Planned by the Spirit

Almost every day, I eat the exact same thing for all my meals. Each morning, I wake up, have a bowl of Kashi cereal, and then have two cups of coffee with Sugar-free vanilla creamer. My latest lunch kick is a bowl of maple brown sugar oatmeal and some fruit. And for dinner I rotate between about three different meal choices. Even my Starbucks order is the same each time (grande soy misto with sugar-free cinnamon dolce and two splenda to be precise). But for the past few months, I have been training for a half marathon and I've found that recently I have had to break free of my routined meals in order to get the protein and nutrients I need to be able to keep nourished during this training. Responding to the needs of my physical body required a change in my routine.

I don't know about you, but I think that most days I take this routine mentality into my spiritual life. Don't get me wrong. I think it's important to have a routine so that you actually DO make time for prayer and Mass and spiritual activities. But I think so often we become so routined in how we go about participating in these exercises that we do not allow for the Spirit to work. We set aside prayer time but make it more of a check-list of things we're supposed to pray about than an opportunity to let the Holy Spirit guide our prayer time. We enter Mass saying all the right things and singing and speaking when we're supposed to without ever fully engaging in the Sacrament. We become comfortable with how we live out our faith and forget that perhaps God is asking us to step outside that comfort zone and routine to engage in something new.

Do we ever allow ourselves to be unplanned? How often do we allow moments to be planned by the Spirit and not be our own agenda? How often do we forego the ideas we have for how WE want God to work and actually let him lead us? I had to change my routined daily diet to receive the physical nourishment I needed. And I firmly believe it can be the same for our spiritual life. We must change our routined faith lives by being docile to the Spirit to receive the spiritual nourishment we need.

And so today, maybe it would be wise for each of us to examine the way we are living out our faith and ask for the grace to see how we've become complacent, comfortable, and unchallenged. Perhaps we must examine how our routine has become us NOT making time for our faith. Or perhaps we have fallen into the trap of the check-list faith life and have failed to truly allow the Lord to lead us. And so we pray today, Holy Spirit, that you help us to break free from the routined faith we have established for ourselves. We beg for the grace to allow you to provide us the spiritual nourishment we need, to lead us to depth, and to show us how YOU want to work.