For: The Essentials Formation Online Worship Values Course with Dan Wilt
I believe the descriptions contained in the Elemental Life (Earth, Wind, Fire, Water) will help us take inventory of our life, holistically, and develop a good strategy for the nurture of Kingdom life in our lives. While we each have natural talents and supernatural gifts, discipline and exercise is required for those gifts to bloom and grow into useful capabilities. It is important to get our arms around the activities and ‘food’ that can bring nourishment and encouragement to our lives and make them abundantly fruitful to God.
This week, Earth: The Grounded Life (1), helped me to see how important our foundational family relationships and core values are to the process of continued growth. I grew up in an environment where integrity, honesty and family were strong core values. I found it interesting to be reminded how important our foundation is to continued growth. I read an email from a missionary friend today that described their work in the very poor areas of Africa. Family and its shared core values give us our core identity. Many young people in Africa have lost both parents to war, disease or famine. The young people have no identity and so have trouble growing personally or spiritually. They have no foundation to build upon. Our faith and our relationship with God is the foundation of a solid family foundation. People in families, who have strong Christian faith heritage, have a doubly deep foundation on which to build their lives.
Thirty-some years ago, an IBM manager talked to a group of us young IBM CE’s. He told us to take great efforts to nurture, build and maintain our family relationships. Time and again, he saw peoples careers come to a halt if they let their marriages and family relationship fail. As Dan said in The Grounded Life video, our faith and family anchors us into the soil. Like Dan’s picture of a ship anchor, they stop us from being set adift in the ocean of chaos and confusion.
I am also reminded of Catherine of Siena’s writing that describes Christ as a bridge and that there are stones of true virtue set into place by God, with mortar tempered with the blood of Christ. Are the stones perfected and shaped by our trials and disciplines? The Stones of Virtue are in our lives to shield and protect us from the raging rivers of life that would threaten to sweep us away otherwise (2).
Faith and family are the foundational grounding of our lives and we can only have life growth when we are securely and firmly anchored deeply into God and family. That is where our identity is founded and firmly stands.
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(1) Earth – A Grounded Life, Video, Dan Wilt
(2) Devotional Classics, Edited by Richard J. Foster and James Bryan Smith, HarperOne, page 266
Mark Grosz