Perfection and experience

So I’ve been struggling with the daily office. And I’m not sure why. The actual experience has been fantastic. I’ve found myself growing struggling, and approaching things a little different in my day-to-day life. But at the same time, I’m finding that I want to protect the time for the daily office in a similar way that I may have wanted to before as I do Bible study or any other devotional discipline that I’ve had with the Lord. And what I find it is that when I’m in that mode it’s all or nothing. So if I’m behind with time or I can’t get to the daily office first thing in the morning, I will just don’t do it. What will happen is that once I miss the first daily office, the second daily office is easier to miss and the third is even easier, and then I would easily get into this pattern of not doing them. I wonder if I need to “protect the time.” Or struggle with the sacred nice within time a bit.

I was reading in Rob Bell’s book The Velvet Elvis that our joy and God’s joy are the same thing. It gives God joy to provide us with joy. And I was thinking about how that works for the daily office or any devotion; this sense of segmenting life from the sacred ties with God. I’ve been influenced greatly by the “Emergent Conversation” and want to see how that impacts my theology and love for God. There’s a great emphasis in that movement to destroy the barrier between the sacred and the secular. In some cases I struggle with that and in others I find great beauty in it. For example, twenty minutes ago I was about to start the daily office for the afternoon and my friend Vic called. I felt this tug between the “doing God’s work through the daily office “and talking to my friend. When in reality there was this continuity with God in both those streams of the daily office and talking to my friend. So I found myself reflecting on that quote of joy from Rob Bell and taking great pleasure in talking to my friend.

So I am about to do the daily office and am about five behind on the mid-day liturgy. But, I am excited and to look forward to doing it and to have the evening daily office as well. This will be the last of the first liturgies within the Wee Worship book. I’m kind of sad because I have grown to appreciate them so much. But also see the promise of going to the second series of devotionals.

I am dictating this into my recording system and then will edit it through my Mac computer. I’m finding parallels between the process of using the voice record for journaling and performing the daily office. My first journal entry on this blog talked a little about this. But haven’t used it since and am finding that I want to perfect the process before I engage the process. And I think this is a dramatic shortcoming on my part. I feel like this same type of pattern persists with the daily office and other disciplines with the Lord. I want to have my arms around it all, the process, before engaging it. I find that God is at the center, but it’s more theoretical than experiential because I don’t want to fail.