Years ago a very wise priest said to me that God is easy to experience but difficult to understand. ‘Signs of God’s grace,” which is an exercise many of us are engaged in – and which is the title for this blog, is one way for people to identify experiences – or encounters, with the holy.
Our worship, going back to the first Christian liturgies, has been designed to fill us with God’s grace. The gathered community receives God’s grace through the careful blending of scripture, sermon, music, flowers, Eucharist, prayers, movement and the community itself. God’s blessing and grace abounds in worship.
And God’s blessing and grace abound in the world as well. We need to train ourselves to be more able to see moments of God’s grace, claim our experiences of God – and pass them on. The purpose of being missional is to see more and more arenas of life where God is working.
For many years, I have taken spiritual discipline very seriously. Study, worship, prayer, service – they have been incredibly important. As I reread Dwight Zscheile’s book, People of the Way, and as we as a diocese become more intentional about being missional, I am beginning to see the invitation – indeed the need, to include missional discipline as part of spiritual practice. The missional discipline of seeing the face of Christ in someone else, and being open to someone else’s experience of God – in order to deepen my own.
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