The Care of the Soul

The care of the soul is not a program to be mastered; not an agenda to be followed; not a curriculum in which we advance. The care of the soul is a way of life—a way taught by Jesus, followed by the early church, practiced in communities in the mid centuries and almost entirely forgotten and neglected by the modern church today.This way of life is a clarion call to pay attention to God in the world and in your own life. Soul Care is about awakening to what really matters in life—far, far more than monetary success, personal achievement and individual significance. The more modern we become, the more likely we are to both forget and ignore the old, ancient ways that we see in the Scriptures. In today’s world, we value the fast and swift; the busy and the one who can multi-task efficiently; the strong and convincing.  By returning to our roots, we find a whole, other way to live--a way the ancients knew and practiced--a way that brought them life in the midst of trials and tribulation. We need this hope today, don't we?Our souls are in need of great care because there is great violence happening in the world today and great violence in our inner lives. The world seems so thin—so much turmoil—so much disturbing us. We seem on the brink of war with so many. Our inner worlds are in turmoil too! We’ve become over-medicated; over stimulated and over committed. We can’t do it all. We can’t keep up. We’re not sleeping well anymore and there always seems to be a committee meeting happening in our minds when we try to be silent.  The expectations we care in our minds about our work, marriage, money, relationships and witness to the world can sink us. They are heavy, often conflicting with one another and sometimes confusing. We need help.[tweetthis]The care of the soul is a non-linear, fluid and kinder way of life.[/tweetthis] Soul Care has a predictable movement which involves these developments:- an awakening that we need to tend to our inner life.- a confession that we can’t do this on our own and that we need help.- a humility to become a beginner in something we’ve never been good at but need to master.- a guide to show us the way forward.Perhaps we need to just stop here and say that the reason why there is so much resistance to the care of the soul is because we are not really good at all at: awakening, confessing, being humble and realizing we need a guide. Our culture has shaped us into almost the exact opposite of each of these postures of the heart. We have been led to believe we are already the enlightened ones. We have no need of confessing anything because we feel we have not done anything wrong. We are stiff-necked not bowing to anything or anyone. Thinking that we are the real trail blazers we have no need of guide because there is simply no time to ask anyone for guidance.Caring for the soul is seen first and foremost in the life and teachings of Jesus, himself. Since he said, “I am the way…” we would do ourselves some good here if we remembered that the first followers of Jesus never called themselves “Christians.” They referred to themselves as the “followers of the way.” This is mentioned five times in the book of Acts alone.I’m sorry that the church, in general, is not much help here. Addicted to programs, attendance and performance, we must return to the ancient ways to find our own ways of doing our life. I lament this so often as I travel, experience and witness the unfolding of our American attempt to be the church.  Personally, I feel like we are on thin ice with our smoke machines, performance driven ways and spectator like methods of worship.  I'm so thrilled to share a new and just released resource with you here. Our friends, Mark and Carrie Tedder have now released a way for house churches, missionaries, those who travel; those who can't go to church--a new way to worship. It's called, "Scattered and Small" and you can view it here. It's a way to worship without the frills and trappings and for those who might want intimate, small and more reflective.  I am thrilled to discover churches that embrace the care of the soul for the sake of others as a basic tenet of their life. I'm so glad to say, I know of many and lift of the chalice of my life to greet their life.Throughout the history of our faith, individual men and women have stood up and stood against the tide of culture defining our faith and how to do our faith. Throughout time, there have always been individual voices beckoning us this way or that way and a part of caring for your soul is listening to the voices who speak with authority, clarity and conviction.  Perhaps, you might decide to start reading books published 100 years ago–for in these pages, you will find a more distilled voice–a voice that we can benefit from in today's modern world. Ancient wisdom still lives today and helps us today.Potter’s Inn is a resource to individuals who seek to care for their soul and then offer that same care to others. Our Aspen Ridge Retreat is a place people can come to be trained, receive guidance from our trained spiritual guides, and explore more resources we offer.To get started or to continue in the journey of caring for your soul, I’d like to suggest the following places to dig in:

1. Get and read, Embracing Soul Care and do a daily reading. Use it as couples, in small groups, with a friend or alone. There are short entries to grasp some new thinking. Also, consider reading Soul Custody. Use this as a guide because there is a short study at the end of each chapter.
2. Consider having a spiritual guide—a spiritual friend where you can enjoy conversations that are deep; life-giving and healing. At Potter’s Inn, we offer this through Skype, but also in person at the retreat.
3. Attend a retreat this coming year. Consider the Potter’s Inn hallmark retreat: The Soul Care Experience. It’s a five-day, guided retreat covering the life-giving themes of soul care. The May 2016 is almost full but there is room in the fall retreat in October.
4. Consider the Soul Care Institute, which is a two-year, cohort modeled training initiative led by seasoned veterans in the field of soul care.

Caring for your soul is a spiritual journey that has tremendous benefits for our physical life, our human bodies and minds–who always seem to beg for more!  It is a journey of the heart and mind, where a place of convergence begins to flow onward and inward.Blessings as you move onward and inward in the care of your soul this year!  

The Dignity of the Work

The role of the marketplace worker—the teacher—the firefighter—the doctor—the small business owner—is, first of all, to be present. Through your presence, you bring a witness that it is not only you who is present but God is present through you. By showing up in the dailiness of your work be it glamorous or dirty, your presence is a witness that we are not alone—that God is with us. Our confusion in our soul is often in the crux of our soul. We think we have to become “more”—something more than we are right now. The real work of life begins when we simply learn to show up.In a world where we face competition, rivaling priorities and busyness, presence is perhaps one of the most under-estimated and unappreciated aspects to being in the marketplace and not of the marketplace. To show up in your work zone is to awaken to the realization that God has already gone before you. When you open the door to your work, God is already there ahead of you--not behind you. Being assured of this fact can transform how you work and the way you work.We do not just encounter God in our church. We encounter God just as Jesus encountered people in the marketplace. Wherever people are—God is too! [tweetthis]“Bidden or unbidden, God is present.” [/tweetthis]This adage is for ordinary people, who have ordinary jobs, to become aware and awake to the fact that God is with us. [tweetthis]There is no work zone where God is absent.[/tweetthis][tweetthis]That imaginary line that some folks have drawn between sacred work and secular work needs to be erased.[/tweetthis] All work is sacred and to show up in your work clothes and to put on your uniform—whatever that may be: tie or stethoscope or steel tip toe boots, God walks with us. We bring the incarnation of God to the workplace through our skin; our voice and our hands.When we create, we engage in the Genesis creation of making something happen—every day and each day. When the school bell rings- creation begins.When the email comes in,-creation begins.When the voice mail is listened to-creation begins.When your door closes or you enter the cubicle--the work zone begins. Our work, no matter how menial; how significant; important or bland is a part of the unfolding of God’s hands touching the world through our own.----------------------------------Two resources that will help you explore this more deeply are the chapter in Soul Custody which is titled: Soul Vocation: Choosing What to do with your life and Inside Job: Doing the Work within the Work

Outer vs. Inner Markers of Success

One of the great problems of our day is that nearly all of the markers of success are external. We don’t look within to define success. We look outside. What size is their office? What kind of car does she drive? What neighborhood do they live in? Where did they go to school? Does she have her MBA yet? If all we have are external markers of success then we are complicit in promoting a bloodthirsty culture—one that is about domination, power, and control. We speed up so we can get the validation we think we need. We become aggressive in our pursuits of making life work. We both make choices and use people for our own ends. Success cannot be truly enjoyed because if you stop, slow down or smell the roses, someone—somewhere, might get ahead of you. One business executive confessed to me “When one of my colleagues succeeds at something, a part of me dies. I can’t be happy for her because I know I’ve just been bypassed.” It’s a sad state of the soul.When these external markers eclipse any other guiding values available for us, we become servants to the bitch-goddess of success and our hearts become enslaved one quadrant at a time until we lived dead to honor, enslaved to money, and paralyzed to move in any different direction.It seems that aspirations to be great and to be first are as old as the stories within our Bible. It’s interesting to find even the early followers of Jesus caught in plotting their own legacy so as to be remembered as one among the greats. In five short verses, Jesus shifts their paradigm and stretches their understanding of real leadership.They came to Capernaum. When he was safe at home, he asked them, “What were you discussing on the road?” The silence was deafening—they had been arguing with one another over who among them was greatest. He sat down and summoned the Twelve. “So you want first place? Then take the last place. Be the servant of all.” He put a child in the middle of the room. Then, cradling the little one in his arms, he said, “Whoever embraces one of these children as I do embraces me, and far more than me—God who sent me.”First place is last place. That’s a radical shift in understanding—one enough to make the proud fall and the humble to be exalted. Jesus’ model of leadership was something that the eager-beaver emerging leaders found difficult to grasp. Surely it would be about power! Most certainly it would be about grandeur and greatness. Wrong! This radical new paradigm of leadership took years for the early followers of Jesus to develop and it is no different for us today. Every definition of leadership that you think you already know—already assume and perhaps already embody is turned on its head.[tweetthis]Every definition of leadership that you think you already know is turned on its head.[/tweetthis] (This is an excerpt from Inside Job: Doing the Work within the Work IVP 2015 Chapter 3)Please consider ordering Inside Job through:Amazon: Buy through AmazonorBuy through Potter's Inn: Download a FREE Chapter, Download a FREE Session in the Companion Workbook and learn more!Buy and Learn More about INSIDE JOB through Potter's Inn3 Ways to Help in the Launch of Inside Job:1. Using your social media (Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, Instagram, et) to quote the book, take a pix of you and the cover (a contest for this will be launched soon) and more.2. Think beyond buying 1 copy--buy several copy and give copies to your friends, spheres of influence.3. Start a group study and use the workbook.Get the WORKBOOK and download a FREE Session!4. Share this post now on your own social media platforms. We'd be very grateful for the "SHARE".Thank you for all of your consideration! 

Sabbatical: Going to the End of My Rope

“You’re blessed when you are at the end of your rope. With less of you there is more of God and his rule.”—Jesus in Matthew 5:3, MessageMost every person I know needs to dismantle their emotional programming for what it means to be happy in life. We are hard-wired to think that happiness and joy come by chasing the outer markers of success in life: a bigger house, a nicer car, a new toy. I explore this in Inside Job, my new book. We believe a lie and we make a vow that determines how we will live our life and try and try to be happy.Jesus turned this kind of thinking up on it’s head. To be happy—to be blessed—requires a total shift in our paradigm of how we view life. He offered us a paradigm shift in what is called the “Beatitudes.” These statements found in Matthew 5:3-14, are short, pithy and life-altering guidelines which help us not only dismantle our hard-wiring we’ve acquired through culture, church and family, but they help us really see how happiness is cultivated in our lives.In our Sabbatical, Gwen and I have come, face to face, with these statements--these beatitudes. Let me share one here: “Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.” The Message jolts us to our core and says it this way, “You’re blessed when you are at the end of your rope. With less of you there is more of God and his rule.”Blessing and happiness come by our emptying ourselves and having to rely on God in a complete and resolved kind of way. It’s when we are so vulnerable; so power-less; so weak and so empty that there is room for God to do his work. Our poverty is exchanged for his blessing. On our own, some of us try to out work and out wit God.We live as Parker Palmer has aptly coined it: functional atheism. We say believe in God and trust God, yet we live in a manic pace, stripping our souls and running our lives on empty. I had to come face-to-face with this humbling realization in our sabbatical--yet, again. We live as if our life, our work and our relationships are totally up to us. We, the, “functional atheist” of the 21st century, have soul work to do. We’d never admit it but we are more functional atheist than experiencing a faith with sustains, nurtures and shows us how to live with resilience . We live and function as if we are the ones having to push the proverbial boulder up another hill—yet again.Poverty in soul, for me meant that I had to accept let go of my grip on my work--and get out of its grip on me, my ministry and my staff. This acceptance--this consent is my daily work--my daily job. This letting go was a relinquishment of power and control. It required me confessing that I find my satisfaction in work--and not in God is not a good thing for me or anyone else around me. It is a shift towards poverty of soul for me. At times during sabbatical, I was anxious that Potter’s Inn might fail; fall apart or even die. We feel so fragile due to raising our support. Our helplessness actually fostered a deep sense of well-being---why? Because it meant letting go. Poverty of spirit meant a handing over to God all that I simply could not do and should not do.God works in us is to foster, nourish and grow a sense of contentment, inner-serenity and shalom that we live with the awareness that simply says this: No matter what my circumstances; no matter how hard this particular time is in my life; no matter how powerless I feel right now, 'All is well in my life and all will be well around me'. True contentment, my friends, is an Inside Job. In sabbatical, I left my work but I had to do my inside job.It is NOT up to me. I relinquish my efforts to be God—to be everywhere at once and to do multiple things that have stripped my soul bear and left me so empty inside. The great work of God is more than planting churches; more than sharing the Gospel; more than teaching. The great work awaiting each one of us the work of our inside job. God truly does desire our well-being. Sit with that thought for a moment and see where it might take you. What if you took a moment today and sat in your emptiness and weakness—feeling depleted and truly at the end of your rope and experienced the hands of God doing one thing: holding you. That’s it—just let yourself be held for a quiet moment. To sit, rather than DO something is an act of submission--and act of letting go--an act of well-being. Hey, I'm all for action, but even action must have it's seasons, right?In the beginning of our time “off” we felt like we truly were at the end of our rope. We were tired, worn out and experiencing some degree of burn out. So many years of pioneering and work had depleted us. A poverty within is what we had to face. As we faced our own spiritual poverty and admitted it and also confessed it—finally—we were brought low to a place of inner desperation and longing. “God, I don’t feel like I can go on. I can’t retire financially. But I’m at the end. Please God, do something. I let go now. It's time for you to do the thing that you must love to do--transform me and people like me."In that kind of confession, it seemed to have ushered us both into a journey of renewal.

There's Something About Peter

Tertullian (A.D. 155-250), the early Christian historian, wrote that “Peter endured a passion like that of the Lord.” Peter’s name is mentioned roughly 200 times in the New Testament. He began his vocational career as a small business owner along with his brother Andrew and their associates, James and John. His fishing enterprise was abruptly cut short, perhaps in a mid-career sort of crisis, when he met Jesus. That encounter changed everything for Peter.Peter became one of only a handful of important eyewitnesses to the life and legacy of Jesus of Nazareth. Not only did Peter’s passion change from fishing for food to shaping and discipling men and women, but Peter’s own life was transformed—changed from the inside out.  Perhaps this is precisely why Peter is so concerned with the inner-traits of a would-be leader and outlines for us the important inner-markers that are necessary to living successfully and finishing well. Peter knows about the work before the work.Luke, the medical doctor and 1^st church historian, tells us that Peter was the leader, second to none, of the rapidly spreading church.  It was Peter, not Paul, who first realized that the message of Jesus was intended for people outside of the Jewish faith.[1] He was a persuasive preacher par excellence; a formidable thinker about life, faith, and leadership; and a passionate defender of the faith against the criticisms and persecution that threatened the expanding church. In the end, Peter was martyred for his participation in the greatest movement the world has ever known. According to legend, he was crucified upside down. The world’s final assessment of him was that he got it all backwards.On the practical side Peter was married and his wife even accompanied him on some of his journeys.[2] Peter was a family man caring for his mother-in-law[3] and brother Andrew. He knew well the attempts of seeking to balance a life with the pressures of a small business against the competing demands from a family. Peter’s proximity to Jesus is clearly seen as he was present during many of Jesus’ major miracles, including Jesus walking on water, and what is known as the Transfiguration. Peter was witness to Jesus’ remarkable ability to perform miracles thus foreshadowing the miracles he himself would be doing later as seen in the book of Acts. Luke tells us that Peter had such power that people scrambled to stand in his literal shadow as he walked by.[4] This kind of charisma, influence, and leadership make Peter worthy of our examination. It ought to tell us something.[1] See Acts 10.[2] I Cor. 9:5; I Peter 5:13[3] Mark 1:29[4] See Acts 5 for this story.From my latest book Inside Job: Doing The Work Within The Work (Due for release June, 2015 by InterVarsity Press)

Nothing New

It would be tempting to think this is some new phenomenon, that we are the first to see such an unprecedented crisis of character. But that’s not true. This problem is sadly recorded throughout the pages of the Bible where we see men and women with undeniable promise and gifting become tripped up in unwise choices and bottom out in disgrace and dishonor.Do you remember David, the warrior poet? Instead of going to war with his men he went to bed with another man’s wife. The consequences were catastrophic. Or how about Barnabas, Paul’s companion on many of his missionary journeys? He simply could not find a way in his heart to be a team-player. The result was a tragic split in their shared leadership. And it’s not just the men. The women are there too. Two women in one of Paul’s first churches nearly split the church because of their uncontrolled tongues and poisoned hearts for each other. Then there’s Sapphira. She could not bring her husband or herself to make good choices regarding money. They fell into hoarding and so became a negative example for all, a couple of misers with their God given resources.And don’t forget Peter, that impetuous disciple who always spoke before thinking. He would definitely be an unlikely candidate to speak about character. Or would he? Interestingly enough, based on the extraordinary writings of this apostle, I’ve found that we can discover the much needed and absolutely necessary character building blocks that assure us of “never falling”[1] and will keep us from becoming “ineffective and unproductive.”[2][1] II Peter 1:10[2] II Peter 1:8 From my latest book Inside Job: Doing The Work Within The Work (Due for release June, 2015 by InterVarsity Press)