Faith Venture

Four questions for the year.

• How can I improve my spiritual health this year?
• How can I improve my physical health this year?
• How can I improve my intellectual health this year?
• How can I improve my emotion health this year?

Rather than goals or resolutions this year, how about beginning each week with a series of questions and answers?

Each week as part of our weekly review of projects and tasks, we can devote five minutes to answering each of these questions for the week:

• What one thing will I do for my spiritual health?
• What one thing will I do for my physical health?
• What one thing will I do for my intellectual health?
• What one thing will I do for my emotional health?

I hope you have completed an annual review of where you’ve been and where you’d like to go this year. Monthly reviews help you stay on track or make course corrections as necessary. Weekly reviews bring it home. You can look at the week and see the days you’ll exercise, the pattern of study and meditation, and so forth.

For me, I need to learn to ask better questions.

“We are called to prove in our own lives that Christ is born.”

I came across that challenge in my reading during Advent. Some people think that all you have to do is say you believe aloud and that you will be saved and all is good. You would not find that in any definition of discipleship.

Jesus challenged us to live as if God were right there with us. Live in the kingdom of God, he called it.

There used to be a phrase making the rounds—if you were put on trial for being a Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict you?

That is looking at that thought from the outside in. If someone followed you around, like say in a spy novel, taking notes of what you did and how you acted, would they suspect that you were a follower of Jesus?

We have passed through Advent and are living the twelve days of Christmas. We celebrated in our own way the commemoration of his birth. Have we once again brought that into our lives from the inside out? Will people we meet and people observing us say, “That person proves there is a God in the way they acted”?

It’s not the megachurch pastor saying good words to thousands while masking a sordid life. It’s each and every one of us through our daily random acts of kindness that prove the birth of Jesus.

The solstice is a point in time when things flip. Ancient people even laid out their villages with stakes that would show the movement of the sun marking the seasons. By four days after the winter solstice, they could tell that the days were getting longer. Warm weather was coming. It was a reason for celebration.

Today is winter solstice in the northern hemisphere. Many are celebrating a “longest night” worship tonight. A recognition of the hardships and grief encountered in the past year and the hope of better things to come.

My wife and I can’t say that we’ve had hardship and grief. Life is different moving to a new community in the pandemic. She has forged a small social connection with the women in our cul-de-sac. I have none. All my contacts are long distance.

Still, we moved about 200 miles north. So the days are almost an hour shorter here than where we came from. I think that has some impact on us. I’m reading more detective fiction than normal.

It is no coincidence that Christmas comes at that point in the northern hemisphere calendar when the days are noticeably longer bringing hope for better days. Christmas is the celebration of the coming of Jesus also bringing hope for better days. To all the literalist Biblical interpreters out there—no, this is not a birthday celebration in the sense that we mark the day of our birth. This is not Jesus birthday. But it is a celebration of a birth that totally changed the world.

And we pray it changes us—for the better.