Reflections on God52

I must admit I've fallen behind on the God52 weekly posts and exercises. This has partly to do with recent events in my personal life and partly with my own procrastination and has lead me to think about the God52 process and it's impact on me, personally.

I think the idea is great! Each week a new discipline being challenged. A new focus for spiritual development. Behind the idea is the feeling that we are falling short in certain spiritual disciplines and so we need to challenge ourselves to improve them.

This, however, is where God52 starts failing for me. I find myself approaching the exercises as a sort of check list; Give extravagantly? check; Focused prayer? check; 1 hour meditation? check. Been there, done that. What it isn't doing is helping me to develop these into disciplines that I practice every day. Once I've achieved a task I move on to the next week's challenge and forget about what I learned in the week before. I certainly have not practiced any previous week's challenge consistently this year!

So I've decided to not follow every challenge every week. I will rather choose specific challenges to work towards developing into disciplines. This week's challenge is a great example for me to start on - meditation. Sitting still for 1 hour just focussing on God. Not praying. Not singing. Not listening to worship music or podcast sermons. Just sitting quietly. It's a massive challenge for me; someone who is always multitasking at least 10 things in my head while working on 5 things at work, but I can see the value of meditation and I can see how it's missing in my daily life.

So God52 is great. I'll keep checking up on what each challenge is for each week because you never know how it might challenge you, but personally I'm going to be picking just a few challenges to work on, so as to develop them into disciplines.

Reaching out...

Ultimately the goal of our Christian walk is to go and make disciples - after worshipping and loving God of course. I suspect I am not alone in feeling inadequate in this area. The first evangelical challenge of God52 was therefore a big challenge, not just for me.

I take some consolation in reading about the efforts of other bloggers in the challenge of praying for a non-believer. Many of the bloggers are full time ministry workers who you might expect to excel at this sort of thing. It was with some measure of relief therefore that I saw how others were struggling to fulfill this task. Everything from offering to pray for people via a Twitter hash code, to stealth praying for people - they won't know what hit them!

Don't get me wrong. My missionary life has led me to many opportunities to pray for, and with, non-believers. Yet I am still afraid to declare my beliefs aloud. Not to mention the fact that these days I hardly even come into contact with non-believers. All my friends are believers, I work with believers, I serve in worship in my church... with believers. So it's already a bit of a challenge.

Put it to God though and He will make an opening. I went on a very important trip to buy something. On this trip I was praying, asking God for favour to get a good price. I threw in a prayer at the end for an opportunity to be a witness. I thought I could use the interaction with the sales clerk to initiate a conversation that might allow me to pray for him/her. Plan in place I entered the shop... and was approached by a woman with head covering....Muslim!... In an instant all my resolve fled. Any plan I had to use my missionary status to negotiate a better price was crushed! How could I share with this woman? How could I dare pray for her?

In hindsight I realise I had been given an awesome opportunity and I blew it! I should have entered with boldness and courage and shared what God had placed on my heart, but I fled into the security of a stealth prayer. I'm not knocking quietly praying for people without their knowledge, but in this case it was just an excuse to avoid standing up for my faith.

This God52 stuff is a hard! Sadly I seem to be failing more than I'm succeeding. Hopefully as the year progresses I'll improve and learn.

Desire vs Will

It is interesting to me how often things coincide in my life. Different aspects, from difference sources, come together at the same time. So it was when God52 called on us to fast 1 day in the week, OM also called on us the fast in the same week. Thus a 1 day fast became combined with a 3 day pray & fast.

Food has never had much of a hold on me. I eat when I'm hungry, but have never had a problem eating too much. It's surprising then that fasting is so difficult. The craving for food is incredible during a fast. I've gone through days, when I am really, really busy, where I completely forget to eat. Start a day of fasting though and suddenly all I want to do is eat! It doesn't help that odd temptations arise as well.

For example, the only time that my house mate has ever offered to share his breakfast with me was on the same day I was fasting! The second day of my 3 day prayer & fast (I was just fasting lunches), one of our workers came in and offered me Kudu droewors! He's never done that before!!

I suspect that God throws these things at us to test just how serious we are about the commitment we made. I see this not only during fasting, but also with other commitments. We might be tempted to blame the enemy for these tests - and perhaps sometimes it is him - but I suspect more often the testing of our commitment comes from God. He wants to see us thrive in the challenge. He wants to see our will triumph over our desire.

I wasn't so good at it this time. The Kudu wors was too much... I took a bite even before I realised what I was doing! Next time I'll do better!