By some miracle, I’ve gone to the gym most weekdays for several consecutive months.

For me, physical exercise used to be like visiting the dentist and cleaning gutters — something you don’t want to do but are glad to have done.

This mindset extended to spiritual exercise. I assumed that the more unpleasant the practice, the more God could use it to change me. I figured that if there’s medicine for curing hell-bent habits, then give me the strongest stuff in the bitterest pill.

There’s no denying that following Jesus is hard, and daily life is full of things we need to do but would rather not.

But be careful of that Christian for whom most of life is a chore. This person is a chore to be around, even to himself. He takes pride in his self-sacrificing martyrdom, but what’s really sacrificed on his altar of obligation is compassion and joy. (I speak from experience!)

The cure for this “choredom” is calling.

Buechner’s overquoted phrase still rings true:

The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.

Earlier I said it is by some miracle that I frequent the gym. That “miracle” is rediscovering my love of basketball. It just so happens that more calories are burned in 20 minutes of hooping than in 30 minutes of riding that torturous ring of repetition they call an elliptical machine.

I’m a middle-aged man who can’t hit a shot when it counts. Clearly, basketball isn’t my calling. But playing again taught me a lesson about the general call to follow Jesus and the specific call of what I am put on earth to do: follow the joy.

We still need uncomfortable practices from time to time. Often we don’t choose them; they choose us. Difficult circumstances can Christ-shape our souls like nothing else, if we cooperate with Christ in the shaping. Other times, we do choose an unpleasant practice as a way to put ourselves on the operating table of the Master Surgeon.

For Matthew Lewis, a storyteller and missionary on the podcast this week, Sabbath is one of those hard practices. But the thing that moved me most in his interview was a story about joy.

“There’s something different about you, Matthew,” a friend said to him during a particular season. “You’re glowing.”

In that season, Matthew was immersed in writing poems and stories, finding laughter and tears and intimacy with God in the process.

“Giving yourself permission to say yes to the things that make you most come alive in God has been such a freeing thing for me.”

So… Yes to hard things. Yes to uncomfortable practices. But the energy for these things will be found by saying yes to what makes you “most come alive in God.”

Father, teach us like the Psalmist to delight ourselves in you, to delight to do your will, to make your joy our strength — that we may become more like Jesus not by willful self-effort — as if that were possible — but by continual responsiveness to your Spirit, whose presence is evidenced by joy.

LET’S DIVE IN...

CURATED BY GRACE POUCH

Matthew Lewis joins Nathan Foster to talk about his new book Human and the beautiful way God designed for our deepest longings — when we give them our attention — to lead us home to Jesus.

Read “God Speaks in Beauty,” an excerpt from Matthew Lewis’s book Human: How our deepest longings lead us home.

“It is not until after we have settled into our desires and named them in God’s presence that we are ready to be guided into the spiritual practices that will open us to receive what our hearts are longing for,” writes Ruth Haley Barton.

“Restless is our heart until it comes to rest in Thee.” Listen to a free audiobook version of Augustine’s Confessions.

“For many of us, the holy longing for God’s kingdom that should characterize our existence has been anesthetized,” writes Carolyn Arends. “The arts help train us in longing.”

On an episode of Matthew Lewis’s podcast Follower, Trevor Hudson says that restlessness can be a gift that keeps us seeking God.

Grace Pouch
Content Manager

WORTH QUOTING

“Neither the hair shirt nor the soft berth will do. The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”

– Frederick Buechner
Wishful Thinking (1973) (source)

TO CONTEMPLATE

The Return of the Pious Women
Gaetano Previati 1910 (source)

I don’t know the subject matter Previati has pictured here, but when I look at the painting, I see both the delight and the melancholy of longing. I see the figures being drawn in and slightly bowed backward, perhaps by the majesty of what (or Who) they behold. The luminous effect that the artist has achieved speaks to me of saying yes to whatever makes you come alive to God. We are aglow when — attentive to our deepest longings — we are drawn together to adore and abide in God.

Follow the Joy

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LET’S DIVE IN...

WORTH QUOTING

TO CONTEMPLATE

TO PONDER