Progressing in this forward movement from surrender to abandonment to contentment to participation is the mysterious secret of wise saints, some of whom you and I may have encountered. (We might consider them to be the people we want to be like “when we grow up.”)
Believe that you may become one of them. As you do, your life will never, ever be boring because you’ll understand that interacting with God creates a daily divine drama that makes the average life in our culture look boring.
TODAY’S EXPERIMENT - Consider what it would look like for you to move forward on this continuum of identifying your will with God’s: surrender . . . abandonment . . . contentment . . . participation. Ask God for grace and wisdom to help you discern what your next steps could be, including the use of any spiritual disciplines:
-Confessing roadblocks
-Practicing community with those on this path or those who will stretch you on this path
-Serving in a way that makes abandonment a reality
-Practicing solitude to surrender yourself regularly
In self-examination processes such as these, we must avoid turning our eyes back on ourselves with recurrent analysis. This is not helpful. Nor is wondering if we’ll ever get to participation. Such self-preoccupation can, in fact, keep us spinning so that we
are not wholly preoccupied with God in our lives. It’s better to simply ask God, What do I need to know? Perhaps what is needed is to simply believe this progression is possible, to believe that you can participate in the divine drama of accomplishing God’s will in our world in some way. Here’s the reality: Partnering with God in this way on a day-to-day basis can be much more interesting and engaging than any movie you’ve ever seen.
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