Not Actually Dr. Pepper

This isn't actually about Dr. Pepper. Even the Diet kind. 

It is about the Spiritual Formation class I have been teaching for the last seven weeks. It's with a group of 7ish women of all ages and it has been amazing for me, and I hope for them as well.

Tonight, we were talking about The Sacramental Life. When I first thought about that chapter, I imagined things like communion, saying a rosary (though, I'm not Catholic) etc. But I was deeply surprised when we got into it.

It was actually more focused on Sabbath and the blurry lines between spirituality and secular-ness.

Where it got interesting was when the authors started discussing the Trinity -- you know, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Because, that's so simple to understand. Anyway, there were two takeaways from this:

In the person of Christ, God became human (incarnation). And by doing this, he affirmed all human activity -- from the religious sacraments to laughter and sorrow and more. Because God lived it (through Jesus) nothing is exempt or "unholy", everything received equal honor and thus is sacred. Our jobs, our sleep, our gardening, our cooking, our praying... everything is sacred.

The next part is the Spirit. You know, the Holy Spirit. The Spirit allows us to move past the material things and to become the hands and the voice and the mind and the arms of God. The Spirit lets us become the person God created us to be and then the world gets to experience God through us.

These ideas, while maybe not awesome in the true definition of awesome or whatever, are still eye-opening to me. I strongly believe in St. Francis' saying: "Always preach Christ; use words when necessary." This makes me think about my life in a more harmonious way -- rather than either faith or work, it become faith and work, all through the St. Francis lens. My job is a calling, even if I'm not in ministry as a pastor or what have you.

I don't know, something feels wonderful about this. I love it. I think it it really important for me on my spiritual journey. I feel like this is the key to something which I was missing.