Ordering Your Private World

In February of 2008, my friend, Angie, gave me a book called 'Ordering Your Private World' by Gordon McDonald. I read it and it was an amazing read! I mean, life changing!

Well, I just started back to school at Regent and one of my books for a class is this book! I'm now reading it for the second time and it's still an amazing read! I was at a totally different place when I read it the first time. So now it has some new things to look at from a different prospective.

I want to share a part of McDonald's writing here.

-I believe that one of the great battlegrounds of our age is the private world of the individual. There is a contest that must be fought particularly by those who call themselves practicing or observant Christians. Among them are those who work hard, shouldering massive responsibilities at home, at work, and at church. They are good people, but they are very, very tired! And thus they too often live on the verge of a sink-hole-like collapse [a time when all that is underneath them falls and they can no longer even trust the ground they stand on]. Why? Because although their worthwhile actions are very unlike those of Wilde, like him they become too public-world-oriented, ignoring the private side until it is almost too late.

Wayne Muller writes:

"The busier we are, the more important we seem to ourselves and, we imagine, to others. To be unavailable to our friends and family, to be unable to find time for the sunset (or even to know that the sun has set at all), to whiz through our obligations without time for a single mindful breath, this has become the model of a successful life."

-Our Western cultural values have helped to blind us to this tendency. We are naively inclined to believe that the most publicly active person is the most privately spiritual. We assume that the larger the church, the greater it's heavenly blessing. The more information about the Bible a person possesses, we think, the closer he or she is to God.

-Because we tend to think like this, there is the temptaion to give imbalanced attention to our public worlds at the expense of the private.

I am loving this book all over again! And to have an entire class of people to talk about it which is awesome!

I've recently been trying to put my finger on this gap I've seen in bible studies and church ... this is it! But what I think about it is people really want to know how to have a spititual life and they just don't know how. They've been given the wrong formula ... perhaps. Just an observation :)

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