Chiropractors and Spiritual Formation

Over the past few months, I've become a believer in chiropractic care. I had always been a bit skeptical in the past, but after a second episode of back pain that made me nearly unable to move, I was desperate enough to give it a try. Pain has a way of motivating us to try things we wouldn't have done without it. In addition to recovering without having to take a single drug and seeing my chiropractor often enough to enjoy getting to know him, I've also seen some parallels between being his patient and my life with God.

First, the Pain Factor: I never would have gone for help without it. Even if the pain hadn't been as bad as it was, I would have gone on putting up with it rather than trying to figure out how to get better.

I've studied the Christian life quite a bit, but even with head knowledge, I find that I don't open myself up to God's grace in the ways I've studied until some level of desperation drives me to do so. Ruth Haley Barton writes about this quite a bit. In her excellent book, [amazon_link id="0830835458" target="_blank" ]Invitation to Solitude and Silence,[/amazon_link] she tells how desperation drove her into experimenting with these practices. She says, "As strange as it may sound, desperation is a really good thing in the spiritual life. Desperation causes us to be open to radical solutions, willing to take all manner of risk in order to find what we are looking for. Desperate ones seek with an all-conuming intensity, for they know that their life depends on it." (p. 30)

The Fear of Death Factor: Having never done anything like it before, it was a bit intimidating on the first couple of visits to let another person manipulate my spine. I've seen way too many episodes of 24 to be able to avoid thinking that this guy could kill me at any moment he wanted to.

Once desperation drives us to open ourselves to God, some of the best guidance we may receive can feel pretty intimidating. We're being asked to do what? To give up what? Sometimes this is intense and other times not, but there's a real sense in which parts of who we used to be are being put to death as we learn to put ourselves in God's hands, and it feels fearful to give that much control over to anyone else. These are the points at which things we are often quick to claim to believe about God are tested. Is God really loving? Is God really all-good? Is there really nothing bad about God? Is God really trustworthy? Can I say as Jesus did, even while hanging on the cross, the words from Psalm 31: "Into your hands I commit my spirit?"

In these moments, we have to remember the desperation that drove us to seek help in the first place, realizing that we cannot continue to get well if we don't entrust our lives into the other's hands.

The Cooperation Factor: From the initial visits to my chiropractor, he's given me exercises to do at home between visits. Ideally, these practices at home would work together with the adjustments he gives me during my visits and enable me not only to continue avoiding my previous pain level, but also to actually recover and live better. My track record of doing the exercises stinks. The reason is pretty simple: Most of the time, I feel good enough without doing them. The work that he does for me when I have an appointment is enough to keep the severe pain away. When I'm like this, I'm leaving the health of my back totally up to him.

I may hit a nerve with this one; at least it's the parallel that has struck the deepest chord with me. How much life are we missing out on when we're content to only show up for our weekly appointment in our lives with God, rather than also actually cooperating with God by doing the practices at home which would allow his work of grace in us to actually become a permanent part of our lives? More specifically, showing up at church is good, and may be enough to keep us from the intense kind of pain that we experienced in life when we were completely ignorant of God. But there are other practices handed down to us that can us, and indeed they're actually essential to our recovery. When we fail to do them (things like prayer, reflecting on the Scriptures, spending time in solitude and silence, fasting, service in secrecy, or many others), we're content to leave the health of our soul completely up to other people.

According to the data from the REVEAL Spiritual Life Survey, this is where the largest group of us in churches find ourselves. We desperately need to learn to do the practices and take our infinitesimal share of the responsibility for the quality of our lives with God. I'm sure that Jesus did not intend to say, "I have come so that they may have life- life that's good enough." No, he clearly wanted to convey an abundance of life that, through him, is available to us. But it requires our cooperation.

I write this sitting at my computer, which according to my chiropractor, may be the main culprit for my back pain. And I write it not having done my stretches or exercises for weeks. So I'd better quit writing before my back starts hurting. It's yet to be seen whether I take some responsibility for how it feels or just wait, again, until my next appointment...

REVEALed: A Lot of People Have Been Here a Long Time

[This is one of a series of posts related to the REVEAL Spiritual Life Survey. To see the others, click here.] One of the first things that was quickly obvious from our REVEAL results was how high our "tenure" was, meaning how long people have been a part of our church. According to the survey, 45% of the adults in our church have been here a decade or longer.

By itself, the fact that the percentage was high didn't surprise us. We're a very established congregation, having existed for more than 125 years. But I was surprised at how high. 45%! (And on our second survey, two years later, it's up to 47%!) Almost half of our people have been here longer than a decade.

While a positive note about people's loyalty and commitment over time can legitimately be drawn, I think that number should also raise some potential red flags for us:

  • If that many people have been here that long (combined with the data that said 59% of our people are above age 50), it becomes obvious that our church is going to face some major challenges in the next 20-30 years. History reliably shows that nobody can keep coming to church here forever...
  • Having that many people who have been here that long likely means that people are pretty accustomed to and happy with the status quo. Leading change is always difficult. Leading change in a church where half the people have been there over a decade is a monumental task.
  • At an earlier point in our history, these numbers must have been different. Perhaps people have changed, and our methods of bringing in new people haven't. Perhaps earlier generations simply placed a higher value on bringing in new people. Whatever the explanation is, I'm sure it's a combination of a lot of factors, but this number is serious. (Think of what it would say if we were a sports team: If half of our roster had been in the league 10 years or longer... It may be possible to still be good right now, but we won't be good much longer.)
  • It would be one thing if we had these numbers in a small, rural town where the entire population is aging and there are very few people moving in, but that's not the case. While we're not in a huge city (our population is about 110,000), we're a rare area in the country that has a thriving economy and plenty of growth.
While there are implications such as these that can be drawn from this statistic, this first insight is really just a demographic number. REVEAL really starts to do its work on the next insight it gave us: A lot of people have been here a long time without growing.

"If You Were Going Somewhere By Yourself, I'd Want to Catch Up."

Recently I bought a bigger truck, solely for the purpose of being able to take my kids around with me when I'm doing work on our ranch. I love it when I get to take them. Sure, my productivity takes a dive, but I can still get some things done, and I love having my favorite people (my family) with me at my favorite place (our ranch). Several weeks ago, I had my three-year old son with me on one of these days and on our way out of town driving toward the ranch we had to stop at a tire shop and get a flat fixed. They got it done for us, and then I was buckling him back into his car seat, and we had a short conversation that I hope I never forget:

Me: "I sure love having you with me, bud." Him: "I love having you with me, too, Daddy. I wouldn't want to go anywhere without ya." ...[He thought for a minute as I continued buckling him in]... Him: "If you were going somewhere by yourself, I'd want to catch up."

Now that will make a Daddy's day. In fact, by now that conversation was about two months ago, so I guess I can say that it didn't just make my day, but made my quarter.

A couple of weeks ago, we had a great time with a group from our church on our Three Ways to Pray retreat, where we explored praying with other people's words, praying without words, and praying with our own words. Although I grew up most accustomed to praying with my own words, in recent years I've focused more on the other two ways of praying.

Praying with other people's words through practices like Fixed-Hour Prayer has brought a shape, rhythm, and depth to my prayer which I've longed for for a long time.

Praying without words seems to be one of the most needed practices in my own spiritual life, and probably is for many of us. It's in doing so that what we so often call "a personal relationship with God" actually, for me, becomes something that can actually be described with words like relationship or friendship.

But these comments from my little boy, and the immense joy that they brought to me knowing that they came from a very sincere place in his tender little heart, have reminded me of the power of talking to God in very personal words. For a lot of people, this is a very natural and easy way to pray, but not always for me- at least not at this point in my life.

I don't know if my words to God can have anywhere close to the same effect on him that my son's can have on me, but I would guess that it's similar. It certainly isn't by accident that the writers of Scripture, and particularly Jesus, so often choose to describe our relationship to God as one between a father and his children. So, if things between God and me are that similar to things between my son and me, I need to tell him how much I like being with him.

It doesn't require many words, but I've got to use some.

The First Week of BlogX: Complete!

The most helpful person to me in the technical parts of setting up this blog has been John at TentBlogger. He has a ton of very helpful information on his blog, and if you're a blogger as well, you should definitely become familiar with what he writes there. Seriously, what Dave Ramsey is to my paycheck, TentBlogger is to this blog. (I'm far from being black-belt at the things that either one of them teaches, but I'm making progress!) John has begun a 90-day blogging challenge called BlogX, and I'm participating to try to improve my writing habits and clean up the technical parts of the blog. It's been a real challenge so far, but if I can stick with it, I really think it will pay off with more consistency and better writing.

I've actually been done with the first week of BlogX for a week, and didn't get much of anything done on the blog last week. But, I'm back on the wagon now. Blogging lesson learned: When I can look on my calendar and foresee a few days when I know I won't be able to write anything, it would be great to already have a few drafts on hand to be able to publish and keep the activity on the blog happening during those down days.

Looking forward to seeing what's coming in BlogX week 2...