Kingdom Identity

I think that it would be somewhat accurate to say that every person has or is going/gone through a period in life in which they are trying to figure out who they are and what their purpose is. Last year, I had what I have now come to call, my quarter-life crisis. It was a time in which things were just not settled in my soul. I knew that I was meant for something that I wasn't currently doing, but didn't know what. It was stressful. It sucked. Thankfully, God has guided me out of that wilderness into the place I am now (which is not so much more defined as it is better directed).

The reason I bring this up is because today I want to tell you two things and I think it will help if I can relate them to myself. These are meant to be defining markers in discovering your Kingdom-of-God identity. The first is:

You are not the sum total of your experiences and abilities.

 Conversely, you are also not the sum total of your inexperience and inabilities. When a person holds this view, they are seeing themselves in utilitarian terms; that is, "I am only as good, acceptable, worthy-of-life, etc. as I am experienced or capable". The problem with that is that no one in the world can actually be "acceptable" to this standard. This is simply because there is too much in the universe to experience and there is too much that a human could be capable of. So where do you draw the line? When are you good enough? The answer is never; chasing that definition of yourself is like trying to sweep up that last little bit of dust into a dustpan with a lip on it -- the line will always evade you. Instead, there is a greater truth -- a better way to define yourself: 

You are the sum total of the relationships you have.

When you view your life in relational terms instead of utilitarian terms, you see the value and beauty in the world. I am only as much me as I am in relationship with all of you (whoever that is). The beautiful thing about this is that it naturally fits into how we behave as creatures. It is natural to have one relationship that filters all other relationships. For a child, this may be the parent; for a spouse, their other; for a believer, it is Christ. This means that the believer's relationship with Christ not only dictates how they see themselves, but how they see every other relationship, which in the above definition of self, circles back on how to understand oneself. This is why, as a Christian, it still hurts when loved ones of the faith die: a small part of our identity is separated from us. That part that was your mother, your uncle, your sister or brother is now separated -- and it hurts. This idea also explains why men revert to an animal state when lost in the wilderness or stranded on an island. It also explains why solitary confinement is an effective punishment. Finally, it explains why the church needs each member of the body, all in line after the head, Christ. 

The second thing I want to tell you is:

God's goodness is greater than your shortcomings.

I found written in the back of an old Bible I own this quote: "God doesn't call the equipped, he equips the called." While I don't believe the first part is true, I definitely agree that he equips the called. One theme that echos throughout the entirety of Scriptures is that God is faithful to provide what is needed when it is needed so that his will can be done. My failures and my sin are no stumbling block for God. My inability to produce goodness on my own is no stumbling block for God; furthermore, the same is true for you. Now, don't misunderstand, this is no excuse to do whatever you want; God still demands righteousness from those who seek him. What I'm saying here is that when we fail (and fail we will), it will never be so disastrous that God cannot make beautiful things come of our mess.

So, when you're trying to figure out who you are in creation, remember that it has little or nothing to do with what you can do and what you have experienced, but everything to do with who you commune with; who do you know? If it is Christ, the rest will fall into place; if it is not Christ which defines all other relationships, I fear you will always have an emptiness in your soul. Secondly, when discovering yourself, be courageous to step out and strive for things; Jesus said to seek his Kingdom first, not find his Kingdom first and everything shall be added to you. God does not expect us to achieve his will alone, but to strive for it, then the Spirit which is in you will carry you when your feet fail you; but what feet fail while standing still? none. You must be moving toward his will and don't be shackled by your shortcomings.

Pray that God reveals these things in your heart as I have just done in your mind. You are loved and worth loving, according to God. You are for his purpose, regardless of your personal junk.

peace,

C.M.

The Lost Art of Gratitude

If the only prayer you say in your whole life is "Thank you," that would suffice.

- Meister Eckhart

Meister Eckhart (1260-1329) was a German mystic who was of the Dominican order. In the above quote, he points out one of the single most important aspects to the Christian life: gratitude.

Why is gratitude important? I think that there are several reasons, but lets cover just a few in brevity; by doing so, my hope is that there is room for the reader to think about this topic and come up with some of your own reasons for being grateful.

Gratitude Takes Humility and Wisdom

If there is one thing that I think stands the test of time, it is that humility and wisdom are often directly proportional in a person's life. Gratitude often is a difficult thing because it means one of two things: either I needed the gift given or I can appreciate it, even if I didn't strictly need it. In the first case, it is obvious that it is often difficult to accept help when one needs it; I think we all can agree that our pride often gets in the way. In the second case, the wisdom that is necessary to realize when good things are given and that they did not have to be given takes time. By way of example, I remember my philosophy professor pointing out a rose and saying that it did not need the quality red or the scent that it carried in order to be a rose; if God wanted it gray and scentless, he could have made it so. In this way, Gratitude helps us to practice wisdom and humility in any given situation and those are Christ-like qualities.

Gratitude Pleases God

The only thing that is more of a let down than when someone doesn't say thank you is when someone thanks you for the gift you've given and then doesn't use it. It's like getting your friends a coffee maker for their wedding, receiving a hand-written "thank you" note saying how glad they are that you were at the wedding and then finding that coffee maker, still in the box, in the garage at their cook-out two years later. You feel let down; you feel like they didn't truly like the gift and that there was no joy derived from it. In your mind you had images of early morning brew gently rising them from slumber and ushering them into a beautiful day only to find out that they were likely still grabbing that Starbucks every morning on the way to work. Gifts are given so that joy and fullness can be experienced from them. The same is true for us and God; God gives gifts to all of creation. There are general gifts like nature and our bodies that are given to both believers and non-believers and there are spiritual gifts given to those who have become one with the Holy Spirit. In either case, we truly let God down when we take that gift and leave it in the box, on a shelf in our spiritual garage. Gratitude not only means saying thank you but using the gift because there is joy to be had in it and this pleases God.

Gratitude Brings People Together

When I was managing a restaurant, one of the most important things that I did for my employees was say "thank you." Most of them had never worked for someone who valued their creativity and efforts as much as their actual output. For example, we were tweaking a recipe and I asked one of my cooks to have some liberty with the recipe so that I could see what came of it. The first couple tries were a flop, but each time I encouraged him to try again and sincerely thanked him for his efforts. By the third or fourth time, he nailed it, confident in himself. He told me later that no one had ever thanked him for his work and made him feel valued that much. Gratitude inherently brings people into better relationships. When we thank people for their contributions and stop viewing people in utilitarian terms of what we can get from them, it is much easier to see them as people -- just like you. Ironically, no one likes being used, but most everyone struggles to intentionally make people feel valued. Gratitude is key in this effort. 

This is Not the End

There is so much more to be said about gratitude and when you stop and think about it, thankfulness impacts so many areas of our lives; it touches our self-image, our relationships, our jobs, our families and more. Practice gratitude in sincerity and action, not just in hollow words and if you have to fake it until you make it, it's better to say it and learn to feel it later; remember that the wisdom to recognized deserved thanks only comes with maturity and we're not all there. Also remember that our prayers should be primarily articulations of our thankfulness and then secondarily requests. So think about how you can be more grateful today

and then do it.

peace,

C.M.

Looking Through the Glass

How we regard ourselves is arguable one of the single most impactful things in our lives. If we think ourselves small and powerless, we are likely to behave small and powerless; if we think of ourselves as powerful and in-charge, we are likely to act thus. What is interesting is that it is not a matter of how we really are, necessarily, but how we understand ourselves. In looking in the mirror, we have to recognize that we don't really see ourselves. That is, we cannot see the inner workings of our body much less our soul and so, there is only a representation of ourselves and not the whole thing.

Paul, the apostle and mystic, has some words about this topic. When discussing love and the powerful, central role it plays in a Christian’s worldview, he mentions keeping a handle on reality.

Now our knowledge is partial and incomplete, and even the gift of prophecy reveals only part of the whole picture. But when the time of perfection comes, these partial things will become useless. When I was a child, I spoke and thought and reasoned as a child. But when I grew up, I put away childish things. Now we see things imperfectly, like puzzling reflections in a mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely.

                        -Paul, the apostle, NLT

First and foremost, Paul acknowledges the true way that we exist as created things; that is, no matter how developed or sophisticated our science and philosophy, we will only ever truly know things in a partial way. Now, the empiricist might argue that we know exactly how the heart works; how it moves, what powers it, what each ventricle, atria, artery and vein does. They would be correct only to a point, however; that is, we still do not know what initiates the first electrical pulse that powers the heart. Does it come from the mother? Is it self-generated? How does a heart actually start beating? This is one, limited example, but the point is that ultimately, there is mystery in all of our knowledge and it is a mystery, Paul says, that will never be revealed until we are one with God. 

Secondly, Paul speaks of process; that is, growing up spiritually by way of a physical analogy. He says that when moving from childhood to manhood, he let go of the childish things in favor of the manly things. This isn’t to say that there was no value in childish ways; as father of two little boys, I know their ways are beautiful. What he is saying is that when one has reached man-status (in whatever way that is measured), the childish things cannot be embraced alongside the adult ways; it is an either/or. If there is one thing that is true about children is that they often think they are more mature than they are; this also should be a word of caution to us: don’t think that you are more mature than you really are. Evaluate yourself with sober eyes and realize your shortcomings; they are much easier to reconcile with when they are laid bare.

Finally, Paul looks to the end and speaks of the time when we shall know ourselves and everything else in its fullness, just as God does. It is a little strange to think that God knows us better than we know ourselves, but it is the truth. Do you know how the soul is attached to the body? Have you walked the corridors of the spirit to discover what secrets lay therein? No, only our Creator knows the depths of our person. Someday, however, we shall see ourselves as we truly are; not just past the physical, but in a larger context with all of our connections and relationships laid out like a road map. Until then, we should only strive to know God more, for that is how we learn more about ourselves and actual reality. What we see now, Paul says, is a distortion of how the world really is. We are the ghosts and beyond the veil is reality. We pray now for revelation and look forward to the time where we can be with him and him with us. There we taste the fullness of his gift; for there is no offense and, indeed, no forgiveness between God and us because there is no space or room for it; He is in us and us in Him.

So, today, pray this: that we should be with him in that fullness and see ourselves as maturing and not-arrived-yet. The truth of our lives is that they are not over yet; let us embrace the process and, in humility, see ourselves as we are to the best of our ability.

Peace,

C.M.

Love Your God: Conclusive Thoughts

Over the last week or so, I have been slowly taking a look at some of the deeper meaning behind what is called the "greatest command" in Mark 12. In the first installation, I talked about loving God with our hearts and making sure that we knew what the divine will and affections are so that we can bring ours in line with it. In the next post, I talked about loving God with our soul and gave some practical resources to start to get in touch with your non-physical body so as to be able to devote it to God. In the third piece, I talked about loving God with our minds and wrote on what the mind does and how to exercise it for God's Kingdom cause. In the last post, I discussed loving God with our strength and how this encompasses our physical bodies, our areas of influence in the world and our practical capabilities. In this conclusive post, I would like to draw these four together to demonstrate that what Jesus is really getting at -- and what the law was meant to portray -- is that we belong to God and he is ours in graceful union.

To me, these four specific areas seem to fall into a set of two couplets that encompass all of the relational facets of the human.

Couplet One
I see mind and heart making up the first couplet; here we find that Jesus is saying to love God with our intellectual and reasoning faculties, but to also love God with our feeling and wanting faculties. This seems pretty straight forward, but let's look at why this important. If a person were to compartmentalize their relationship with God (as most people are prone to do from time to time), there is a privation of total experience. For the intellectual person, we lose out on that deep-seated feeling of love; for me, this happens while working on my master's degree. I'll get so wrapped up in evaluating thing in a sterile, laboratory-type mental state that I forget that theology is inherently organic; it is natural, mystical and real as it is simply our thoughts and beliefs about God. It would be absurd to view my relationship with my wife as purely analytical and legal -- it would just be unhealthy -- so why should my relationship with my Creator be any less messy and intimate? it shouldn't. However, the pendulum can swing the opposite direction.

It is true that at times, people can compartmentalize in the other direction: with the heart. We get wrapped up in what it feels like to try to commune with the divine but in placing all of our focus here, we necessarily cut off the ways that we try and meet God via our minds. As one who has been in music ministry for more than half of my life, I can identify with this as well. It's easy to find "that song" or "that passage of Scripture" that just speaks to your heart and dwell so long on it that we lose out of the richness of fully engaging the couplet of heart and mind. Where this becomes detrimental to one's relationship with God is when our theology suffers because of our emotional longings. Sound theology, proper, demands careful thoughtfulness and passionate energy. Passion alone is like my two-year-old dancing and playing air guitar to the end music of his Scooby Doo movie; it's cute and beautiful in its own way, but it lacks grace, coordination and accuracy (he seems to switch from left handed to right handed guitar a lot). The better way -- the more holistic way -- is to love God with the entirety of this first couplet: heart and mind -- passion and intelligence.

Couplet Two
The second couplet, then, is clearly the two remaining ways of loving God: the soul and strength. Here we also see opposing facets of human relational capacities. Simply put, we are to love God with all of our physical parts as well as all of our non-physical parts. Just like the first couplet, we tend to compartmentalize or over-emphasize one of the two. When that happens on the soul side, we end up with people who are very "spiritual" without actually doing much. This can look like a number of things, but it is most apparent in one who is willing to say they're Christian, maybe post a lot of Christian memes on Facebook, maybe listen to "Christian music" (whatever that is) or maybe simply study and believe all the right things about God, but when it comes down to it, this person is not communing with the marginalized in their community; they aren't reaching out to the hurt and lost or (and this one is going to hurt, so please believe my intentions are good) perhaps this person is simply destroying their body with how they live their life. I don't mean substance abuse, but the just-as-deadly killers of the western diet and lack of exercise; there are far too many in ministry who don't talk about health and fitness because it indicts themselves and their lack of effort. Remember that it is a measure of love to care for our bodies and it is a measure of love to do good works for the Kingdom. Let us not be simply speakers, but also doers.

The other extreme, however, is the person who is willing to volunteer, is faithful to be in the pew on Sunday, bakes the casserole and writes the check, but does little to deepen their experience of the divine. This person may see the value in doing, but rarely feels that intimate connection to the divine except in emotional starts and bursts. There is no consistent awareness of the presence of God and there is little exploration away from their little island of theological awareness and experience. Just as it would be awful in my marriage to be content to take care the kids, do the chores, pay the bills and never connect with my wife on a deeper level than the transactional, never learn more about her and only grow closer in starts and bursts, so to is it with our relationship with God. Truly, humans are designed to need both sides of this couplet in order to have the fullest relationship with God.

Last Things
I think that if we really think about it these two couplets, when used to their fullest potential, not only yield the greatest expression of love to God, but also are a blue print of sorts to the best way to yield a vibrant relationship with God. Spanning the width of our minds and hearts while simultaneously reaching ever deeper into the fathoms of our soul and strength; this is the greatest command: that you should love God with absolutely every part of who you are. This is our design given by the divine.

peace,
C.M.

p.s. If you liked this series, let me know! Also, share it with someone you care about :)

Love Your God: with Your Strength

Part 4 of what (I just now decided) will be a 5 part series. Thus far, in examining the greatest commandment, we have evaluated loving God with your heart, soul and mind. Here we begin the fourth way and next after this, I'll draw some broader conclusions and pull these ideas all together into a unified message. Let's begin.

Now, at a brush, "love God with your strength" kind of seems like an odd phrase. We usually associate love with feelings and so we don't typically think about using our physical modes in non-physical ways; it's just absurd. I remember as a kid asking a youth group leader what this meant and he more or less said "love God real hard". While this is something of an exaggeration (that is, he did try at something but this is about all that came across), it does point out a blind spot in our understanding of this Mark 12 passage. So now we have to ask the seemingly silly question:

What is my strength?

The easy, undeveloped answer is simply that the Greek word used for strength in this passage is transliterated as ischus (is-khoos') which means ability, force and strength. On first appearance, this definition doesn't seem to bring much clarity, but when you start looking closer at each of these areas, you will find that to love God with our ischus means a lot more than you'd have thought.

• To love God with your ability means to submit in loving humility and servitude to God with all that you are able to accomplish. Entrepreneurship, speech, networking, raising kids, cleaning house, making dinner, calling friends, writing a letter (yes, people still do that); the list goes on and on. This inherently puts submission and prizing the will of God in the active category, not just the emotional. Love is not a feeling, but a verb -- a movement. So, in all of your activities -- every single one -- demonstrate the sacrificial love of Christ (without getting into it here, I'd just like to add that this is harder than it seems on first examination).

• Loving God with our force means to love God with our power of influence. Whether you are a CEO of an enormous company or a stay at home mom, you have a measure of influence (I would add that the latter has the greater amount) and it is to be used to the glory of God by the furthering of his Kingdom. This places love of God as the central responsibility for the believer; not correct theology, not perfect reputation in the eyes of others, but divine love. So, take time to take stock of your force and think critically of where you might utilize your power for Jesus' cause.

• Loving God with your strength (more colloquially here) means submitting your physical body to him in its care and purpose. This is not the same teaching as "don't tattoo yourself because your body is the temple of God" or "don't smoke or drink because you dishonor your God-given body". Instead, this is the stronger (and better exegetic) argument and command that not only what comes out of the body is either dirty or clean and so make sure that is fit for a Kingdom-person (Matt. 15:11) but also how you care for and know your body indicates your love for God. For clarity, let's put this argument in a simpler form: which is more convincing and right? to say to someone "take care of your body as best you can because God lives there and it dishonors him not to" or "take care of your body as best you can because it demonstrates love to God". The latter is consistent with our definition of love while the former functions on warped premises (i.e. Does God need a body to live in? no; is his honor of primary concern? no, Jesus says that love is of primary concern). So, get to know your body, feed it good things, move it how it should be moved and do no evil with it.

So how is all of this accomplished?

While I gave points of direction at the end of each of the above bullets, the simplest answer is this: intentionality. Just as I covered in the "love God with your soul" piece, it is not by any accident that we love God with our physical applications. You must block out time in your day to sit down and write out which areas of your life you have "force"; you must carve out of, what seems to be a stone-hard schedule, time exercise and eat right; you must purposefully behave in a way that reflects love, especially when people don't deserve it. Loving God with all of your ischus is nearly as difficult as loving him with all of your psuche. Nevertheless, this (along with the other installations in this series) is the command of God.

Thank you for reading this and the other posts; join me next time as I (attempt to) tie these four modes of loving God into a single theory of loving God.

peace,
C.M.

Love Your God: with Your Mind

Part 3 is here! I encourage you to go back and read parts 1 & 2 about loving God with your heart and soul. I have been systematically walking through the passage in Mark in which Jesus says that "the most important commandment is...you must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind and all your strength (Mark 12:29-30, NLT)." So we find ourselves ready to evaluate how to love God with your mind; let's begin.

The first thing we ought to do is define terms:

What is the mind?

The mind is a person's intellect, capacities to reason and memory. As I said in the previous post, I believe that the mind is a facet of the soul and thus not necessarily located in the brain (I won't get into it, but I will say that all that science can say definitively is that if there is a connection between the soul and the body, it is likely in the brain/nervous system). In this post I would like to expand on this idea and add that I think the mind is the guide to the soul; that is, it is the part that directs the soul where it would go and what it would evolve into. This is why we're told through Scripture that it is by the reforming of our mind that we are transformed into Christ's likeness. If you renew your mind -- the conductor of your "soul train" -- you necessarily impact the rest of the person.

So how do we love God with this mind?

I think, while there are many specific ways which we can love God with our mind, there are also general categories. My purpose here is to draw out these broad categories.

First, our mind can be made to love God by expanding it. Learning is one of the most primary ways that we honor God. Any time creation is as it is intended to be, God is honored; by learning, the mind is most fundamentally acting as it should according to it's purpose. In this way, we utilize our mind in humble submission (and thus love) to God's will and intention for that piece of our being. Again, there are specific ways that we can do this and most people learn by different means. So, whether you are a visual, auditory, a reading or a doing learner, you can love God by pushing the margins of your knowledge to new limits. God want's you to; he made you to; he delights in the wise and learned; he blesses seekers of truth.

A second general way that we can love God with our mind is to "meditate on the things of God". We covered this in subtlety in the last post. In lay-terms, think of things that are of God; things that are good, true, honorable, etc. We also do this by thinking about the teachings of Christ, the traditions of the church and things revealed to us by the Spirit. For example, once in a time of transition in my life, I felt the Spirit clearly say to me "eyes forward, hands on the plow". A reference from Scripture recalled and re-worded for my benefit, this message carried me. I spent time thinking about it; if I wanted to be fit for the work of the Kingdom, I needed to be forward looking and have my hands firmly gripping the tasks at hand. It is often true that you become like that which you think about.

A third way that we can love God with our mind is to do what it naturally does: drive the soul. Specifically, we ought to use our powers of intellect and reasoning to form a worldview that reflects the worldview of Christ. This means that we need to take his sermon on the mount seriously; it means that we need to view the world in terms of spiritual warfare; it means that, despite modernity, we ought to realize that the world as we  know it and the governments we submit to are not good enough. In light of this Christ-like worldview, we ought to be driven to action. Our mind drives not only the soul but also the body in this way.

There are probably things that lay outside of these categories, but I'm fairly sure that most uses of the mind and most ways of loving God with it fall into one of these three broad and often inter-related categories.

Things to keep in mind:

While there are many things to note when discussing loving God with our mind, I think that one of the most important is that we ought not fear reason and intellect. There is a subculture within Christianity that would say that unquestioning obedience is what God seeks and that philosophy, doubt and reasoning ought to be held as suspect. This, however, is not truth; Jesus consistently pushes his followers and challengers to think well. I am of the belief that Jesus was the greatest philosopher in the most academic sense of the word. Here is a fantastic book that builds a solid case for the life of the mind in a Christian's walk, here is a book that beautifully demonstrates that Jesus was indeed a philosopher and here is a book that shows you that doubt is not the opposite of faith.

I strongly encourage you to look up those books and even read them. Also, think about what has been said here; learn, think about the things of God and form your worldview to match Jesus'. Join me next time to talk about loving God with our strength. Also, please feel free to add your own ideas in the comments section: how else can you love God with your mind? Let us reason together!

peace,
C.M.

Love Your God: with Your Soul

Continuing into part 2 of this series on loving God, we approach the sometimes confusing part of the passage in which we are to love God with our soul. If you missed part 1, I encourage you to read it first.

A good preliminary issue to tackle is the elephant in the room: what is the soul? This is often the confusing part for those who would read Mark 12 and seek to obey. The Greek word used here that is interpreted as "soul" is transliterated as psuche (pronounced psoo-khay) which can also mean one's breath of life, vital force and a person's essence which is different from the body and preserved beyond death. Soul is simply a concise term to capture that idea.

I believe in a particular "theory of the soul" but there are many; for simplicity and efficiency sake, I'll be speaking from my own belief and not educating the reader on all the many theories. I do encourage you to go look some up, though, there are many. As I understand it, the soul is the biggest category one can use for a person's non-physical attributes. Within this broader category, we have subcategories which include the spirit, the mind, the heart, the memory, etc. In order to love God we must devote each of these categories in humble submission to the divine.

If I'm to love God with my soul, it means that I am to love him with all of the non-physical parts of me.

Well that seems pretty straight forward, but how do we actually DO that? Great question, thanks for asking!

In order to conform all of the metaphysical parts of my person to the submissive, loving servitude of Christ's example, I must begin by knowing myself a bit. If I don't know what my soul is like, I can't very well interact with it or bend it to my will (which, paradoxically, is located in the soul). In the west, we have far too often lost the art of meditation, introspection, self-evaluation beyond an online personality survey (which Disney Villain are you?) and so we end up walking around the earth like ghosts; we don't know our physical bodies much (unless you are in a health profession) and we don't know our non-physical bodies much (unless you are an exception to the norm, which is just as plausible as being a health professional; that is, it happens). So, first, get to know you, then follow Christ's example and teachings.

How do I get to know my soul?

I'm about to lose some people here...
The most effective way that I have found to encounter my metaphysical self is to still my physical self. This in and of itself is a feat to be mastered (and I have yet to master it), but it is well worth it for the pay off is enough quiet to accomplish an inner look at oneself. Contrary to popular belief, mediation is not historically a foreign practice to Christianity. In fact the ascetic and monastic traditions within Christianity are rich in theology and experience of the divine. It is incredibly worth a look at the Desert Mothers and Fathers as well as more popular mystics like St. Gregory Palamas or Bonaventure. So here is a quick how-to on Christian meditation. Be forewarned, this isn't nearly the only way and you likely won't get it perfect the first time (unless you're just a soul-ninja) as calming one's mind and body at the same time is a skill to be practiced.

• First, find a time to practice; I'm a morning person, so being up at 6 am with nothing to do for an hour and a half is great for me. My kids and wife (and even dog) are still sleeping and I have no obligations other than what I place on myself. You may be a night person or only have time on your lunch break. Like exercising your physical body, you must block out time intentionally to "take your soul out for a jog". Thankfully, you shouldn't need more than half an hour at most; even still, I would only attempt about 5-10 minutes in the beginning as that will be plenty difficult. Set a timer somewhere if you need to, but don't try for too long; acclimate. 
• Next, find a place that is appropriate to practice your meditation; I've found that too comfortable a spot isn't good because I just fall asleep and too uncomfortable a place is also distracting, though this may be ok as you become more proficient at mediation and are able to block out discomfort. You'll want to be seated, not laying, in a comfortable position in which you won't need to fidget too much.
•  Then pray; this is the easiest way to get out all the things that would likely have come up to distract you later anyway, so just pray that God grants you peace and help to discover who you are in him and how to grow in your soul. This will be the start of your practice.
• After that, I've found that what is called the "Centering Prayer" is most effective to begin to calm my mind. The Centering Prayer works like this: you pick a word (i.e. grace, peace, Jesus, love, hope, sacrifice, Father, Trinity, etc.) that will help you "center" your thoughts and focus. As you close your eyes and begin to think of nothing but that word, you are preparing to hear from God. This is not an emptying of your mind, but a focusing on the things of God. Here you will learn what occupies your mind (which is a part of your soul) as these are the things which will come to distract. Don't be discouraged or angry when other things come to mind; simply acknowledge them briefly and then use that word as a tether back to your center.
• Then, listen; look inside yourself and ask who you are. Ask God who you are meant to be. Don't think too hard, just be. Again, this isn't an erasing of yourself; just as a static body can be working very hard, so too can a still soul be active.
• When time is over or you feel you've heard/learned something new, pray again in gratitude for all that God gives.
• Finally, "wake up" the body again. Stretch, move, walk around; it is rare that the body is so still and the soul so active, and what goes on in your metaphysical person affects your physical deeply so be courteous to yourself.

Ok, that was a quick (very quick) instructional and it is not nearly all encompassing by any means; it is simply what has worked for me. Other ways of learning about yourself (if this suits you) is to write a "spiritual autobiography". For this, you only need to make a timeline with your birth at one end and today at the other, then go through and mark major life events and then go back one more time and try to discover what your spiritual life was like during the time between events (remember your spirit is the part of your soul which communes with God). One last way to learn about your soul is to read; read, read, read and see what you like, what interests you and what you believe and what you don't. Engaging your mind is part of this effort.

All in all, you must always remember that in each of these efforts to discover your metaphysical person, it is all for the purpose of loving God who doesn't want us to be strangers to ourselves. Learn who you are in the deepest parts of you; introspect and question. Only then can you begin to think, feel, know, believe, experience and love God with your soul.

Next time I will be writing on loving God with our minds; I hope you join me again.

peace,
C.M.