Scripture And A Grounded Start

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Good morning. I'm Sherry, and though I have 12 years of recovery, I take it one day at a time. I'll be reading out of Genesis 28, 10 through 17. Jacob left Beersheba and set out for Haran. When he reached a certain place, he stopped for the night because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones there, he put it under his head and laid down to sleep. He had a dream in which he saw a stairway resting on the earth with its top reaching to heaven, and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. There above it stood the Lord, and he said, I am the Lord, the God of your father of Father Abraham and the God of Isaac. I will give you and your descendants the land on which you are lying. Your descendants will be like the dust of the earth, and you will spread out to the west and to the east, and to the north and to the south. All peoples on earth will be blessed through you and your offspring. I am with you and will watch over you wherever you go, and I will bring you back to this land. I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you. When Jacob awoke from his sleep, he thought, Surely the Lord is in this place, and I was not aware of it. He was afraid and said, How awesome is this place? This is none other than the house of God. This is the gate of heaven. This is the word of the Lord.

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All right. Thanks be to God. Thank you, Sherry. Hi, friends. It's good to see you again. Um, if we haven't had a chance to meet yet, my name is Mike, and I come to you from Southern California, from the Long Beach area, the land of the Dodgers. Oh, that elicits some good reactions. We've been on a we've been on a losing streak, so I knew I could come in here in humility to um to be received by you. And uh I was up here with you about two months ago, early on in this series, talking about step

The Airport Plan That Failed

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two. And before I got up here, I I flew to come up here. And my airport that I like to fly out of is the Long Beach Airport. It's 12 minutes from my house. And the reason I know it's 12 minutes from my house is because I've timed it. And the reason that I've timed it is because I'm one of those people who likes to spend as little time in the airport as possible. Some of you maybe are like that, but some of you might be the opposite. Are any of you the people that like to go to the airport and that you like to spend like you want to make sure you're there plenty of time early. You don't want to be stressed. You'll get there early. Yeah, yeah. Some of you, I do not understand you. Because I don't want to get in there and like have a $15 cup of coffee sitting around in like I just want to get to my plane. So what I have done is I figured out how long it takes me to get to the airport, how long it usually takes me to get through the TSA line, how long it usually takes me once I'm through that TSA line to then walk to my gate. And then I work backwards from when my plane is gonna start boarding so that what I can do is I can get out of the car, I can walk to the TSA line, I can walk through the line, I can get to my gate. And as I get to the gate, that they're announcing boarding, and then I just stand there and wait until it's my turn to board. That is my ideal scenario. So two months ago, as I'm coming up here to be with you all, I do that. I get to the airport, I get in the TSA line, I get to the front, and I hand them my ID, scan my ID, and first time this has ever happened to me, it buzzes. And the TSA agent says, huh, let me try that again. Does it, and it buzzes again. And I say to him, What's going on? Am I in some sort of watch list that I don't know about? What's happening? And he said, I'm not sure what's happening. It just says see ticket counter. So you need to go out and you need to go see the ticket counter and resolve whatever you need to resolve there, and then come back and get back in line. So I go and I go over to the ticket counter and I get in that line. And as I'm waiting that line, I'm recalculating in my mind, like, okay, like how long is it going to take me now to go through this, to get back in line, to go through TSA, and will I be good and figuring out, like, I think I'll be fine. And as I'm in line, I look up and there's a screen that's there that's showing all the upcoming flights. And I'm just sort of casually looking at the screen, and as I'm going through it, I'm looking for Oakland. Oakland, Oakland, Oakland, Oakland is not there. The next like four hours of flights are there, and Oakland isn't there. And I was like, that is strange. Now, what you need to know is that there are three airports that I can fly out of from my house. Long Beach is the closest, 12 minutes away. The next closest is Orange County, John Wayne. It's about 25 minutes to my south. And then when I really hate myself, I'll drive 45 minutes to the north to go to LAX, which I try to avoid at all costs. But as often as possible, Long Beach. So I assume I'm flying out of Long Beach, but I'm looking up there and I'm not seeing Oakland. So I pull up my phone to look at my ticket, which says Orange County. Very quickly, I get out of line, I get on the lift app and order prior, like pay extra for priority pickup. As soon as I get out to the curb, the car is there. I jump in the car and I tell the driver what's going on. That I was like, hey, my flight is boarding right now, but it's not boarding at this airport, it's boarding at that airport. Like, I need to try and make it because Lawrence has the day off. I'm supposed to be preaching. This is the last flight of the day. I need to make it. As we are driving down there, there are two thoughts that are going through my mind. The first thought is like, what am I going to do if I don't make it? And I start figuring out how long it takes me to drive up here. And I think, okay, what I can do is I can get back to my house, I can get in the car, I can drive through the night. I will get to Benisha with a couple of hours before service so that I can take a nap and then get up and preach. And I'm figuring out, like, okay, I could do that. I'm thinking that. The other thought that I'm thinking is, why was I not paying attention? Well, why didn't I pay attention to where my flight was leaving from? Why didn't I bother to pay attention? And get to Orange County Airport. TSA line has nobody in it. I get through it, I get to the gate, and as I get to the gate, I'm one of the last people to board before they close the doors, which told me this. I could leave a lot later than I've been leaving to the airport. I have plenty of time. But I almost missed it. I almost missed it because I didn't create the space to pay attention. You ever do that? Does that ever happen to you where you're just going through life and you're going through life

Autopilot And The Cost Of Hurry

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and you're doing these things, but you're not actually there. You're like somewhere else. You're not fully engaged in that thing wherever you are. Like, have you ever had this happen where you start driving and suddenly you end up at work and you stop in your parking lot at work and you're like, it's Saturday, and I was going to the grocery store. How does that ever happen to you? Because you just went on autopilot, right? Like you had other things going on, and your body went into autopilot and it just did that thing. You end up missing where you want to go because you're not fully engaged in paying attention. Or I don't know if this ever happens to you. Have you ever been reading something? You're reading a book, you're reading a PDF, you're reading somebody's Substack, you're reading and you get through several paragraphs and then you stop and you actually have no idea what you just read. That right? Yeah, you got to the end of it and you're like, what was going on there? Because you're thinking about all the other things. You're thinking about some friends of yours that are in a fight, and you're thinking about like, how do I help them resolve that? You're thinking about your grocery list of what you got to get. You're thinking, like, oh, I saw this guy at church and I said, let's hang out. And I told him I would text him and I didn't text him. Who, what was his name again? You're trying to remember that. All the while this is going on in your head, and you're like looking at the words, you're reading the words, but you're not actually paying attention to the words, right? And so you're not actually doing the thing that you want to do because you're not fully paying attention. Or I don't know if any of you have ever done this or if this has happened to you. I hope that it has, because uh it happened to me a few months ago for the first time ever, and I'm I'm pretty embarrassed by it. So I hope that I'm not the only one who has done this. I was at the gas station, I was filling up gas, I got out the the squeegee and I was cleaning the windows, and I was just kind of in my head. I was in my head about stuff going on, like life stuff, about family stuff, kids stuff. Like I was just kind of in my head. I was not on my phone, I wasn't scrolling, I wasn't doing the phone, it was in the car, it was just in my head. I I finish washing the windows, put the squeegee away, I get in the car and I start to drive away. And as I drive away, I hear a huge thud. And I stop and I look in the mirror, and there is a gas handle hanging from my gas tank that has detached from the gas pump and it's just hanging there. And I thought, what do I do now? Do you ever find yourself so scattered and consumed with other things that it's hard to find the space to actually pay attention? And when you're not paying attention as a result, you miss where it is you want to go or what it is that you want to do. And as we spent time in the series called Steps, we've been processing through how like how we don't want to stay stuck. And what do we do to not stay stuck? How do we break out of these cycles, these continuously repeating cycles that we find ourselves in that are just destructive, but we keep ending up in them? How do we even like have a pathway of growth in life, regardless of where we're at in life, that there's some sort of way we can keep growing and keep moving forward? And where we're at today on step 11, in order to take this next step for our own growth and our own healing, it requires us to create the space to be present and to pay attention. And friends, the thing is that if we don't do that, we'll have made so much good

Step 11 And Conscious Contact

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progress. We'll have gone through 10 steps of work, we'll have done so much work, but what we're gonna find is we're gonna find ourselves getting stuck and stalled out at such a crucial moment of our growth. Because what we won't realize is that in order to keep going and in order to keep moving, we actually have to hit a point where we slow down a bit. And I wanna remind those of us who have been here for these weeks, or maybe if you're with us for the first time, I want to let you know what we've been doing and building together over the last uh several months, that we've been using the time-tested guide of the 12 steps as a roadmap for how do we grow. The 12 steps is this time-tested program. It's a helpful and important pathway for all of us. Regardless of whether you have an explicit uh substance addiction or not, it is a helpful and tested pathway. And we're paying attention to where the 12 steps intersects with what it looks like to have an invitation to a faith-filled life. And the thing about the 12 steps is, and those of you who've been a part of it, you know this, that it works if you work it. And so we've been methodically working through each step because each one builds on the one before it, and each one is important and significant, and we don't skip them, we work through them because it works if you work it. And we're getting close to wrapping this up on step 11 today. And step 11 is about a conscious paying attention. Here's how the big book puts it. Step 11 says this that we sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood him, praying only for knowledge of his will for us and the power to carry that out. I want to spend a bit of time focused on one particular phrase in there. We sought to improve our conscious connection with God. That we hit this point of growth where it's not just simply like keep going, keep going, and do more and more and more, but it's about an actual intentional slowing to pay attention in order to improve our conscious contact with God. And the thing that we discover as we improve our conscious contact with God is that God is already moving and God is already working, and God is already doing things in our lives. And what we discover is that we don't have to go looking for God in special places. It's not like that there are holy places, places like church that we have to go to in order to connect with God, that like if you don't come here, that that God is only residing in this sort of space, we discover that that is not necessarily the case. And we discover that it's all it's not that you only hear from God when you are doing certain specific religious activities, but instead to improve our conscious contact with God means that we learn to recognize God's ongoing active presence in our everyday, ordinary moments. To improve our conscious contact with God is to learn to pay attention in all of the places of our lives. In fact, this is what happens in this Jewish story that's found in Genesis 28 that Sherry read for us earlier. It's a story that centers on a guy named Jacob. Here's how Genesis begins this story. Chapter 28, verse 10. It says Jacob left Beersheba and he set out for Haran. When he reached a certain place, he stopped for the night because the sun had set. When he reached a certain place.

Jacob’s Dream In A Nowhere Place

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And so he's leaving Beersheba. But there's another place that's named. The other place that's named is Haran. That's where he's headed to. It's where God says to Abraham to leave his father's household, to go to the land that he'll show him, and that God will be with him. He tells Abraham that he'll bless him and that his descendants will be numerous. So Jacob knows about these places. He would have heard stories about his father and his grandfather and the encounters that they had with God in those places. Those places, Beersheba and Haran, those are holy places. They would be significant places. They would be memorable places. People would go looking for God in those places. In fact, later people would take pilgrimages where they would go specifically to those places in order to encounter God. Beersheba and Haran, that's where you go to meet God. That's where you go to experience God. That's where you go to hear from God. If you want to have conscious contact with God, you go to Haran or you go to Beersheba. So where Jacob ended up for the night, it doesn't really matter. It's not a significant place. It doesn't have a name. It's just an ordinary, nondescript place that happened to be between two places of significance. He's leaving a place of significance. He's headed to a place of significance. But where he stops, it's just a certain place. It's an ordinary place. But it's in that ordinary place that he begins to have a significant encounter. Here's how the story goes on. It says that taking one of the stones there, he put it under his head and he lay down to sleep. He had a dream in which he saw a stairway resting on the earth with its top reaching up to heaven, and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. The stairway that he sees, it's connecting heaven and earth. That there's something that's happening in this nondescript ordinary place of no significance that actually seems to be connecting heaven and earth in some sort of way. It reminds me of a phrase that the ancient Celts from Ireland would have that they would use to describe places like this. Places where it seems like heaven and earth feel so connected. Where our experience of heaven and earth, where it seems like they've shrunk, that you can almost feel it. They would call those places thin spaces. Because it's like in this place, the distance between heaven and earth has gotten so thin. Maybe you've encountered spaces like that before. My guess is that we all have places that when we go to, it feels like a thin space to us where heaven and earth feel so close to each other. This last week my family was in Yosemite, and Yosemite is one of those places for me. I try to go every year because it's one of those thin spaces for me. That there's something about being there in the beauty and the grandeur of it all that does something in me that it's like, oh, this space between them has gotten so thin. Or the other day, I experienced it not in a particular place, but with particular people. Just a few weeks ago, and we were in downtown Long Beach, and we're walking to dinner, and my wife and I holding hands as we're walking, and in front of us is my son and my daughter. My son had just spent a year in Norway studying abroad, and he had come home just a few days earlier. So he hadn't been home in a year. My daughter had just finished up her first year of college, living away at college. And we're standing behind them and they're walking in front of us and they're just kind of chit-chatting and catching up. And I was had one of those moments where it was like, oh, how many more times will we get like this as they're growing up and kind of building their own lives? And I had this moment because of who I was with, where it felt like heaven and earth that they got so thin. It was a thin space. If you were to think of your own thin spaces as probably connected to a significant place or significant people, which is what's so fascinating about this story. Because remember where Jacob is, he's in an ordinary place. There is nothing special about it. It is not Yosemite, it's just an in-between place. But it's in that in-between place that he's having an encounter where heaven and earth connect with one another and it begins to create this thin space in this ordinary place. In fact, notice the movement of the angels that the author writes, they are ascending and descending. Some of the ancient Jewish commentators would talk about how interesting it is the order of what the angels are doing. They would say this. They would say, shouldn't they be descending and ascending rather than ascending and descending? Shouldn't they be going down and then up rather than up and then down? Because if they are coming down out of heaven, they would be descending first, wouldn't they? So what some of the ancient Jewish commentators and then what some of the ancient rabbis began to say, they begin to conjecture, is perhaps the reason that they are ascending and then descending is because they're already here on earth. They're already all around Jacob. And so they have to ascend, they have to go up before they can descend. Because they're starting off not in heaven, they're starting off on earth. This would actually begin a Jewish tradition of saying that there are angels all around us if we would just pay attention. That idea would even get carried into the New Testament where the writer of Hebrews would say, make sure that you show hospitality to strangers, because you never know when you are entertaining angels. This idea that they are all around you all the time. And so Jacob lays down to sleep in this nondescript ordinary place, and it's in that place where he has this vision, this dream of a stairway connecting heaven and earth. This nondescript ordinary everyday place becomes a thin space. And then his dream continues on. And he said, I'm the Lord, the God of your father Abraham, the one who I encountered in Haran, and the God of Isaac, the one who I encountered in Bathsheba. I will give you and your descendants the land on which you are lying. Your descendants will be like the dust of the earth, and you'll spread out to the west and to the east, to the north and to the south. All peoples on earth will be blessed through you and through your offspring. I am with you and will watch over you wherever you go, and I will bring you back to this land. I will not leave you until I have done what I've promised you. It's the same

Thin Spaces And A God Already Near

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promise, at least in its essence, that's given to his father and his grandfather before him. I'll be with you and I'll increase your descendants. But remember, like Jacob's not in any place of significance. He's in a certain place that happens to be in between two places of significance. And in fact, he's not even doing anything of significance. He lies down to go to sleep, a very ordinary thing. In fact, even to show the ordinariness of what he's doing, the author of Genesis does this really interesting thing and has his pillow be a rock, that it's just like he grabs a rock, this thing that just happens to be around him, and he sleeps on that as if to say there is nothing special about this place. And it's while he's in an ordinary place doing an ordinary thing that he has this important encounter with God. And so notice Jacob's observations about what has happened. Jacob awoke from his sleep and he thought this surely the Lord is in this place, and I was not aware of it. Surely the Lord is in this place. And I was not aware of it. I wasn't paying attention. I was thinking about other things. I was thinking about the significant place I left. I was thinking about the significant place that I was headed to. I was not aware of it. And it goes on, it says that he was afraid and he said, How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God. This is the gate of heaven. This ordinary, nondescript place a place that he has this encounter with God where his eyes are open to realize God has been here all along, and I just simply didn't notice it. And so he gives it a name. And the name that he gives that place is Bethel, which just means the house of God, a nowhere place that had nothing special about it, that from then on becomes known as the house of God. Because what happened to Jacob is that he began to live awake to the reality that God was in that place and he hadn't been aware of it. And so he starts to pay attention. That place becomes special, not because there was anything special about that place in particular, but because it's where he began paying attention enough to become aware of God's presence, to be conscious of his contact with God. And this, this friends, this is what it looks like to improve our conscious contact with God. It is beginning to live more and more awake to the reality that in the ordinary, everyday places of our lives, and the things that feel normal, and the things that feel like they don't have any significance in and of themselves, and the things that we like will skip over because we're going to something significant. It's in those places that God is present in those places, whether we are aware of it or not. And to learn to live with conscious contact is all about becoming more and more and more aware of it. In our everyday and ordinary parts of our lives, it's about learning to pay attention. And this is where it all starts. It all starts with recognizing that each moment and every place is pregnant with possibilities of sacredness and holiness. Jacob says that he is in the house of God, not because he has gone somewhere, but that the place where he is at already has that recognition. The ordinary place becomes sacred to him because it's there that he was awakened to the ongoing, everyday presence of God. I wonder how many times we have been in these certain places and we've missed God's presence. We've missed God's presence because it wasn't the space where we expected to encounter God. And if we have eyes to see it, every place is pregnant with that potential. If we'll pay attention, every place we're in can become a thin space, even if it's just for a moment. And it's in those places where we then begin to be able to hear and respond to God. Or the way that step 11 puts it is that we pray for the knowledge of God's will and the power to carry it out, which is about hearing and responding. I'm not often much of a poetry guy, but uh there's this one stanza in a poem that has grabbed me by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. She writes this. She writes, Earth's crammed with heaven, and every common bush a fire with God, but only he who sees takes off his shoes. Earth's crammed with heaven. It's all around us all of the time. Everyone is experiencing, everyone is experiencing the common bushes, everyone

Training Attention Through Prayer

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is experiencing those same things. Everyone is there, but not everyone will notice it. Everyone will be in the same places with the same moments, with the same opportunities, all the same things, but not everyone will be able to say, surely God was in this place, and I actually was aware of it. But that kind of awareness, that kind of awareness doesn't just happen. We have to train ourselves to see it, which is why I love the language of step 11 saying that we uh we wanted to improve our conscious contact, that it is a choice and it is training and it is work and it is growth. It doesn't just happen and it isn't always wonderful. It is improvement. It is a little bit better today than it was yesterday. We train ourselves to be the kinds of people who have the eyes to see it. Otherwise, we'll keep being the people who keep missing it, who keep not paying attention and keep missing the places where we want to grow and the things that God is calling us into. And so we learn to attune ourselves, to be awake to God's ongoing presence in our lives. We learn to train ourselves to become more aware, to improve our conscious contact with God. And this is what intentional prayer does. This isn't all of what prayer does, but one of the things that prayer does for us is it helps us to improve our conscious contact with God in the everyday and ordinary. So we create intentional space for that. When we create intentional space for that, uh, we begin to become more and more aware of God in those everyday, ordinary moments. So let's look again at what step 11 says. That we sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood him, praying only for the knowledge of his will for us and the power to carry that out. So here's here's what I want to do with the rest of my time with you here. Uh, I originally was gonna walk us through three different ways of praying. And I was gonna talk about like three different ways for us to understand uh uh how we can pray and how we can improve that conscious contact. Here's what I've discovered when we teach on prayer is that it becomes a thing that we all understand and we all talk about, but we don't actually do. And prayer is meant to be experiential. It's meant to be something that we actually do and we live into. So, what I want to do instead is I want to talk to you briefly about an ancient kind of prayer that helps us to become more awakened to God's presence in our everyday, ordinary lives. And then we're just going to walk through it and experience it together if you're open to that. So, this ancient kind of prayer has been passed down through the centuries through from women and men who've been praying this way. It's called examine, E-X A M-E-N. And the prayer of examine is a way to help train ourselves to have the eyes to see and pay attention to the God who's all what God is

The Prayer Of Examen Explained

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already doing in our lives. So, what we do in that prayer is just it's very simple, actually. There's five steps to it, but it's very, very simple. What we do is we ask God's spirit to help us review our day. If we do it at the end of the day, we review the day that we've gone through. If we do it in the morning like we are today, we review yesterday. And as we go through our day in uh partnership with the spirit, we just recognize the spirit is going to, there's going to be some encounters, some experiences, some times that we're going to notice and that the spirit's inviting us to pay attention to. Maybe it's somewhere where the spirit was giving us an invitation and we missed it. Maybe it was somewhere where the spirit wants to give us some encouragement. Maybe it's somewhere where we did lean in and we notice God's presence and the spirit's like, like, keep doing that, keep leaning in there. Maybe there's a space for us to grow. Maybe there's somebody that we need to reconcile with or go back to. Maybe there's something that we need to ask for forgiveness for. But we're reviewing our day with the spirit and we're paying attention to the invitation of the spirit. That's essentially what the prayer of examine is. And so what I'd like to do is to just walk us through an experience of that. And if this is the kind of thing that resonates with you, I would encourage you to make it a practice, to give it a try. In fact, I would encourage you to give it a try for the rest of this month, for the rest of August as a daily practice, and see if you don't start noticing things differently in your day. See if you don't start seeing your ordinary experiences differently. See if you don't find yourself more awake and more aware of God's ongoing presence in your life if you do this as a regular practice, if you try it for the rest of this month. So I want to invite you, if you're open to it, to kind of get comfortable in your seat, to put your feet flat on the floor, to get, you know, things out of your hands, papers, phones, whatever, put your hands comfortably in your lap. And if you're even open to it, you can rest them palms up as just kind of a posture of receiving. And if you go ahead and close your eyes, and would you first take a moment to invite the spirit to help you review your day? And just simply say something like this like God, I invite your spirit to lead me in reflection. And then the next thing that we do is we take a moment to give thanks for the day as a gift from God. We recognize that God's grace enables us to experience the day, and that regardless of what happened on that day, having the day itself is a gift

Guided Examen And Closing Blessing

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for us. And so would you take a moment and give thanks to God for the gift of yesterday. And then next, we're going to review the day with the spirit. We're going to pay attention to encounters, activities, and conversations. We're going to recognize where God's Spirit was actively present in the midst of those. It's kind of like a replay of your day, but you're doing it along with the Spirit. And I want you to pay attention to when one of those encounters, one of those activities, one of those experiences, when it stands out to you. That for whatever reason, you don't even need to know why it stands out to you, but something about it stands out to you, you pause and you spend time there. And you just invite the Spirit. What is it that you want to reveal to me here? Ask for insight. Is there something I need to learn or change? Is there something that I need to give thanks for or appreciate? Is there an aspect of my character I need to lean into more? Or is there something you were calling me to that I missed, or something that you're calling me to that I that I stepped into? Just take a few moments and start reviewing your day and see if there's a space that begins to grab a hold of you. But then finally, what we do is we pray expectantly for what's next. It's in the evening, we pray expectantly for tomorrow. But since it's the morning, we pray expectantly for the rest of today. And so you can just simply do something like this. You can ask God to help you be aware of God's presence as you go through the rest of your day. Ask God to help you live the rest of your day as a kind of person who God has called you to be that you would have the strength and courage to do what God is calling you to do. So amen and amen. And so, friends, may you experience living awake to the God who is around you in the everyday, ordinary moments. May you experience the God who is calling you more and more to God's own self and who's calling you to live out of the abundance of God in your life. Grace and peace to you, friends.