinciding with our release of control over those concerns.
3. Confession – An act of laying bare our soul to God and recognizing where we have missed the mark in our efforts to live as God intends for us.
4. Reflection – Sometimes overlapping with confession, reflection comes as we take the time to look at our selves and our experiences, asking God to show us where we are being formed. It is a posture of listening and awareness, and often comes through journaling or Scripture reading.
5. Retreat – An intentional time of withdrawal from the immediate in an attempt to connect with the eternal. A place where prayer might be most mysterious as we engage in forms of meditation or contemplative prayer.
6. Presence – Living with an ongoing awareness of God’s work in us and around us as we go through the common activities of our day.

As we do each month as we talk about unique practices, the challenge is for each of us to reflect on these in the month to come, and talk about our experiences intentionally practicing one or two of these forms of prayer in the month to come. I’m looking forward to hearing how it goes for each of us.

Praying for a Christmas where you are reminded that God, compelled by love, is always finding new ways to move into this broken world.

Paul’s time with the people of Ephesus is recounted in Acts 19 and 20. Specifically, this Sunday we’ll look at Acts 19:8-41 and 20:17-38. Take some time to read these passages this week, and bring your observations and questions from the text with you to our gathering on Sunday.

We will remember and celebrate Pentecost on Sunday, May 23. As we anticipate and expect Pentecost in the coming weeks, we will sit together in some key texts that describe how the church was anticipated and then enacted by Jesus and the Spirit through the disciples and other early followers.