Faith Venture

Does it ever happen to you? One day you feel great. Everything goes well. The next you feel depressed with seemingly nothing going right.

Think of Jesus’s friend Simon whom he nicknamed Peter (the rock).

One day Simon blurts out a sentence of amazing spiritual depth. “You are the Messiah.” Jesus calls him a rock.

Soon after, maybe the next day, that rock was more like a rolling stone. The newly crowned Peter blurts out that Jesus can’t possibly be right, that things won’t happen the way he says. Jesus calls him Satan telling him to get out of his way.

Not only Peter but the whole crowd of them seemed to oscillate between euphoria with Jesus doing great things reflecting back on them and depression with some of the hard and weird things Jesus said.

So, we’re not unique feeling that oscillation.

Gradually we learn calm, awareness, perspective. We realize that stuff happens. Like a pendulum given a push and left alone, the swings gradually reduce until we reach the still point. That point of understanding. That point where we can be like Jesus (a little), the calm port in the storm.

This only happens with deep spiritual understanding and experience. That’s why we practice the spiritual disciplines.

This entry was posted on February 3, 2023 at 6:32 am and is filed under Awareness, Disciplines. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.