Noticing Jesus’ recreating rhythms in us
Joel Warne is an author, spiritual director, retreat leader, pastor, co-founder of WellSpring Life Resources and a Tending the Holy faculty member at Christos. His latest book is INSIDE MOVES: Falling, Rising, Becoming - Waking to Jesus’ Life-Giving Rhythms in You. How do we wake to Jesus’ recreating rhythms already moving in us—alive and pointing the way forward? What transforming invitations are continually stirring, calling and drawing us every moment? The book includes group and personal questions and activities, ideal for a book study or multi-session small group activity.
Why did you write this book?
My wife Gerri and I jokingly call ourselves “recovering ideal-a-holics.” It’s natural for us to project an idealized picture of what life should be. Personally, I have often lived in the tension of my real life which I can’t escape, and a fantasy life I wish was mine. My ideal life is a projection of what I believe I need to be happy and well: the ideal marriage, kids, body, job, bank account, health, popularity, spiritual accomplishment–the list goes on.
But I’ve experienced dozens of crises in life– big and small–when my ideal picture gets confronted, sometimes crushed, by reality. I’ve been down dark alleys with seeming dead ends. These episodes have served as forced invitations to release my fantasies, and live instead in my real life as the place where open doorways to my full self and my genuine future are waiting.
And I’ve noticed that these moments of my story, these phases—in the book I call them “seasons” –have an unexpected, hopeful and recreating dynamic to them—a rhythm—the same one I notice in Jesus’ story in the Gospels.
What main themes flow through the book?
The book walks through six stages, phases – I call them seasons – in Jesus’ life and work that beautifully correspond with interior seasons we constantly move through ourselves. This shouldn’t be surprising, because as beloved children in his creation, all the echoes of Jesus’ story play out in ours too.
Jesus’ recreating seasons in us is not linear. The seasons are cyclical—rotating in and out, forward and around, at deeper and deeper levels through all our lives. The six seasons range from Cana, which corresponds to seasons of our own lives when life is good, things are progressing and we’re able to overcome our problems; through Good Friday, Easter, The 40 Days, Ascension and Pentecost.
Many people might assume that the 40 Days refers to Lent, but that’s not the case.
Between Easter and Jesus’ Ascension there is a period in the Gospels sometimes referred to as The 40 Days. It’s a period not much discussed today, but it was an important time for Jesus’ followers to start to get on board with the new thing offered in Jesus’ resurrection. For the disciples (and for us) The 40 Days is a time to mourn the loss of what was, and to let God befriend us in our losses. It’s a time to gently be with God in our discomfort, pain, and uncertainty about the future.
Like the disciples, during our own seasons of 40 Days we can let God comfort us, be frail and human and be loved by God inside and despite the loss. Mourning our loss, and letting God befriend us inside it, helps us gradually loosen a grip on the past, or on a life we wish was ours, and opens us to new and life-giving next things.
What are the “inside moves” that readers can experience on their own?
The life-giving cycle of seasons we find ourselves in is active in God and never-ending. It’s not once and done. It’s simply the ongoing reality of life in the God “in whom we live and move and have our being.” There’s nothing we need to do to get inside this life-giving cycle – it just is. Our invitation is to wake more and more to what’s real and already happening in and around us.
This book offers ways to normalize our frail human journey and in the words of Henry Nouwen, offer a “creative yes” to the possibilities that God offers us inside our real lives. God’s great power is a hopeful possibility for something new.
