A Rule of Life for the Recovering Box-Checker
Intuiting My Way into Cultivating a Relationship with Jesus
I grew up in the height of 1990’s evangelical Christian culture.
Michael W Smith and DC Talk…
WWJD bracelets and purity rings….
Learning how to share the gospel with my friends so they wouldn’t be left behind in the rapture…
All of these things defined my youth group experience as a teenager.
Another thing that defined my youth group experience was keeping a “quiet time journal”. At the beginning of each new year, we would all receive a journal with daily readings that corresponded with the topics we’d be discussing in youth group that year and spaces to record our thoughts. We were to have our little “daily quiet times” and then bring our journal with us to youth group on Wednesday night. If it was incomplete, we’d have to sit out in the hallway and fill it in before we came in to join in the games and fun.
Now, I honestly do think that this approach came from good intentions. Our youth pastor and his wife genuinely loved and cared for us and I am still grateful today for the positive influence they had in my life. But this thing with the quiet time journals…this was deeply misguided.
Some kids blew it off, of course. Other kids like me - the conscientious ones - did develop the habit of taking the time to fill it out every day…but not out of a motivation of wanting to grow closer to Jesus. It came more from a sense that it was what “should” be done. And that “should” still didn’t come from a place of wanting to know and love Jesus better, it came from a place of not wanting to be embarrassed by being made to sit out in the hallway in front of all of the other youth group kids.
It turned what should have been a formative spiritual practice into an exercise in performative box-checking.
These days - some 30 years down the road - many of those 90’s youth group kids have walked through some kind of “deconstruction” experience: a complicated unraveling of the good, true, and beautiful from so much that was deeply broken. I am no exception to that, although I walked through that unraveling before I knew what “deconstruction” was. For some, that unraveling proves too complicated and people walk away from their faith entirely. I am thankful that I have been able to salvage mine and indeed have walked away from that unraveling with a faith that is stronger than it was before. I don’t take that for granted - so many pieces of my own story resonate with those who have walked away from Jesus.
But one lingering effect of the performative, box-checking faith of my youth is that it has left me feeling a little allergic to anything I “should” do to help form my faith.
This has been a challenge at times. Now that I am in a place with my relationship with Jesus that I truly *do* want to further cultivate my relationship with him for the sake of knowing and loving Him better - and not to prove anything to the rest of the youth group kids - I often find myself at odds with many of the traditional recommendations for doing so.
Many guides to forming a rule of life, while designed to be helpful, end up being too formulaic for me. I read one that recommended analyzing all of the various aspects of your life - spiritual, relational, emotional, physical, financial, etc - and then developing a list of habits or disciplines that would help you to live faithfully in each one. This may be a good approach for some - but this is exactly what I, given my background, cannot do.
There is also the reality of the shifting seasons of life. I’ve found that just as soon as I have settled into a certain rhythm and discovered the habits and practices that work well in that season…something shifts and all of a sudden what was working doesn’t anymore. I am left scrambling to re-invent the wheel.
At the same time, cultivating one’s relationship with Jesus doesn’t happen accidentally. I really do believe it is necessary to be intentional about practicing spiritual disciplines and developing habits that help us to live faithfully and resist the siren call of cultural values that would drag us away.
This, of course, led me to a bit of a quandary. How could I be intentional about cultivating my relationship with Jesus without falling back into the performative, box-checking tendencies of my youth? I needed to find a more organic, intuitive way to approach the practice of spiritual disciplines and developing a rule of life.
As time, went on…I did fall into a “rule of life” - if you want to call it that - that has helped me navigate my way through this tension of being intentional about cultivating my relationship with Jesus while maintaining enough flexibility to shift and change with the seasons of life and avoid falling into that old box-checking trap. This has, in fact, been SO organic and intuitive that I’m not sure I can actually tell you how I did it (sorry for those who were hoping for a 10-step system to follow!). But over time, I have gathered these truths to live by that have formed a “rule of life” for me.
I Know That I Am Loved…
This first truth is the one that is foundational to all of the rest, because this is the truth that I completely missed in the box-checking approach to faith of my youth. That box-checking faith of my youth taught me that I had to do the right things to earn God’s favor. Part of my “unraveling” was learning how to recognize that I was his Beloved and that anything else I did flowed from that foundation. (I wrote more about this here).
Tish Harrison Warren states it well in Liturgy of the Ordinary:
“Jesus is eternally beloved by the Father. His every activity unfurls from his identity as the Beloved. He loved others, healed others, preached, taught, rebuked, and redeemed not in order to gain the Father’s approval, but out of his rooted certainty in the Father’s love…[Likewise] you are beloved by God, not by your effort but because of what Christ has done on your behalf. We are weak, but he is strong.”1
I remind myself of this reality in any number of ways: through the reading of the Word and of other words (theology, biography, memoir, literature, poetry) - through praying on my own and with others - through regularly participating in the Eucharist in the context of my church community - through meeting with a trusted spiritual director. When and how I engage those practices shifts and changes with the seasons: but the important thing for me is that in some way, I am regularly bringing myself back to this truth: That I am a Beloved daughter of Jesus, apart from anything else that I do.
I Am Waiting with Patience…
I am not the world’s most patient person - I am actually pretty driven, goal-oriented, and efficient. But many of the circumstances in my life in recent years have forced me to wait. I’ve found myself again and again in places where there was literally nothing that I could do to take the next step towards the goal: there was nothing to do but to wait.
I have not always waited graciously. I have a good friend and mentor who can attest to that fact. He has listened with a great deal of patience to my grumbling and complaining.
And then he reminds me: “Jen, waiting is part of your formation.”
There is part of me that hates that he is right about that.
But, of course, he is. And the more that I have taken that to heart, the more I have seen the fruit that has come from it. This is a posture more than a practice or an action - a posture that I lean into when there is nothing that I CAN do. Embracing seasons of waiting with patience has been a huge catalyst for growth in my life, and I’m slowly learning to be less stubborn about leaning into those seasons.
I Am Finding Delight…
Those of you who are in the habit of reading all the way down to the bottom of these letters may have known this one already! This practice of looking for moments of beauty and joy and delight started during the long, dark year of the Covid pandemic - a year which coincided with many other personal difficulties for our family. These moments of joy are tangible reminders of the presence of God, and learning to look for them sustains my hope when I walk through seasons of darkness.
I Am Caring for My Body…
This is the most recent addition to this list, inserted after I had an out-of-the-blue health scare last year. I’m well past 40 now, and while in general I highly recommend being over 40 for lots of reasons, I’m also finding that I can’t take my physical body quite as much for granted as I used to. And stewarding my physical body well - the good body that God knit together in my mother’s womb - is every bit as much as a spiritual discipline as the more traditional practices of prayer and Bible reading and fellowship. Approaching nourishing myself, overcoming my distaste for exercise (fostered by too much trauma in middle school PE class), and making those routine medical appointments as spiritual practices has been helpful in overcoming my resistance to them.
I Am Proclaiming His Excellencies…
This one is last on the list for a reason: it is undergirded by all of the rest. I took this phrase from the sermon that was preached at my ordination service (by the same mentor and friend who likes to remind me that waiting is part of my formation). This was something that he took to heart early in his own ministry and that I have taken to heart in my own. Proclaiming His Excellencies of course is an aspect of those more “forward facing” aspects of my work: preaching and teaching and writing. But it is equally true in the small things: the way I speak to a discouraged child, the unseen visit to a shut-in parishioner, the brief interaction I have with the barista in my local coffee-shop, in the way I respond to criticism or setbacks. And it is the one that brings all of these things full circle, because to ‘proclaim his excellencies’ is the fruit that overflows from knowing that I am His Beloved.
I keep these in front of me - on a card pinned up on the bulletin board above my desk - and periodically will check in with myself on how I am living in to these intentions.
How did I experience God’s love for me this week? What am I waiting on the Lord for right now? Where did I see beauty and joy and delight? How did I care for my physical body? What opportunities did I have to proclaim His excellence?
There are no boxes to check, just guiding truths to live by. When I find I don’t have good answers to these questions: that’s when I know that it’s time to adjust the specific way I live into those truths to better match what I need in that particular season. This has been sustainable for me in ways that a system of rules is not and kept me close to Jesus while steering clear of old traps.
I don’t share these things as a way of being prescriptive in anyway - the last thing I would want to do is to lead anyone else into box-checking! I share this from a place of describing how navigating these tensions has worked for me….and maybe, just maybe, my experience will help you navigate your own way forward.
Until Next Time,
May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, be with us all. (2 Corinthians 13:14)
Jen
Bits and Pieces
Reading/Watching/Listening:
The new season of the Great British Baking Show launched last week!
Taking Delight:
My 15-year-old daughter has taken the “handmade gift” and elevated it to an art form - literally. She made this beautiful watercolor card and homemade croissants as a birthday gift for a friend.
Thinking About:
“There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy, and the tired.”
~ F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Tish Harrison Warren, Liturgy of the Ordinary, p 17.
Love this!
I've enjoyed the chance to hear your thoughts and insights. Grateful for them.