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The NewCity Orlando All of Life Podcast
The NewCity Orlando All of Life Podcast
Slow-Down Spirituality: A Conversation with David Goodman
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In this episode, Benjamin Kandt talks with David Goodman about some of the elements from our Slow-Down Spirituality learning event earlier this month. David was originally going to participate as a leader and help with the teaching of the event, so this conversation is a way to recap some of the principles and practices that were shared there.
Here are some of the resources mentioned, as well as other helpful items:
Transformation Through Intentional Spiritual Formation
Speaker 1So I'm here with David Goodman . He's a member of New City . A leader here with New City would love to talk about your experience , your story , your practices in blowing down around a way of life in discipleship to Jesus . I know that's something that matters deeply to both of us and we've had enough conversations to where I know the things you share will be fruitful for our listeners . So , david , would you maybe briefly introduce yourself and then , if you'd answer this question , which is , I'm curious , what prompted you to slow down and be more intentional about your spiritual formation ? And maybe , like a sub question to that is was it a pivotal moment ? Was it a series of events ? Was it a gradual realization over time ? How would you describe how that came about ?
Speaker 2Yeah , thanks , ben . So hello , New City family . I am David , as Ben mentioned , and I'm an OBGYN here in town . I'm a physician and have a wife , Bethany , and three young kids , and we have been at New City for a little over a year and a half , which just became members in the last cohort of members , and one of the reasons we came here is because New City is the only church in Orlando that commits to a common rhythm , and so that's one thing that really drew us here , and it's just the evidence that being participants in a community that values this sort of slow down spirituality was really important to us .
Speaker 2But that wasn't always the way that we thought about our faith and the way that we approach things . As I was thinking about your question , you know I so my first job after residency , I was a global health fellow and traveled to Tanzania . I lived with Bethany and Deakin when he was a little one year old kid , and we lived in East Africa , in Tanzania , and I was working at a teaching hospital , and you know we left that . We went on that journey to Tanzania , and one thing we wrote in our support letter was it feels like the last 10 years of our life have led us to this year , but it feels like this year is going to transform the next 10 years of our life . And here I am , seven years later after that , and that's the truth . You know , I was this doctor who went , I was doing surgery and doing a research project with teaching residents and working in a busy women's hospital in East Africa and was kind of living the dream right . And you would kind of look at that being like , oh wow , he's like a super Christian doing this stuff . And our church at the time was really into mission business as missions , you know , using a profession and a missionary standpoint . And so for all the time purposes , I was killing it , man , I was doing , I was doing a thing and sadly , I got a lot of satisfaction on that .
Speaker 2And but when you move to Africa , you know it's one thing to stand up on stage in a mega church and be commissioned . It's a very different experience when you land late at night with a kid after when it was 24 hours of travel and you are driving on these dirt roads and I remember driving being like God , what am I doing here ? And and so we did our first six months adjusted to that environment and I could feel myself just experiencing the lack of things . You know , we lived in a very austere house with concrete floors and lizards on the walls and ants everywhere , and we have access to some of the things that we really loved , like television and college football and ice cream was a big deal and and I lived it , I was trying to tough it out . You know , be a good , be a good missionary .
Speaker 2But we came home for Christmas break and something snapped me and I just became ravenous for every comfort I could find , whether it was the sweets associated with the holidays , watching television , just I could feel just this urge growing in me to just consume everything that I could . And it came and had that Christmas experience , and it was in February in Tanzania , and you know there is the really hot , dry season before the rainy season and there was just this brutal , miserably hot day in the office with no air conditioning In February in Tanzania . I can remember having this real come to Jesus moment where I was processing this ravenous desires within me and really realized at that point that I was not a super spiritual person who just send a little bit sometimes , and I was not this really healthy person who just I like to cheat a little bit sometimes and I was not a deeply loving spouse who just had fights with his wife sometimes . I was a crepe in all of those areas and realized that you know , whether it's my own personal inclinations , the training methodology of what it means to be a doctor and the isolation you have to go through , and that negative habits that you develop for that , or just some of the habits from my childhood and upbringing that needed to be ironed out , I realized that my habits were fundamentally broken . And that day I downloaded Charles Duhigg's power of habit and can you remember kind of walking through that and that being my first introduction to the idea that our habits shape our lives . And you know , as any dealer likes to say , you know how we spend our days is how we spend our lives . And I had this light bulb moment of wow , I , this is , there is something really to this . And so that led us to actually turn down opportunities to stay working in Africa . I was a huge career shift of . I had three or four jobs that would have kept us kind of doing that African medicine thing and we chose to move to Orlando and one of the big guiding principles was .
Speaker 2I knew that I needed to grow in wisdom in this time and I didn't know what it was going to look like and so enter , enter that we came through . One of the first books we read was you Are what you Love by Jamie Smith , and that started just really . That's an early . It's a great introduction book to help you really think about your loves and what's shaping you and what's driving you . Yeah , and and yeah . So we started getting into that and I could just feel kind of wisdom , calling wisdom , wisdom , growing this unsettleness with life . And you know it was coming out of that . This is all 2017 .
Speaker 2So we moved here , had a second kid pretty immediately and I jumped into life trying to figure out how to , you know , be an American of the Julian and working here . We were trying to settle on where's church , what's friendship going to be like . I always joked that moving back to Florida was kind of like moving back to America , but different . And you know I was still wrestling . I was wrestling with a lot to see my faith and whatnot , and I think I finally realized that I was not going to become the person God wanted me to be by reading another book parsing out the Greek meaning of justification and settling that argument in my head .
Speaker 2I always I kind of grew up in the church and Bible studies and , you know , always really leaned towards I just need to know things , I need to learn more things . And I started to learn that actually I needed to be transformed in a different way and so it was all . This was kind of coming in the first year and first couple of years and , you know , like a good Christian kid , we started mentoring medical students because that's what you do , getting involved in church that way and I can recall sitting across the table from one of the students , trying to help him with some of his , his own issues in life and thinking very clearly , I know a lot about Bible study but I don't . I need to learn what it means to really disciple someone and form them into the image of Jesus and Pam's or you have a great answer for that and you have a wonderful thing , but I didn't know that . You know , three or four years ago I think I was deficient in all that it takes to come alongside someone and help meet them where they are and point them towards Christ . And you know , all this is kind of brewing .
Speaker 2And then bam , 2020 hits and 2020 was a wonderful time to be a doctor in America , let me tell you so . We , you know , one of my jobs is I work in a women's ER and we have , you know , 120 women a day that come through the emergency room at Winnie Palmer Hospital and we take great care of them . But it's it's . It's very busy and when there are times in the pandemic , when that that ER was full of women with with COVID it was , you know , ob offices wouldn't see them and everyone was just said if you're pregnant , go to Winnie . And we were doing testing . We were some of the early . We were one of the earliest sites in America to have regular , free , like on test the COVID test . It was . It was insane and you know , there was a stress level within me that felt like , you know , lord of the Rings sitting outside Minnes-Tierith , like Bethany and I had . That we had a real conversation about should I like go live somewhere else and keep our family safe , and was crazy . But these are the things we're working through .
Speaker 1So Wow , and I was , yeah , because you're a little bit closer to the hospital because you're a little bit closer to the hospital and wow , I would I love to pick up the story , but just so I think , tracking with what you've said so far , there's this underlying kind of implicit piece which is everyone has a spiritual formation . Right , it's not just a matter of you either have one or you don't . And so what you described is , you know , you had a spiritual formation in your early childhood and kind of how you grew up in the church and then that maybe got developed more as you grew up . But one of the things you named was , you know , the kind of superhero in the Christian tradition that you grew up in was the medical missionary to Africa . And so you did the thing . I mean you , you clicked all the boxes and so you went over there , probably with some genuine good God honoring motives , but also with some mixed motives too that you maybe wouldn't even been aware of at the time . And so there was this combination of the testing , right , I love that picture of melting metal , because the impurities kind of come to the surface as you melt gold or iron ore or something like that . And those impurities were kind of coming to the surface not only in the lack of conveniences that you'd had in Africa .
Speaker 1But then when you came home and you had all the buffet of options that American culture has at our disposal and you found something in yourself , this voracious kind of appetite that was it sounds like almost startling to you , like , wow , what is this in me ? And one of the things I love about you , david , is your , your self awareness , like your willingness to take that , as you know , maybe a kairos moment or sorts , where , like there's an in breaking that's happening and you're like I need to attend to this , I can't let this go by . But then you even named you know there's a spiritual formation in residency . There's something that happens to you in med school and residency that forms you to be a kind of person in your spirit , the spiritual nature of who you are . That has some , I'm sure , some positives , but some certain downsides and deficits . And so , as you're more attentive to what God's up to in your heart and mind and body and soul , then you're now sitting across from med students and you're seeing them .
Speaker 1Maybe what , 10 years prior to where you were , maybe a chance up , like that and you're thinking , wow , like I want to help you set you on a different trajectory of spiritual formation than what I had , but kind of not sure how that looks . And so that's this call of wisdom . I love that language is very proverbs like language , like wisdom is calling to you and you heated that call and part of that looked like delving into some of the spiritual formation literature . Part of that looked like changing some habits and practices and things like that . So that's me just kind of summarizing where I think we've been so far . Is that , is that accurate ? Would you elaborate on any of that ?
Speaker 2Yeah , yeah , totally . That's great summary , and a lot of us might find ourselves in this situation .
Transformation Through Habitual Practices
Speaker 2As for me personally , I had done the most intense thing I could imagine to earn God's love . That'll put you . I'll tell you where I'm coming from , and I went and did it and I still didn't feel it , and I was exposed to enough spiritual teachers and whatnot that I said that I knew there was a level of experiencing God that I am not experiencing and I didn't know how to get to it , and so that was it , and it didn't come overnight , it didn't come through just one prayer . You know , I think that's what's really important is that it is this journey that we take kind of collectively , as a community . It took , you know , my wife is a huge partner in this process of her kind of faithful , kind of just steadfast trust that I was going to figure it out , because she was , you know , light years down the road from me as far as her kind of yeah , we'll say some of her spiritual development and whatnot , and so so all that was was kind of coming to a head 2020 head .
Speaker 2Now I got two kids . All this thing is coming together and I don't know how I even got hold of this , but I started listening to this cultural moment podcast . I actually started listening to it for Mark Sayers I think I found some tweets by Mark Sayers , the pastor in Australia , and , like Tim , and there was this dude , john Mark Palmer , that was the co-host to that I started listening to it on a regular basis , and there's a few books in your life that really change the way you think . And it was around that time in 2020 that John Mark released the book the Ruthless Elimination of Pury , and that was his first bestseller introduction to more mainstream Christianity , and I read that book on the other side of the pen as the pandemic was really hitting Florida in May May , june 2020 , and there's a lot in that book that'll make you think about how do you start to slow down ? Dallas Willard . He said you must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life , because hurry is the great enemy of our souls in the modern age , and so I turn that to heart . There's a lot of books we read right , you probably read a couple dozen books last year and not all of them change your life , but this one really got me started thinking , and so it was around that time John Mark had a later book come out in 2021 called Lift no Lies , which I find to be extremely , extremely influential book for my life and whatnot .
Speaker 2And I started I had the opportunity to actually join like a beta testing team for practicing the way and John Mark and that was the time around September , october , 2021 , that Bethany and I started committing our life to what we'd call a common rhythm or practices and just going through material as practicing the way prepared it for kind of mainstream America . We were like , okay , we're a couple medical professionals in the South . It was very different than Portland where it was being developed , and so we said , hey , let's , let us read , let's work on this and read through it . And we started to find it incredibly transformational , just taking it a month to focus on fasting , a month to focus on simplicity and whatnot , and so each practice we would take it up and it was pretty intense year , honestly , as a couple that ultimately led to in kind of May 2022 , we found our way to New City and here we are .
Speaker 1Wow , so the soil had been prepared . And then you hear Damien or I get up there and go hey , we as a community build our lives around some practices that form us in a common life for a common love . And you're like , oh my goodness , this is all that we've been up to for the last hour , many years . Yeah . So I'm curious . Then , as you began to kind of delve into that and take the . Actually , let me ask you a question , because this was something that came up Somehow . You knew habits were going to be maybe the source of your problem and the source of your solution , because you picked up the power of habit . How did you know that ? Like , what inclined you to think that habits were going to be the thing , that was going to be the way out ?
Speaker 2I think that I often say that habits are the most important thing for your health , and in medical school we learn nothing about how to help people shape their habits . It is I mean , I can just tell you the number of patients that I've looked at and just thought you need a complete transformation of how you spend your days . And so I think that I can see that in people and I can begin to see it in myself , and so I think I could , I could . I've seen enough for me . I've seen enough people in unhealthy situations that I know that you reach help through those small changes , the kind of small daily , daily changes .
Speaker 2I actually was kind of a chubby kid , I don't know how that was going on , but one of the ways that my whole , that my body shifted is I started running one summer and I started running for 30 minutes and I just ran one minute extra every day and my life completely transformed , kind of in that transition from middle school to high school , just from running one minute extra every day . Over the course of summer I was able to run for an hour easily and completely changed my life . And so I think that there's been a lot of little stories like that , where I've learned and reading James Clear with atomic habits , really became convinced that , okay , small changes over time can make huge , huge , huge changes .
Speaker 1Yeah , that's so helpful . That idea of kind of incremental improvement . You take , the idea of atomic habits is so genius that it's . It's this little atomic level , very small , very simple , but they accrue over time into something that's pretty significant , pretty significant life change .
Speaker 1You made a statement a moment ago that seems like a big deal , I don't want to kind of scoot past , which is I might not , I might misquote , you should correct it but your habits are the most important thing about your health , or for your health , maybe for , for wheel or for well , for , for , you know , to get healthy , positive health , good health , you know , and that's true physically , I can say that that's true mental health , wise , but then it's also true in the negative sense .
Speaker 1I had somebody sit across from me once and said something to the effect of hey , like my life is falling apart .
Speaker 1And you know what I realized , if I just inverted all of the practices of the common rhythm , that's the recipe that got me here . And I would I would not like staggered when he said that , because it was so , you know , like I never rest , you know I never take a day and seven to rest . In fact , I just drive , drive , drive , drive , or I never , you know , take an hour with no screens to listen to God's self or others . Instead , I just constantly am like bombarded by tech or you know you could go through all eight practices . I never bless anybody else . I'm kind of really about myself . I never , and it was so like I let my body , the appetites that I have , give , take and have whatever they want , whenever they want . I never fast right , I never say no to myself , and it really is a brilliant recipe for self-destruction and so the inverse of that is also a recipe for wholeness and flourishing and those kind of things .
Speaker 2And that sort of that sort of life is . That's the default life on a lot and that we're being programmed to participate in .
Navigating Cultural Pressures Towards Inhumane Pace
Speaker 2If you follow , if you follow what is going on in modern society , it tends towards that . That's the path of least resistance and I think that it's a struggle right To try and change that and try to adapt ways that are different . But it's that thing , it's . An old adage from global health and business is that every system is perfectly designed to achieve the results that it is currently achieving , and that is true that we all have some system that we've adapted , whether it's consciously or unconsciously , and we're reaping the rewards of it .
Speaker 1Yeah , it's so true . So , basically , if you're in a river , the current is pushing you towards malformation , not formation into Christlikeness , and that's not a surprise . You know the Bible talks about the world . You know as this , this system , that we live and move and have our being in a way that actually has a way of malforming us .
Speaker 1So one of the things that we in our particular cultural moment this might be an overstatement , but it makes the point which is I don't know if Christians in the history of following Jesus or Jews prior to Jesus , have ever faced the cultural pressures towards an inhumane pace of life quite like we have now .
Speaker 1I think that that's probably not a hard case to make that , with technology and the level of tech , but particularly the level of conveniences that we have and now the ability to constantly be on and all I mean , there's so many pressures that make the conveyor belt of productivity just speed up faster and faster , with more to do , and so , in light of that , I'm curious to hear what are some of the specific things that you found beneficial to resist that pressure to constant speeding up towards an inhumane pace and that would be the negative way to put it the resisting , but to embrace a life with God , a life where you're practicing the presence of God and conscious of God's nearness to you in moment by moment ways . What have those practices looked like in your life ?
Speaker 2Yeah , I think that that is . I have a trouble kind of not listing off a ton . You know for me , you know for me in my personality I mentioned kind of the signal for me was my kind of insatiable desires that I felt over it's Christmas break coming home from Africa . So for me personally , fasting has been a really formative practice and so fasting historically was common practice for Christians . You know Jesus , and someone on the Mount says when you fast and just assuming people would do it and I've been told that for 1000 years Christians fast at every Wednesday and Fridays and that it was a formative part of the community . I read the did a K over Advent this year and it's clearly kind of spelled out there and I guess there's some famous quote that John Wesley wouldn't ordain anyone who didn't fast every two days a week . And so I've actually taken this practice up and really tried to develop this in my life .
Speaker 2I heard someone say the week that you know fasting what it does is that we bring our bodies to this kind of brink of desire , to a insatiable need , and then we give it God , and that just struck me because easy to sit around and say what is fasting gonna do for me just being hungry all day .
Speaker 2But as a person who gets really hungry and really loves to eat , I find so much that on Wednesdays I fast and pray , just asking God to make me into a genuine person of love that lives at peace with my kids and genuine connection with my wife . And every time that I'm hungry I just ask , I ask for that and I pray for that . And on Fridays I ask and kind of I pray for God to help direct my career and you know there's a lot going on just in my career right now and as a pray God , I submit this to you just out of every moment of hunger throughout the day . I do that and it's unbelievably clarifying . It's unbelievably clarifying to do that to put your body . You know , I think Dallas Willard says that the practices in fasting in particular are things that we do with our body , that we can currently do in order to prepare us for things that we cannot do , and so I've found fasting to be an incredible way to alert me to my desires and to transform those desires in a Godward fashion .
Speaker 1Yeah , so good , there's this , there's such a power in saying no to yourself . That's the piece of fasting that gets me is . Abraham Joshua Heschel , who marched with MLK and one of the civil rights marches , has this quote it's something to the effect of the root of self-respect is the ability to say no to oneself , and I think one of the reasons many of us have a hard time experiencing our dignity we all have dignity , but experiencing it is that we notice like to be ruled by ourselves . We surrender to our some of our basis desires , right , and so taking a day to actually say no to my appetites that are good the appetite for food is a good appetite , but to say no to it actually forms me in not getting my way in other areas of my life , which is so powerful .
Speaker 1Something you said there that I think is so significant , and it's you said it in your own way . We say in the common rhythm which is , you know , the aim here is love , right , the aim here , you said , you asked God to form you into a genuine person of love , and that , of course , is coming from the gospels , where Jesus says the two great commandments are to love God with all of yourself and your neighbor as yourself . That's what this is all aimed towards , which I actually think is helpful , because it's a metric Like if you're fasting and actually becoming more of a jerk , or more self-righteous like it's not working right .
Speaker 1In other words , you can measure these whether it's done out of legalism or done out of love , based on what the fruit is in that sense . So I'm curious then , with that in mind , how would you describe how you've experienced slowing down impact your relationships with other people You're with you and Bethany , or you and your boys , or you and your neighbors , or you and the med students that you work with , or you and your patients , or how would you describe the impact that some of these practices and slowing down have actually had on your relationships ?
Speaker 2Yeah , I think for me and my wife . I think that one of the practices we've adopted is to just pray together every morning . And in some ways I'm a little bit competitive and Tim Keller writes in the meaning of marriage and it was really hard for him and Kathy to learn to pray together and so I was like , yeah , I'm beating Tim Keller , but so we've committed to this . Every morning that I'm at home , we sit down and do this and to sit down and hold hands and just be vulnerable and to just pray . We have a lot of things to pray about these days and , just God , we want you to break through . We want you to take that difficult situation we had with our kid last night and can you heal and repair that in them and draw us into that ? I think it's created a level of communication and vulnerability that we haven't experienced in marriage before , and that's been really great .
Speaker 2I think that embracing my own weakness and through practices like fasting and whatnot has really helped me see how I can relate to my kids better and just having a slow down attitude of putting our phones away , trying not to be solely compelled by this , and I got to become a much better parent in many ways and one of the things that work I try to do is to embrace this three times a day prayer .
Speaker 2One of my practices is when I get on the elevator is to really resist that urge to just check a few emails or send a few messages , but take a moment to breathe and connect with God . To , number one , be reminded of my vocation and why I'm doing this . And number two , to be alert to the needs of my coworkers . And I've had multiple times I've shared the gospel with coworkers and had really fruitful discussions and because of that kind of drawing awareness back to God and not just the rush of the day , and I think that's been really helpful to embrace that and not just think about maybe sharing your faith with coworkers at 7 am that morning , but at 3 pm , oh yeah , I guess I could do that .
Speaker 1Yeah , there's something about that interruption that three times prayer brings into your life where you're doing your thing , and then it's like , oh wow , it's 9am or noon or 3pm or whenever your times of prayer are , and wherever your mind is , it's just this call , almost like church bells were right to draw your attention back to the presence of God with you . So as we wrap up here , you know , kind of zeroing in on that question a little bit more , you have some really remarkable practices as a family . You shared some of those with how you and Bethany pray . And just to maybe even put some context to this , I reflected this to you maybe a month ago or so when I was talking to you , that you and I had a phone call over the summer when you and Bethany were going through a pretty hard season and you had said something to the effect of it's moments like this where I'm so grateful for being intentional about my spiritual formation , and it was something to that effect because it had formed , it was forming you into a genuine person of love .
Speaker 1Obviously , you know Jesus has the standard long way to go for all of us , but there had been noticeable progress in this . Another time of testing , if you will , and what was surfacing in that time of testing was better fruit , if you will , than what it was previously . I just remember that being such a powerful reflection in that moment , and some of that has been the ways in which you and Bethany have built into your family intentionally rhythms to connect with one another , with your kids . Would you share maybe one or two of those ? And then I've got one final question before we wrap up .
Speaker 2Yeah , just a couple of
Practical Tips for Spiritual Formation
Speaker 2things . I think you know a lot of young families really struggle with the idea of Sabbath . You know , one of the best books for this is AJ Sobono's book about Sabbath . It's called Subversive Sabbath . I think he kind of addresses this question .
Speaker 2But so it's really hard right to just have this peaceful 24 hours when you have chaotic kids . And so one of the things that we've done is , you know , saturday night we have a little ritual out . As you know , we don't we don't hit this 100% . Obviously there's different birthday parties and I have to work some Saturday nights and that's where stuff . But you know , three or four Saturday nights a month we are lighting a candle , saying a Sabbath prayer , having particular conversations .
Speaker 2We make pancakes on Sunday mornings and then we have this thing called power hour where we have three kids .
Speaker 2So each kid gets 20 minutes of kind of face to face , locked in time , with their , with one parent , while the other parent goes and has like a really reflective kind of prayer walk , of spiritual time . They , you have an hour . So we carved out this one hour on Sunday mornings where one parent can go and just , I think , really experience a very special Sabbath experience and the other parent gets to have face to face conversation , you know one on one interaction playing a game , reading a book , doing something with one kid while the other two boys have to play together , and so they're learning how to play together and and and lead out and those sort of things and they love it . Now they love power hour and and plan for it and want to do it . So that's transformed our Sundays honestly into making it really possible and it'd be great for the day that both of us can have really peaceful , kind of calm Sundays . But we're trying to make do with what we can in the midst of it .
Speaker 1Yeah , I love that , such a intentionality , and I love how you're accomplishing so many things at once with an hour Right , I mean you're quality time , your other boys are learning how to play with each other , the one spouse is getting some space , and all in a Sunday morning . I just think there's a good brilliance to that . So , as we close here , I'm confident plenty of people have resonated with your story , different parts of it , and I'm curious if you were to say , hey , here's some some practical next steps , simple , but we'll move you in in the direction of formation into Christ . Like this , what kind of encouragement , what kind of maybe even exhortation , what would you offer to people that have resonated with what you've said so far but don't really know what the next step might look like ?
Speaker 2Yeah , I think that I think I'm going to go to Dallas Willard for the win , and he says that growth in the spiritual life is about training and never trying . And there's a perspective a lot of us can have in the Christian state of like , oh I'm going to try this fasting thing , I'm going to try to do it real hard and do it real good , I'm going to try to do this and whatnot . And so I think you've created this wonderful resource called the Olive Life Guide which can really , if you can carve out four hours to really work through that , you'll probably find what you need to do bubbling up to the surface , I think . For me , I think one of the earliest things we did was just setting aside kind of quarterly spiritual retreats , of doing things like the Olive Life Guide for just four hours once a month . So I do it once a month , and then Bethany the next month , and then we do it as a couple and finding that practice . What grows out of that is you do a little bit of silence and solitude then and that makes you more aware for how to embrace silence and solitude Otherwise . So I think I think giving some good attention to the Olive Life Guide and one one day , one half day that you're going to kind of dedicate to this , I think , is a really good place to start .
Speaker 2One thing for me is I use the Do app D-U-E on my Apple Watch and it reminds me basically three times a day to pray , and I use that and it persists . It's one of the only apps that kind of persists every five minutes until you turn it on , until you say that you've done it , and it's a way to just take control over your phone and use it as an instrument for good and not a tool for your distraction . And so I think , embracing that , I think picking just one , I would say pick one practice out of the common rhythm you know and then , really committing to that for a month , find some resources . You can give a lot of great resources . I'm happy to load anybody up with resources that they need .
Speaker 2I think practicing the way can offer a lot of these , whether it's the podcast or whatnot that we can point you to . But if you say , okay , I'm going to really commit to this , to the fasting practice or to this resting practice , I'm going to give it a month and I'm going to begin , I'm going to work it . I'm going to figure it out . What day is the right day for this everything ? Commit to it for a month . Don't try to commit to five practices at one time . Pick one , give it one to three months and keep working it in , and then I think you'll find that your hunger for further practices and further intentionality will grow instead of what your current capacity being overwhelmed .
Speaker 1So helpful . I'm going to make sure we put links in the show notes to a lot of these things the All Life Guide , the practicing the way , some of these books you've mentioned , because resources really can be so helpful . They were pivotal for you , they've been pivotal for me . Okay , so we've got maybe in like a 30 seconds to a minute . Would you be able to answer this question ? Okay , david , I'm listening to you and Ben and some of this sounds legalistic . In other words , there's some people that , given their background , any kind of call to effort in their formation feels legalistic . And how would you respond to that with grace and truth , in 30 seconds to a minute ?
Life With God Through Spiritual Practice
Speaker 2Yeah , I would say you can do all of this in a legalistic fashion and destroy yourself , but the invitation on offer is life with God and life in a different way , and the Gospel of John says this is eternal life that they know me and the one whom you have sent . You know the Father , you know God and kind of live life with him . And so I think that , as is it , embracing these practices simply comes down to just opening yourself up , offering yourself to God and letting him work through you to make the space to let it happen . And that's why I think starting with some of these kind of weakening practices like fasting can be really helpful , because you'll find very quickly that you come to the end of yourself and and God will , he will meet you there . And I think that if you're aware of your , of your need and desire to be legalistic , you can offer that to God and continue to not let it go there .
Speaker 1Such a good word . Well , david , I'm so grateful for you . I've learned so much from you and our friendship in what it means to follow Jesus with intentionality , and even in this conversation here . So thank you for the gift you've offered to all the listeners and to me , and I'm looking forward to continued conversations in this vein . And thanks so much , may the day heal you .
