Are you skimming this between meetings, or between changing diapers and fixing dinner? Waiting in the carpool line?
You barely have time to take a quick glance at this post, and the last thing you want is to feel guilted with one more thing you should be doing or not doing. I hear you sister. You’re desperate for a little encouragement or a hack to do EVERYTHING FASTER. Sometimes the thing you long for the most is the hardest to make time for.
Invitation to Retreat is a new book by Ruth Hayley Barton. It’s a timely, tall drink of cold, refreshing water – permission to stop, withdraw, and gulp God’s goodness. It’s an invitation to choose the counter-cultural way of slowing and silence instead of stress and striving in our own power. It could be seen as just an advertisement for a Transforming Center retreat (which would not be a bad thing), but it is so much more. Whether you use this book as a resource for a classic retreat, or use it to inform your daily and weekly spiritual rhythms, it has tremendous value.
One of the images I love most from Ruth is that of retreat as strategic withdrawal from the battle lines. Whether we are paying attention or not, we are all in a spiritual battle. Ruth writes:
“We often see this (retreat) as a negative thing; however, military retreat can also be a wise tactic – an opportunity to rest the troops and tend to their wounds, to stop the enemy’s momentum, or to step back to get a panoramic view of what’s going on and set new strategies.”
Each chapter is relevant to retreat, but also contains valuable insights that are transferable to everyday life. For example, who of us can’t relate to the daily need to relinquish false-self patterns – identity dependent on what we do rather than being Jesus’ beloved?
“The cure for too-much-to-do is solitude and silence, for there you find you are safely more than what you do….That harassing, hovering feeling of ‘have to’ largely comes from the vacuum in your soul, where you ought to be at home with your Father in His kingdom.”
I also found great challenge and encouragement in chapters on Discernment, Recalibration, and Spiritual Freedom.
Ruth quotes Henri Nouwen saying,
“‘Maybe my own deep-rooted fear of being on my own and alone kept me going from person to person, book to book and school to school, anxiously avoiding the pain of accepting responsibility for my own life.’” Then she adds, “On retreat we stop avoiding the pain of the disconnect between our deepest desires and the way we are actually living.”
Today you may be overwhelmed with “to-do’s”. Instead, I pray you will hear the gentle invitation of Jesus to come away with Him, back to your true self, beloved whether the meeting tanks, or dinner is mac ‘n cheese out of a box, or you forget to pick up a kid at soccer.
“Come away by yourselves to a secluded place and rest a while.” Mark 6:31
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