By Dynamis Ministries | January 6, 2022
Before we move into a new year of growing our generosity together, we have a question for you. How’s your soul? We recently completed another year of structuring our days around meetings and commitments, planning our lives around the weekends and celebrating on special days like birthdays, anniversaries, festivals and holidays. This is the American way of life – work hard, play hard. We build out our calendars this way, and there’s nothing overtly wrong with it. But there’s more. What’s missing for many is living in rhythm in ways that nurture our souls.
A lot of the activities we build our time around are productive, entertaining and enjoyable. They just don’t do anything for us in the deepest, most expansive part of our person – the soul. Have you had a time when you thought you were winning, when everything was going your way? And then a trusted person asks you, “How’s your soul?” Suddenly, when invited to go below an inch deep in your life, you realized that you really weren’t in that good of shape. You might have noticed:
- an anxious flutter in your heart
- conviction over how you’ve been mistreating people
- a host of emotions rising up like sadness, anger or fear
- emptiness and a thirst for something substantive that fills
So, how’s your soul?
Our soul is designed by God to integrate all the parts of ourselves and flow in love and wholeness with God. It is good when it is well with our soul, which happens when God is filling it up and connecting the dots within us. This is what we should seek just like the Psalmist in the “soul book” of Psalms that says, “As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, my God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When can I go and meet with God” (Psalm 42:1)?
There’s a practical, calendar element to soul-keeping. We need to dedicate times for God and focus on developing our relationship with him. Since this is the dawn of a new year, one way to do this is to live the church calendar in our own lifestyle and focus on spiritual practices and rhythms that keep our soul with God. This very day is the beginning of a church calendar season, Epiphany! Here is the full list for the next year:
Epiphany, “Anticipated Light” – January 6 – March 1, 2022
Lent, “Penitent Return” – March 2 – April 16, 2022
Easter, “Resurrection Joy” – April 17 – June 4, 2022
Pentecost, “Kingdom Living” – June 5, 2022 – November 23, 2022
Advent, “Preparation for Coming” – November 24 – December 24
Christmas, “Celebratory Birth” – December 25, 2022 – January 5, 2023
To help you be well in your soul and in turn be generous in spirit and action in 2022, consider picking a scripture verse theme for your life in each church calendar season and identifying spiritual practices you will keep to draw near to God during that time. You could consider specific practices around things like worship, prayer, the Word, confession, fasting, solitude and service. Pray about it, write it down, share it with someone else and commit it to the Lord. This is a major way to do soul-keeping with God based on how the Church has been ordering its year for centuries. Plan to keep your soul just like everything else in your life, and you won’t be disappointed.
