Try Softer
Published: Mon, 01/27/25
Updated: Mon, 01/27/25
Sessions Include:Lesson #1 Lesson #2 Lesson #3 Lesson #4 Lesson #5 Lesson #6 Lesson #7 Lesson #8 Lesson #9 Lesson #10 Lesson #11 Lesson #12 Lesson #13 Lesson #14 Lesson #15 Lesson #16 Lesson #17 Lesson #18 The Me I Want to Be / Lesson #19 The Me I Want to Be / Lesson #20 The Me I Want to Be / Lesson #20 The Me I Want to Be / Lesson #21 The Me I Want to Be / Lesson #22
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Not long ago I went with my wife to a yoga class for the first time in my life. Immediately it became clear to me why yoga will never catch on: They don’t keep score. You can’t tell who’s winning. Mostly we just stretched, and I am not good at stretching. On a good day I can touch my knees. What made it worse is that most of the other people in the class were clearly double-jointed. There was a middle-aged woman who didn’t look particularly fit — I thought I would definitely beat her at whatever you compete at in yoga — but she was a dancer. At one point she did the splits with her legs, bent forward with her torso completely flat on the ground, then tied both her legs around the back of her head. If they had been keeping score, I would have lost at that point on the mercy rule. Afterward, I did ask the instructor if the woman could be tested for performance-enhancing drugs. As you might imagine, the class was a lot of work and good for my body. But I was struck afterward by a phrase I never heard: Try harder. The instructor never said, “Try harder to stretch. Try harder to be flexible. Try harder to contort your body like a fourteen-year-old female Russian gymnast.” When you stretch, you don’t make it happen simply by trying harder. You must let go and let gravity do its work. You give permission, opening yourself to another, greater force. This is not just true when it comes to stretching. As a general rule, the harder you work to control things, the more you lose control. The harder you try to hit a fast serve in tennis, the more your muscles tense up. The harder you try to impress someone on a date or while making a sale, the more you force the conversation and come across as pushy. The harder you cling to people, the more apt they are to push you away. Sometimes trying harder helps. It can help me clean my room, push through phone calls I need to make, or run another lap. But for deeper change, I need a greater power than simply “trying harder” can provide. Imagine someone advising you, “Try harder to relax. Try harder to go to sleep. Try harder to be graceful. Try harder to not worry. Try harder to be joyful.” There are limits on what trying harder can accomplish. Often the people in the Gospels who got into the most trouble with Jesus were the ones who thought they were working hardest on their spiritual life. They were trying so hard to be good that they could not stop thinking about how hard they were trying. That got in the way of their loving other people. The problem when I try harder is that I get fixated on my own heroic efforts. I grow judgmental. I can’t let this endure forever. So instead of making vows about how my spiritual life will be perfectly well organized until I die, I seek to surrender my will for just this day. I look for small graces. I try to engage in little acts of service. I pray briefly to accommodate my limited attention span. I look for ways of being with God that I already enjoy. I try to go for half an hour without complaining. I try to say something encouraging to three people in a row. I put twenty dollars in my pocket that I will give away sometime during the day. I take a five-minute break to read a page of great thoughts. If trying harder is producing growth in your spiritual life, keep it up. But if it is not, here is an alternative:
A river of living water is now available, but the river is the Spirit. It is not you. The contemplative Franciscan priest Richard Rohr puts it like this: “Faith does not need to push the river because faith is able to trust that there is a river. The river is flowing. We are in it.” Don’t push the river. Trying softer means focusing more on God’s goodness than our efforts. It means being more relaxed and less self-conscious. Less pressured. When I try softer, I am less defensive, more open to feedback. I learn better. I stay patient if things don’t turn out the way I expected. It means less self-congratulation when I do well and less self-flagellation when I fall down. It means asking God for help. John Ortberg, The Me I Want to Be: Becoming God’s Best Version of You (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2009), 12–13. If you would like to explore this new study, it is available on Amazon, as well as part of Good Questions Have Groups Talking Why Study Books?My church recently transitioned to using books as curriculum in our Sunday School. The reason is simple. My life has been profoundly influenced by the reading of books. I don’t think my life has ever been changed by any curriculum piece I have ever read. Ever. I have actually surveyed a number of groups I have taught over the years, asking: Has your life ever been changed by any curriculum? The most common response is for people to laugh out loud. Our first study was the Bless book by Dave and Jon Ferguson. It is a great study on relational lifestyle evangelism. About half-way through the the study, we did a survey to help determine what we would study next. No one wanted to go back to the curriculum. Not. One. Person. The #1 choice for what to study next was a tie:
We will be studying these two books over the next year and a half or so. Here is what Amazon says about Ortberg’s book: The Me I Want to Be will help you discover spiritual vitality like never before as you learn to "live in the flow of the spirit." Why does spiritual growth seem so difficult? God's vision for your life is not just that you are saved by grace, but that you also learn to live by grace, flourishing with the Spirit flowing through you. And this book will show how God's perfect vision for you starts with a powerful promise: All those who trust in God "will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream. It does not fear when heat comes; its leaves are always green. It has no worries in a year of drought and never fails to bear fruit" (Jeremiah 17:7-8). Pastor and best-selling author John Ortberg first helps gauge your spiritual health and measure the gap between where you are now and where God intends you to be. Then he provides detailed tasks and exercises to help you live in the flow of the Spirit, circumventing real-world barriers - pain and sorrow, temptations, self-doubt, sin - to flourish even in a dark and broken world. As you start living in the flow, you will feel:
God invites you to join him in crafting an abundant and joy-filled life. The Me I Want to Be shows you how to graciously accept his invitation. I have just completed a new, 22-week study of John Ortberg’s book, The Me I Want to Be that we will be using in my church. (I had previously done a 7-week study.) I have always thought that using books as a curriculum would be a good idea, and I have written a lot of book studies over the years. One of the things that actually using books as curriculum caused me to realize has to do with cost. By writing a study on every chapter of this book, instead of my previous study that had a lesson for every section, the cost drops to below what we were paying for curriculum. Better curriculum. Cheaper cost. Win. Win.
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