Writings of a Beholder 🌿 8.4.23

The sacred connection between reflection & spiritual formation

Photo by Serrah Galos on Unsplash

The Sacred Connection Between Reflection & Spiritual Formation

I’ve been doing a lot of reflecting this week.

One year ago on this past Tuesday, August 1st, 2022, I embarked on my own healing journey through a program called Journal Gently. My friend, who also happens to be a licensed spiritual director, Kari Bartkus, offers a trauma-sensitive journaling program that can help you process your grief safely on the blank pages of your journal as you allow yourself to sit openly before God while He tends to those broken, hurting parts within you.

And this was very much my experience throughout the entire program. It was truly life-changing for me.

When I initially enrolled in the 8-week program, I did so with my own expectations. I was carrying some hurts and wounds from a particular situation and I expected to flush those out with the Lord during the following weeks of Journal Gently. And we did, for a little while.

But I was shocked when journal prompt after journal prompt kept pressing on an old, long-forgotten — but somehow still very present — wound that had been hiding and hibernating in the dark for a long time. With each press of the wound, it stung and ached and oozed, telling me that it indeed needed to be tended to. At first, I resisted because these wounds were related to my past and I hadn’t yet learned how to give myself permission to revisit that hurt, to process it.

I thought the expectation related to this wound was to move on. I mean, I had physically moved on, so shouldn’t my soul, body, mind, and heart, move on too?

The Holy Spirit had other plans though, and gently led me back to the past through the pages of my journal, inviting me to sit there in the hurt with Him. To face the truth of what had happened, what I had lost, and what had been taken from me. To cry, to yell, to curse, and to rest in the darkness that I had not realized I had been running from for all these years.

Jesus used the practice of reflection and journaling to open the door to my healing journey. And now, one year later, I’m amazed at how far He and I have come together.

On Tuesday, I sat with my current journal open, remembering the pain that greeted me and seemed to consume every bone in my body last August right through to the new year. I remembered how hard and difficult it was the first time I sat down in front of a counselor, admitting that I needed someone to help me carry this, to process this. I remembered the tears, the confusion, the feeling of all the emotions and the grief.

So I held that hard remembering in one hand, and with my other, I held the joy and the breath that has seemed to return to me now that the hard, painful work has worked its way through me. I know what it looks like now to hold both grief and joy, loss and hope. I know what it feels like to have a soul spacious and exhaling again. I know what it feels like to reemerge stronger, and somehow softer, on the other side of trauma.

And I know this because I’ve taken the time to reflect, to remember, to sit in the hard and the good with Jesus and let Him speak words of Love and goodness and with-ness over me. It’s during these moments of reflection and remembering that I notice how God is speaking and moving and how I’m slowly forming and becoming.

I shared in last week’s letter that I’m in a season of enjoying learning new things about myself, including what I plan to cultivate now that the ground of my soul has been cleared of old, dead, bitter roots. The soil under my feet feels fluffy, like a cloud, and freshly plowed. It’s open and expectant, waiting to see what I’ll plant now that the space is available. And I see Jesus standing in the middle of this open field with me, the soil grazing his sandaled feet. I see Him smiling, waiting for me, too, to decide what it is we should grow together.

I feel His excitement, His delight… in me. I feel how proud He is of me, of the work we’ve done and the darkness we’ve faced down together. I feel His Love, radiating from Him, like a father tenderly loves His daughter.

I see all of this unfolding before me and feel it building at the center of me, because I choose to slow down and notice it — notice Him noticing me. And it hit me this week as I processed all of this with the Holy Spirit just how important cultivating a practice of reflecting and remembering is, how vital it is in our relationship with God, ourselves, and others.

I shared this quote last week, but I’m sharing it again today because the truth of these words have really played out in real time for me this week.

American philosopher and psychologist, John Dewey, said that we don’t learn from the experience, we learn from reflecting on the experience.

We live in a fast-moving world, a noisy and sort of chaotic world, that is constantly tempting us to just move on already. To get on with life, our day, the next moment, the next season. To push down that hard emotion or hide the fact that what they said really did sting, that the loss really did take pieces of you with it.

But what if the receiving of the most sacred and holy moments in our life is intricately tied to our ability to reflect on them? To slow down, pause, and pay attention to them? To remember feeling the weight of them in our chests? Our hearts?

Writer and spiritual director, Emily P. Freeman, writes,

“The practice of looking back and paying attention serves as an anchor to the soul in a fast-moving world. Instead of waiting for the world to stop so we can catch up, we slow ourselves, look around, and name what we see.”

(Emily P. Freeman, The Next Right Thing Guided Journal)

There is so much power in naming our experiences and emotions. I know, because my own traumatic experiences and the feelings tied to them went unnamed for a long time, and the weight and hurt of them grew until it felt utterly suffocating.

But we don’t just need to name the hard experiences, we need to name the good ones, too, and even the mundane ones. We reflect on and remember both the hard and the good and everything else in between because it teaches us to behold God in the right here and now. Reflection grounds us, rooting our feet in the present once we answer its invitation to remember, to glance back over our shoulders at the past, beholding how God was faithful then so we can anchor ourselves in hope where we presently are.

As we begin to reflect and remember, we notice what we hadn’t noticed before. We notice the ways in which we’ve grown, how our faith has been stretched and deconstructed in order to be put back together again all bruised and scratched and real. The pain we see when we glance behind us can either harden us or soften us, and I’ve learned that inviting Jesus to sit with me and hold my pain breaks me open so that His tenderness and Light can leak in, tenderizing me.

Reflection shows us where and who we’ve been and how God has been present throughout all of it so that we can notice and name who we are slowly becoming. Our own spiritual formation may just hinge on a regular practice of reflecting, naming and noticing. Because as we stretch those remembering muscles, our awareness of God’s presence with us stretches and grows, too.

One of my favorite passages about remembering and reflecting comes from Psalm 77:3—12. The first few verses, 3-9, illustrate the pain of remembering. The ache and wrestling and uncomfortable questioning that can come from reflecting on past experiences.

“I remembered you, God, and I groaned;
    I meditated, and my spirit grew faint.
You kept my eyes from closing;
    I was too troubled to speak.
 I thought about the former days,
    the years of long ago;
I remembered my songs in the night.
    My heart meditated and my spirit asked:

“Will the Lord reject forever?
    Will he never show his favor again?
Has his unfailing love vanished forever?
    Has his promise failed for all time?
Has God forgotten to be merciful?
    Has he in anger withheld his compassion?” (NIV, emphasis added)

But then comes the joy once the grief is held and the hurt is named, and suddenly, there’s a remembering and reflecting that leads to rejoicing.

“Then I thought, “To this I will appeal:
    the years when the Most High stretched out his right hand.
I will remember the deeds of the Lord;
    yes, I will remember your miracles of long ago.
I will consider all your works
    and meditate on all your mighty deeds.” (NIV, emphasis added)

Reflection nurtures attentiveness to God.

So if we want to be people who practice beholding His presence with us in the everyday, I believe nurturing a practice of reflection is vital. It’s vital to our own self-awareness, but more importantly, it’s vital to growing in intimacy with our Beloved God and Creator.

So, friend, if you’d like to get started with a regular practice of reflection, I’ll drop a few resources below in the Resource section of this letter that could help you do just that. And who knows, maybe next week I’ll come back to you with a few ideas of my own how to begin a small practice of reflection.

But until then, I pray that you’ll do some of your own remembering today. Remembering and reflecting on and noticing how far you’ve come, and how close God really is.

With you on the journey,

Celia

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Life Lately

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A Breath Prayer for Your Weekend

breathe in:

I will remember.

breathe out:

Your miracles of long ago. (adapted from Psalm 77:11)

*if you’d like to learn more about the practice of breath prayer, download this complete digital guide to practicing breath prayer.

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Resources & Good Things to Pick Up

As promised, here are some resources that might be helpful if you’d like to be more intentional about cultivating a regular practice of reflection:

• The Next Right Thing Podcast episode 84: A Beginner’s Guide to Self-Reflection

• The Next Right Thing Guided Journal by Emily P. Freeman (I have one of my own and it’s very helpful for practicing a rhythm of weekly, monthly, and seasonal reflection)

• The Next Right Thing Podcast episode 150: A Guide for Personal Reflection

• Reflection and Journaling as a Lifelong Practice with Business Strategist Elizabeth McCravy (on the Encouraging One Another Podcast)

Grab some breath prayer cards, a journal, a candle, and other contemplative resources from my Etsy shop: The Beholding Co.

Grab a copy of my Bible study, You Are Beloved: a 21-day study on how to root your identity in the love of God, over on Amazon. And if you’d like a free 3-day sample of the study, reply to this email and I’ll send it right over!

My friend and licensed spiritual director, Kari Bartkus, offers an 8-week journaling program for those who want to process their grief and trauma with God within the safety of blank journal pages. I’ve completed the program myself and can say confidently that it was incredibly impactful and healing: Journal Gently

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An Invitation to Pause & Reflect

A regular practice of reflection helps us recognize what’s going on beneath the surface of our souls so we can name it in the Lord’s presence. Because as we learn to name what we feel, what we need, and what we long for, we’re also learning to discern the Spirit’s sweet, gentle voice within our hearts and lives.

Take a few moments today or this weekend to journal or contemplate with the Holy Spirit the following question(s) or prompt(s):

• Is there a wound or hurt that the Lord is pressing on that needs to be named and acknowledge in His presence? Or, perhaps, in the presence of someone safe?

• How might you practice holding both joy and grief in your own life right now? Or, how might you even just practice holding space for one of those?

• Try making a list in your journal or a mental list in your head of how God has been faithful in your life recently. What do those expereinces reveal about Who God is and who you are becoming?

• How might you nurture an attentiveness to God in this season of your life?