This is what the LORD says: “Stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk in it, and there you will find rest for your souls. Jeremiah 6:16
Years ago, while living in Duluth MN, I made a decision to snowshoe to work every day throughout the winter regardless of the cold. It was a two mile walk through the golf course that took me from my house, right to the church where I was working. Every day I had to make a decision to walk the will worn path I had made or go to the great effort to forge a new trail. The choice was taking the well-worn cow path or get more of a workout with a new trail.
This is the challenge laid out in the book today. Vision, Intention, and Means are our three topics and today is the discussion about Intention. The vision piece was recognizing that our understanding about the Kingdom of God that Jesus ushers in is the vision, but Intention plays a key role. Our broken frail heart tends to walk down the well worn cow path of life. The invitation into the Kingdom is an invitation to charting new ground and the difficulty of the road less(seldom) traveled.
The book invites you to consider what happens if a person has a vision to speak a foreign language and then just waits to see if it will happen. That’s vision with no Intention. An important part of the Spiritual Formation that we are talking about is rooted in the idea of our engagement with the process. To intentionally choose the difficult or unknown path when it would be just as easy to do what we have always done. It’s not always a matter of disobedience, sometimes it’s just easy to repeat what we have always done.
The chapter ask us to differentiate between knowing and believing. It’s possible to know the right answers and not truly believe them. “To believe them means we are set to “act” as if these “right answers” are true. Perhaps the hardest things for sincere Christians to come to grips with is the level of real unbelief in their own lives… and how that undermines the efforts they make toward Christlikeness.” PG 60
We accept a certain level of fatalism and say things like, “That’s just the way I am.” It would be a great step to discover how the choices we make bring us to the vision we might have for the Kingdom. And maybe some of our lack of step taking is rotted in a vision so small that we don’t know where to head.
As you head off into more intention, I encourage you to be content to invite the Spirit to give you some conviction about a piece of your life. Taking steps with one thing is better than being overwhelmed by all the things. The fruit of the Spirit is Love, Joy, Peace, Patience, Kindness, Goodness, Gentleness, Faithfulness and Self-Control. Ask the Spirit to speak to you about how you could walk out one of these in the next week. Paying attention to these matters gives us a chance to ask the Lord for strength and create in us a testimony of How we see God working in us and say thanks to Him.
Truth, Grace, and Time 