I have found it to be of value to occasionally take stalk of where I’m going on this journey of faith. Again, I’m using the List of Ten as a way to probe what i currently see as the growing edges of my faith. Make your own list and see how it guides you on your journey.
1. I’d like to understand how to respond to the painful picture of suffering children and the sense of hopelessness for their future that confronts me in the news.
2. At 70, I’d like to strengthen how my faith helps me cope with these last years of my life’s journey.
3. I want to continue to probe what it means that God chose the church, with full knowledge of its frailty, as the instrument of God’s work in the world.
4. I want to find a sense of peace with the hurt child in my past that seems always to be worrying about being hurt.
5. Even at this point in my life, as I continue my effort to respond to what God is calling me to do, I want to better distinguish between God’s call and my need to please others.
6. I want to continue to explore the dimension of humor in articulating the faith.
7. I want to better understand the relationship between time and eternity and the way the eternal God finds expression in our finite world.
8. I want to be more disciplined in listening to God as it affects my response to life around me.
9. I’d like to understand what are the appropriate means of helping a congregation develop spiritually.
10. I want my faith to find direct expression in my marriage and my family.
It will be interesting to see how different your list is from mine given our different positions in the journey of faith. I would encourage you to make your list spontaneously and not worry about whether later you would want to edit or change it. First, get it down on paper. You don’t even have to show it to anyone but yourself.
