Sunday 20 July 2008

Reflecting on blogging kingdom signs

Thanks to the Prodigal Kiwis pointing to Steve Taylor's idea of getting members of his congregation to journal about signs of the kingdom in the their daily lives, I was inspired to do the same and have just come to the end of the month's experiment.
I shall miss it but I sense a certain liberation and achievement - is it already month - did I really manage (more or less) to submit to this kind of spiritual discipline for a whole month? Less mundanely, writing about a specific theme and trying to open myself to seeing God at work in my everyday life has been good for me. It's helped me recognize both how splendidly varied and rich my life is, but also how good it is for my soul, for my relationship with God to dwell on smaller things - the play of light, the colour of sky, the texture of friendship. As I've already mentioned it's also helped give me permission to feel and to see how alot of my anger, angst and general worrying can be transformed and used to further the work of the kingdom.
The exercise has also taken me back to reading some books which had a deep impact on my spirituality 20 years ago - Charles Elliott's Praying the Kingdom, Fulbert Steffensky's Feier des Lebens, Dorothee Sölle's Die Hinreise - it's good for me to read those again.
I already miss reading the Opawa bloggers but I look forwards to maybe one day getting people in a community I'm involved with doing something similar.
Thinking about how God may be at work has also shown me that communal prayer is not just an important part of my day but actually offers me essential structure and support for the way of the disciple. It's good to work in a place that gives me that possibility.
Meanwhile you can still keep up with Georgina and Dan on their kingdom blogs, or even try it yourselves.

1 Comment:

Anonymous said...

hi,
glad you found it helpful and glad you were with us.

here at opawa we had a de-brief and those involved found it helpful. one is continuing, as it has become an important discipline for them.

it was simply an idea that i invited people to join if they wanted, a way of employing technology to take the church beyond gathered

steve
www.emergentkiwi.org.nz