Week Six - Daily Schedule
Theme: Discovering God's desire to fill me with deep life.
Grace/Desire: I want to know and long more deeply for the God who cherishes me and seeks to fill me with deep life.
Scripture and other Prayer Material
- Romans 7:14-25: Paul found the same contrariness in himself that I find in myself. It is a force in the world. But God in Christ has chosen to defeat that force.
- Prayer of Consideration: Active Indifference
- Hebrews 2:5-13: When I look at humankind, I wonder what God sees in us. Jesus lives in our flesh, though we cannot now plainly see that. By God's choice, Jesus is my brother.
- Repetition.
- John 1:1-18: I can rest in Him who is "the Beginning." Jesus came and stays in my humanity. He chooses to heap gifts on me.
- Deuteronomy 30: 15-20: In this land where God brings me to be, I can choose life or choose death. God reveres me so deeply that He gives me space to choose. All my ancestors in the faith have made this choice.
- Repetition: Look back on the significant movements of each day - high and low.
Prayer
Lord, mighty God, You offer me so much. You give me so many days and years, so many strengths and abilities, so many rich things and splendid technological devices, and You surround me with so many whom I love. Teach me this one thing above all, Lord: How I am to choose. Then I hope to return to You as many wonders as You have poured out on me.
Through Christ Jesus, My Lord and good brother. Amen.
Week Six - Supplemental Materials
Some Considerations for the Week:
- You have thought about the truths that lie under the brief statements of the Principle and Foundation. You might read over that version of the Principle and Foundation that most resonated with you.
- All human activity swings back and forth between delightful and tedious. These exercises are very likely sometimes to console you tremendously, and sometimes to seem like the most desolate wasteland you ever chose to wander through. When these swings happen, take them patiently; you can learn a lot about yourself and your world.
Review of the week
Do I control my life and teat it as my possession rather than to embrace it as God's gift to me? Do I have "non-negotiables" in my life? About what am I not indifferent? Do I find that I am either not free or losing my freedom in certain areas of my life? What people, places, or things need to be chosen differently in order to acknowledge God as the source and end of my life? Am I have "distractions" in my prayer - is God trying to say something to me through these "distractions?"
For further reflection and consideration:
"If we feel a disorder in our attachment to a person, to a job or position, to a certain dwelling place, a certain city, country, and so on, we should take it to the Lord and pray insistently to be given the grace to free ourselves from such disorder. What we want above all is the ability to respond freely to God, and all other loves for people, places, and things are held in proper perspective by the light and strength of God's grace." - St. Ignatius of Loyola, The Spiritual Exercises (annotation #71)
More to ponder:
Nothing is more practical than finding God, that is, than falling in love in a quite absolute, final way. What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination, will affect everything. It will decide
what will get you out of bed in the morning, what you will do with your evenings, how you will spend your weekends, what you read, what you know that breaks your heart, and what amazes you with joy and gratitude. Fall in love, stay in love, and it will decide everything. - Pedro Arrupe
Week Six - Additional Scripture
- Is 65: 17-25: No more the sound of weeping or cries; the wolf and the young lamb will feed together.
- Is 35: Be strong, do not be afraid ... Here comes my God to renew and refashion
- Is 40: 28ff: God our creator never grows weary ... longs to strengthen and renew me.
- Is 40: 1-5; 9-11: Comfort, comfort my people ... The Lord is coming ... He will take care of his flock like a shepherd.