Spiritual Disciplines With Others

I was walking in the park with a friend today, talking about growth in our relationships with God. It occurred to me that a key part of that growth was something we hadn’t touched on much in our talks: spiritual disciplines with other people.

This is something that my favorite authors do talk about, but which I’d never really given much consideration before. In Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline, he divides up his 12 disciplines into three groups: Inward, Outward, and Corporate. His Corporate disciplines are Confession, Worship, Guidance, and Celebration. These are “corporate” because you do them with other people. Well, I do a lot of what I consider worship by myself, but that’s another blog post.

Guidance was the interesting one today. I have two friends that I get together with, separately, once a week. We walk in the woods near my house at lunch time. Our talks are usually centered around God but can involve many of the things that go on in life. We’re sharing our lives and experiences with each other to help each other through the challenges in life. The main way I see that help is encouraging and guiding each other in our relationships with God. Now, it’s not that one is the guide, and the other the follower. We are guides to each other, counselors to each other. I am a couple of decades older than they are, but they have many things to teach me, directly and indirectly. They have many life experiences I do not, and so, many things for me to learn from. They’ve been a great value to me and God has used them to speak directly to me. God has loved me through them.

I have these good friends now, but for much of my life I did not have much in the way of friends. That’s a story for another time (though it’s related to this recent post). Those years without good or close friends, plus my natural introversion, leads me by default to a very private, one-on-one view of spiritual disciplines. It’s me and God. And the “default” disciplines most people think of first are like that: reading the Bible, prayer, and journaling. (Though you can do all three with other people. Corporate journaling sounds really interesting!) Those were the things I did at the start of my real time with God and I did them just with Him. I have seen God use those things to grow me in wonderful ways. God has also used other people to great benefit in my life, as I described above, but until today I’d not put that together with the disciplines I do with God.

The thing that struck me today during my walk in the woods, is that my walk with my friend was a spiritual discipline. What’s a spiritual discipline (or practice, or habit)? It’s where you choose regularly to place yourself before God, spending time with Him, so that he can work changes in your to make you more like Jesus. I choose to go to the woods with my friends regularly. We do it every week (except when one has a new born baby 😉). God is definitely there with us. We spend a little over an hour there each time. I know that God has worked changes in me from the things we’ve talked about there, from what I’ve learned in talking to them and trying to be a good friend to them there. Here’s the great thing about this “spiritual discipline of the woods”: It’s not dreary or boring or repetitive. (You know sometimes your Bible reading can get that way.) It’s exciting, enlivening, challenging.

This makes me think of other times I get together with friends to talk about God. We have a Bible study most Wednesday nights at my house. I’ve been going to Bible studies of one form or another most of the time I’ve been a Christian for the last 30 years. Now I wonder, why did that spiritual discipline not bring about the transformation in my life that others have in recent times?

I’m not sure how much I really included God in those Bible studies for most of my years. Sounds funny, but I think for much of my life “Bible study” was much more a time for socializing, with maybe a little learning of facts and discussing my theology views thrown in. I rarely if ever talked with God about what went on at Bible study. It rarely influenced what I did in my own time with God – though let’s be honest I usually didn’t have any. When in the woods with my friends I’m praying little prayers of help or encouragement for my friend as we walk along. I’m giving praise to God for the good things they share. I’m asking God for insight into what we’re talking about, both for my benefit and theirs. I spend time thinking about the stuff we bring up in the woods, talking to God about it. Things that God places on my heart I bring back into the woods. There’s a continual process there, a going back and forth between and with my friends and God. There’s a continued connection. Most of my Bible studies were sadly “go to Bible study, then forget about it”. But my friends have shown me a new way to include people in my life with God. A way that involves all three of us (or four of us) placing ourselves before God for Him to shape us, together.