Our theme for chapel this year has been the spiritual disciplines. We’ve got chapel three times a week, and all the speakers have somehow managed to shape their discussions around ways to strengthen our relationships with God through reading the Bible, praying, spending time in solitude, etc. Yesterday, our speaker was one of the college’s communications professors. He’s sort of a non-conformist. He started right off by saying that he was only going to spend two minutes talking about the required chapel theme of spiritual discipline. And then he was going to talk about Africa. He’d gone on sabbatical to Kenya two years prior, the professor said, and no one had ever bothered to ask him about it.
Surprisingly enough, it was not the professor’s discussion about Kenya that influenced me the most. It was a great discussion, and really reinforced my desire to go there after I graduate, but it’s been the professor’s two-minute monologue on spiritual discipline that’s been resonating inside my brain since yesterday morning. Go figure.
He said he writes love letters to his wife. He does it because he wants to. Because he loves her. The professor said that he’s got to be disciplined about doing it, however. He wants to write to his wife, but he’s got to be disciplined about setting aside time to do it, disciplined about using the right words, etc. He’s got to be disciplined about writing his wife love letters, because he wants them to be worthy of his wife.
So many times, the professor said, we equate self-discipline with forcing ourselves to do something we don’t really want to do. But it really shouldn’t be this way; we should want to discipline ourselves, to some extent, to make ourselves better. We should want to work on being more spiritually disciplined because we love God. The professor said that if we’ve got to force ourselves to do something for God, then maybe we need to stop and ask ourselves if we really love Him as much as we say we do.
When couples are having marital problems, and don’t feel like they’re in love with one another, the professor said that marriage counselors will often advise them to act like they’re in love with one another anyway. People are encouraged to go through the motions of being in love, in the hopes that the actual feeling of being in love will follow. The professor gave the same advice to us, concerning our relationships with God. Start doing the things you’d be doing if you were in love with Him, and then, hopefully, you will be.
So… my confession of the morning is that I don’t feel like I’m in love with God. I love Him. I’m not in love with Him. There’s a big difference. I don’t like being in a place where I can feel the difference. Once, I used to be in love with Him, and I wonder what happened. I want to get back to that place. So maybe I need to start working on my love letters…
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