chris erdman

A few days ago, I sat on a train, headed to Los Angeles for meetings. I was minding my own business. Since Amtrak has wireless, I was grading student reflections on their reading of Thomas Merton and Henri Nouwen. The readings invited them to move out of the zone of their own comfort to encounter God in others. One of them, Joseph, wrote:

“God created us to be in relationship with one another. It is my tendency (and I believe most of humanity’s tendency) to shut out those around us. I can no longer assume that God can’t use all people and all relationships to speak to me.”

No sooner had I read this, than a man behind me asked if he could use my cell phone. Busy with my “work” I’d taken no real notice of him. “I said ‘no.’” And went back to my work. He stood up and started down the aisle with an handful of five dollar bills asking people if he could pay to use a phone.

He was a middle aged black man, dressed in a black T-shirt and sweat pants. The T-shirt was new. It still had the crease lines from being recently liberated from its package.

“I need to call my wife and tell her I’m arriving at Union Station in LA.”

He looked desperate. And his desperation pulled me out of my cramped, little world just enough for me to say, “Hey, use mine. But you don’t have to pay for it.”

After he’d made the call, I learned that he was on his way home after several years in prison. “Just out this morning,” he told me. “Can’t wait to see my wife. But I can’t walk from the station, ’cause the shoes she sent me are too small.”

He grinned happily despite his discomfort. A man who’d just be let out of prison was seeing the world with new eyes.

I’ve never known a day behind bars, but captivity doesn’t require a jail cell. I need others, people very different from myself, to step out of all that holds me captive inside my own cramped little world.

Intention: Help me today, Lord Christ, to see the world with the eyes of one who’s not so used to it all that I can’t enjoy its wonder.

“We should not be too sure of having found Christ in ourselves until we have found him also in the part of our humanity that is most remote from our own.”

Thomas Merton

What will it take for a true Christian revolution to take hold of us?  It’s too easy for us to build walls between us.  Who’s right.  Who’s wrong.  Who’s in.  Who’s out.  The dividing walls are becoming more numerous.  Thicker too.  Before long we’ll be trapped in a maze of our own making.  Prisoners in our own little worlds, having excluded everyone else but those who are just like us.  Far from what it truly means to be human, in-dwelt by the Divine.

Intention: Today, I’ll open myself to someone who I would otherwise ignore as too different from myself.  As I do I’ll find something of myself, some part of me I’ve ignored, judged, dismissed, and excluded from the loving embrace of Christ.

Have you ever experienced a moment in prayer when it felt as if a gentle rain was falling on your shoulders?

For many of us prayer is a duty–a should, an ought. Of course, there are benefits prayer. We have a sense that the God of the universe had heard what’s on our hearts, and we believe that God will do something with what we’ve expressed. More than that, we’ve seen answers to prayer, and these answers keep us going, keep us praying.

But prayer as a gentle rain falling upon the thirsty earth of your inner being? When was the last time you felt that?

This nourishment of prayer is not something you can believe; it’s something you experience. Beliefs are artifacts of faith; they’re derived from genuine spiritual experience, they are not spiritual experiences themselves. Faith, on the other hand, is the experience of God, and that experience cannot be fully described anymore than your love for another person can be fully described. If course, we try. And well we should. Experiences nearly cry out for communication. Poets try to speak of the love that burns in their hearts. Artists paint it. Musicians put it to sound. But these expressions are symbols and metaphors, not the real thing–as lovely as they may be.

So you believe in prayer. That’s good. But why not experience it? Get outside the usual cramped space of your praying, and step into the rain. A slow, life-giving rain is falling.

Too few get out of themselves long enough to feel it.

Intention: Today, I’ll pause for prayer, but I’ll avoid telling God things. Instead, for just a few moments, I’ll let the grace of God fall upon my parched soul, like “rain and snow that water the earth” (Isaiah 55.10).

Gordon Cosby may be the most influential pastor you’ve never heard of.  He’s a model and mentor of the kind of life I write about in these posts.  And today, we need strong models, witnesses to the life of the Spirit.  He’s one who attracted thousands upon thousands to the Jesus of the Gospels, many who were either burned out or turned out by the Jesus of suburbia bandied about buy a large segment of American Christianity.  His vision of Jesus and his way of life is particularly important in these days of increased suspicion, hostility, and violence.

Gordon died on March 20, 2013 in Washington DC.  The co-founder of the Church of the Savior co-founder and life-long servant leader he passed into the full presence of God at Christ House, a hospice he helped to found for the homeless.

From the Washington Post:

Gordon was absolutely Christian. He was focused on Jesus and sought to live deeply in Christ. I once asked him if his intense focus on Christ did not get in the way of interfaith conversation and respect. He told me that it was his experience that those who went most deeply into their own religion’s truths seemed to understand each other and communicate with each other best. He was profoundly and distinctively Christian without an ounce of parochialism.

How many of us have dreamed of doing something new, adding something to our lives, cutting something out?

And how many of us have done what we’ve dreamed of doing? Why not?

In this TED Talk, Matt Cutts, an engineer at Google, invites you to do something for 30 days . . . and see what happens. In less than six minutes, he’ll embolden you to step out and achieve something new in your life.

Write a novel.

Lose weight.

Break the Facebook stranglehold on your time.

Go deeper in prayer.

Stop dreaming and DO.

Jesus grew up in Nazareth, a peasant of Galilee. Galilee was hill country and life there was difficult. A drought or bad harvest could endanger whole villages. Infant mortality was about thirty percent, and only sixty percent of children lived beyond teenage years. The peasants’ diet was poor: bread, olives, wine; lentils, a few greens, figs, an occasionally some cheese or yoghurt.

Religious practices were simple. In the rural villages there were no scribes or priests. Families practiced the faith with great devotion, for their vulnerability meant they had little hope except in God.

Twice a day, upon rising and at the time of sleep, peasant families recited a simple prayer, the Shema Israel: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might” (This portion from the Torah is what Jesus refers to in Mark 12.29-30).

There was little time for extended prayers, and of course, no possibility of reading sacred texts, since no one could read. The prayers were simple, intense, and frequently recited. It reminded these peasants of the one thing that mattered most to them: to love God with every fiber of their being.

Intention: Today, I will gather my life and energy around the simple act of loving God. My head and hands may be busy with ideas and plans and work, but my heart can rest in God through a simple prayer I can return to over an over again.

We all dream, but how many of us take real notice of them?

When we take note of them at all, they generally bewilder us, trouble us, and amuse us. But rarely do they instruct us. Most of us who remember a dream here and there dismiss them as irrelevant. Some of us do remember them, but when we do, we tend to misinterpret them. They rarely mean what seems obvious to us.

Dreams are rich material for self understanding, guides for the spiritual journey.  But they are a very different mode of communication than we’re used. to.

Every religious tradition honors them, but few of us know what to do with them. In the Bible, dreams are taken very seriously. That’s been true throughout history. But today, the modern mind discounts them as phantoms of the imagination–unreliable, and often impenetrable by conventional reason.

Learning from your dreams is an art. They require attention, objectivity, humility, and patience. They are as important as the sense-data that comes to us when we’re conscious, but they come from a very different place within the mind. You know, don’t you, how a frightening or bizarre dream can lead you into a frump as surely as a critical word for your boss can, or a bad result on a test?

Frankly, dreams often need another to interpret them. And that’s a problem for us, for who among us is in a relationship with someone who doesn’t have an agenda for us, who will listen without bias, who will remain curious, open, and playful with our dreams, holding the interpretation loosely, as we wait together for something to click?

Because we don’t have such persons, we tend to miss out on all God would teach us through our dreams.

You can change that. The first step is to become aware of your dreaming–to welcome them, as bizarre as they might be. Start to write down as much of them as you can, without concern for making sense of them. Observe them over time. Notice how they make you feel. Look for themes and connections–between dreams, and to what’s happening in your life. And while you’re doing that, wait for someone to come who will sit with you as you together listen for the dream’s wisdom.

That someone will come as surely as your dreams will–if you attend to them patiently.

Intention: Today, I’ll open myself to my dreams as gifts from the Spirit to my spirit. I’ll simply become curious, and take note of them in a more disciplined way than I have in the past.  That’s a good enough beginning.

The way you greet the day matters. Your first lucid moments set the course for what follows. Set that course with intention, through a simple prayer, and you’ll be okay. The prayer needn’t be long, but it ought to be clear. In fact, the simpler, briefer, and more focused it is, the better.

For the better part of your life, you’ve let the day start you. Your alarm awakens you, and you stumble out of bed. You turn on the coffee or the shower. A steady stream of thoughts flows through your head. You get the newspaper, put on music or the TV. Maybe you check your email or head off to the gym. The mental stream swells, and as it does, your body and spirit are pulled along with it. Even first thing in the morning, tension and stress tug at your neck and shoulders. The thought-stream nags at you from the start, demanding more from your body than your body’s ready to give. So you pump a little more caffeine into your veins and jot another note on your to-do list. These thoughts—largely unexamined—have yanked you into a river whose direction you control far less than you realize.

Isaiah says, “Morning by morning GOD wakens–wakens my ear to listen as those who are taught” (50.4b).

What might it mean for you to arouse your spirit first thing–to embrace the day and join up with God?

Intention: Tomorrow, I’ll embrace the moment of my rising and waken my ear to GOD. Doing so has the power to change everything.

A friend’s mother died suddenly early this morning. I got the call at 3:30am. After comforting the family, I found myself plunged back into my own experiences of grief–my own mother’s, years ago, and a few more recent ones. I also found myself tumbling back into experiences of loss I thought would undo me, but didn’t.

Loss is inevitable. And it hurts. Frightens us too. Loss is a reminder of how vulnerable we are, how much we’re not in control after all. Loss of any kind can send us spinning, craving firm footing again.

When we do so, it’s not hard to bury ourselves in work or anything else that might distract us, numb us, and help us avoid the pain.

But loss is an invitation. There’s grace in it, hidden beneath the pain. Through loss we can come to greater clarity about what really matters in life.

Through some losses I thought would destroy me, I’ve learned that a lot of what I thought I needed, I don’t really need, and so much I thought I could not live without, I can, in fact, live without.

Grief has taught me how involved I am in humanity, how much I’m made for love. And loss has taught me that the one thing I need most can never be taken from me.

Perhaps that’s what it means to live Holy Saturday, halfway between Good Friday and Easter Sunday.

Intention: Today, I’ll let my losses shift my priorities again. I’ll look back upon them gratefully–even through my pain–and realize they can be my teachers.  Every loss can open me to embrace life more fully.

Kon Leong is co-founder, president and chief executive of ZL Technologies in San Jose, California. Adam Bryant of the New York Times recently caught up to him and chatted about leadership and life and advice for students fresh out of college.

“Experiment,” he says. “You can go in any direction. So experiment and you’ll have a much better chance of finding your sweet spot. And the sweet spot is the intersection between what you’re really good at and what you love to do. A lot of people would kill for that because, at 65, they’re retiring and never found it. Try to find your sweet spot and, once you find it, invest in it.”

Yes, to be spiritually and vocationally alive you must lean into your own God-breathed originality. There are so many bullying voices–inside and outside your head. If you can refuse them and find the sweet spot God’s made you for–what you’re good at and what you love to do you’ll not only live a better live, you’ll made life better for others.

Intention: Today, I’ll take note of those times when I’m in the zone, doing me and doing me well. I’ll look for those times when I’m happy, feeling good, and see if I’m doing things well at the same time. That’ll tell me something I need to hold on to.