What or who is transforming your life? Who or what are you becoming?
What is sustaining your life? Who or what is keeping you going and growing?
As we continue to look for ways to weave Jesus into the rich fabric of our city and beyond we have been asking ourselves some of these questions.
The reality of transformation and need for sustenance are unavoidable facts of life. They happen to us anyway, our choice is about whether we are intentional about what is involved.
We have loved over the summer the chance to once again see our pop-up café spring into life. It adds an extra dimension to our welcome and are grateful to those who helped to make it happen. Great cakes, delicious soup and sumptuous sandwiches.
In many ways bread is the very stuff of life – some how ordinary but put alongside a leek and potato soup or filled with tuna mayonnaise, it can become extraordinary. And as Christians we believe that with the Holy Spirit inside us the same can happen – the seemingly ordinary person when they become alive in the pursuit of God can become extraordinary.
Ultimately, nothing in this life, apart from God, can satisfy our desires. Can sustain us. Can transform us. Tragically, we continue to chase after our desires ad infinitum.
The result?
A chronic state of restlessness or, worse, angst, anger, anxiety, disillusionment, depression—all of which lead to a life of hurry, a life of busyness, overload, shopping, materialism, careerism, a life of more…which in turn makes us even more restless. A life where there is never enough.
Do you have enough? Could a life with God be enough for you?
In a society which has experimented to the point of saturation with every form of material, physical and spiritual palliative to fill the inner emptiness of the heart, Jesus offers an invitation to become like him.
So the goal of reading Scripture or praying is not information but spiritual formation. To take on the “mind of Christ.” To actually think like Jesus thinks. To fill your mind with the thoughts of God so regularly and deeply that it literally rewires your brain, and from there, your whole person. Live as if he is enough.
Augustine, a bishop from Northern Africa writing at the fall of the Roman Empire. said, ‘thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.’
More recently, Dallas Willard, a Christian philosopher, put it this way, our desires are infinite, partly because we were made by God, made for God, made to need God and made to run on God. We can be satisfied only by the one who is infinite, eternal and able to supply our needs.
We are only at home in God. To help us as a community consider this more we are looking to offer some new opportunities to explore and learn. Two of these will begin this month.
Practicing the way is a short course that hopes to some habits that might help any of us who want to, to become more like the one we seek to follow. If that is you then why not consider signing up.
The second is ‘The Bible Course’, it is designed to help us to become more familiar and comfortable with the big stories that make up the library of books that we call the bible.
Why not think about coming along, you are sure to be warmly welcomed.
The Very Revd Andy Bowerman, Dean of Bradford