Dear Father, the health clubs and fitness centers are packed with postholiday traffic.  Yesterday I had to wait twenty minutes before I could even get onto my favorite elliptical machine.  Once again, scores of us seem ready to leave the sugar/butter/carbohydrate binge of the past six weeks for the purge of exercise and sweat.  This is a good thing, for stewardship of our physical hearts and bodies does have value, and it does bring you glory.

Yet, I’ve never been more aware that spiritual formation based on the “binge and purge” cycle simply doesn’t work.  Our spiritual hearts need to be strengthened by the grace of the gospel daily, all year long.  We cannot afford periods of “cruise control,” when we leave the banquet of your love for a buffet of comfort foods, fast foods, and junk foods.  Just like the physical hearts you’ve given us, our spiritual heart muscles will atrophy if we don’t take care of them.

So I thank you for the “means of grace” – the good gifts you’ve freely given us to help us grow in grace and the knowledge of Jesus.  Thank you for the Bible, your written Word, through which you reveal yourself and feed us with the riches of the gospel.  Thank you for prayer, meditation, and corporate worship, by which you meet and fellowship with us.  Thank you for the sacraments of baptism and Lord’s Supper, these tangible expressions of your covenant love and grace.

Father, you won’t love us more or less based on our use of these good gifts.  But we certainly demonstrate and deepen our love for you as we do so.  By the convicting work of your Holy spirit, let us be far more concerned about flabby, faceless hearts than bigger love handles.  Because you love us, don’t let us get used to being spiritually lazy.  May we come to the point where we’d sooner avoid oxygen and water than the means of grace.  Certainly gospel sanity is to be preferred over personal vanity, all the time.  We offer our prayer in Jesus’ loving and faithful name. Amen.

In a fallen world, people of character and conscience will always be angry. Perhaps our problem regarding anger is not just that we are often angry for the wrong reasons, but that we are not angry often enough for the right reasons. Perhaps our problem is that the things that should make us angry and thereby move us to action just don’t make us angry anymore. So we get used to political corruption. We get used to homelessness. We get used to the perverse morals of the entertainment industry. We get used to how many broken families are around us. We get used to the daily reports of suffering and disease that infect every continent on the globe. We get used to the fact that the church is often a place of compromise and division. We get used to our own complacency and hypocrisy. We get used to marital stresses and childhood rebellion. We get used to a world that has been broken by sin. Even pastors get lulled to sleep. Even with lives committed to ministry, we are all too easily satisfied. Things that should distress, concern, and upset us become the things we either no longer see or that we’ve become used to.

The first thing that struck me when I came to live in a house with mentally handicapped people was that their liking or disliking me had absolutely nothing to do with any of the many useful things I had done until then.  Since nobody could read my books, the books could not impress anyone, and since most of them never went to school, my twenty years at Notre Dame, Yale, and Harvard did not provide a significant introduction.  My considerable ecumenical experience proved even less valuable.  When I offered some meat to one of the assistants during dinner, one of the handicapped men said to me, “Don’t give him meat. He doesn’t eat meat.  He’s Presbyterian.”

Not being able to use any of the skills that had proved so practical in the past was a real source of anxiety.  I was suddenly faced with my naked, self, open for affirmations and rejections, hugs and punches, smiles and tears, all dependent simply on how I was perceived at the moment.  In a way, it seemed as though I was starting my life all over again.  Relationships, connections, reputations could no longer be counted on.

This experience was and, in many ways, is still the most important experience of my new life, because it forced me to rediscover my true identity.  These broken, wounded, and completely unpretentious people forced me to let go of my relevant self – the self that can do things, show things, prove things, build things – and forced me to reclaim that unadorned self in which I am completely vulnerable, open to receive and give love regardless of any accomplishments.

I am telling you all this because I am deeply convinced that the Christian leader of the future is called to be completely irrelevant and to stand in this world with nothing to offer but his or her own vulnerable self. (pp.29-30)