(Artwork: Elizabeth Greets Mary by Jason Sierra)
Rule of Life
“What is important is seldom urgent, and what is urgent is seldom important.”*
What kinds of emails, text messages, and voicemails do you get? For most of us, it’s a barrage of tasks and requests:
- fill out these forms for the doctor’s office
- pay that bill
- post something on social media about this breaking news story
What messages will you probably never see in your inboxes?
- Hang out with God for fifteen minutes each morning, with coffee and prayer time
- Join a group of volunteers twice a year to clean up a local hiking trail
- Take your guitar out of the closet and play it for twenty minutes a day
If you do not make decisions in advance about how you use your time, reacting to whatever shows up will make those decisions for you. The notifications on our smartphones are all designed to feel urgent, to grab our attention.
But when do you ever get time to attend to what is essential? How can you find time to pray, grow in your spiritual life, and take time to savor the joys and beauty of this world outside of a regular worship service?
Well, the answer is, you don’t find that time. Nobody gives it to you. So you have to make it. You have to plan for it.
And this is quite literally an ancient dilemma.
We tend to think that our era is more hurried than the past, and in some respects, it certainly is, but people over a thousand years ago also found it hard to make time for prayer and reflection. So much work to do: plowing fields, weaving cloth, thatching roofs.
It is a challenge now to attend to what is important but not urgent. But this was also a challenge for those who came before us in the faith, even without shiny screens to distract them. Early Christian communities wrote down decisions about how they would make time for worship and prayer, alongside laboring to meet their daily needs.
These documents, called “rules of life,” originated in Christian monasteries over a thousand years ago. These documents are where monks and nuns wrote down decisions they made about how they would organize their time so they could pursue rich spiritual lives in addition to taking care of daily needs. Rules of life also included decisions about how members of these communities would live in relationship with God and with one another.
In other words, these communities had to decide how to organize their time, roles, and responsibilities to make sure they attended to what was important but not urgent.
Making these kinds of decisions, and experimenting with living them out, is also an excellent spiritual practice for individuals. Creating a rule of life is an ancient Christian discipline that will help you make time for what matters most.
We do not have to live in monasteries to do this. We can do this as individuals. Many spiritual directors advise people to create their own personal rules of life.
In creating a rule of life for yourself, you prayerfully decide how you want to live out your faith in your relationships with God, yourself, other people, the natural world, and human-made things like technology.
You write those decisions down, so you can remember the commitments you want to live out in your life with God, with your own spirit, and with God’s world. And you review that document on a regular basis, which helps shape your calendar, and eventually, your whole life. Creating a rule of life is a simple but powerful way to make a spiritual GPS, which guides you toward the things that refresh and restore your soul.
Specifically, a rule of life shows you how to make time for things that are important but not urgent. Things like tending to your spiritual life, strengthening your relationships with others, and making time to do what brings you joy in life, and what makes the world a better place.
The things that matter most are seldom the noisiest. They rarely pop up in our phone notifications. Creating a rule of life is a time-tested spiritual practice to attend to what matters to you most.
Check out the Renew 145 Resource page for more information on Creating a Rule of Life
Reflection by Pastor Anna Havron
Questions for Reflection:
- Pick the first five messages you see in your favorite inbox (text messages, social media messages, email, voicemail). Do those messages include the expectation of a timely response from you? (Are they urgent?) Do those messages address anything that will shape your life five years from now, ten years from now? (Are they important?)
- Play along with me for a minute here — do you have any messages from God in those inboxes? (Probably not directly!) How do you hear from God in your life? What are the times and places you feel connected with God, outside of a formal church worship service? Maybe it’s going for a run. Maybe it’s writing in a journal. Maybe it’s mowing (I know a surprising number of people who consider riding mowers their prompts for prayer time). If you were going to create an inbox for God, what would it be? And how often would you check it? What if you wrote that down on your schedule? Congratulations – you now have a simple start to creating a rule of life.