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Philippians 1:1 Lectio: and. For my first Lectio Divina in a long time, I read no further than three words: “Paul and Timothy.” Curiously, the “shimmering phrase” that beckoned to me was the word “and.”

And. We call these “the letters of Paul.” But look at that! A surprising number of Paul’s letters are addressed from multiple people. This shows how intent he was on discipling.

And. They are a team. They are partners, working together. All the words we have, plus the prayers and conversations we don’t have… they were shared, and birthed out of their partnership.

And. They were friends. But it’s a friendship deeper than “liking each other,” or what churches call “community.” This is communitas, the bonds of shared endurance. …Oh Mike, how I miss you.

And. Paul is not only training Timothy by writing this with him; he is also releasing him as a leader by establishing him as an equal. But this is not a hierarchical hand-off of bureaucratic authority. It is a community of faith (Paul and Timothy), speaking to other communities of faith (the believers in Philippi). Life imparting life.

Paul and Timothy. A truly healthy spiritual life takes place only when one is being discipled, and has disciple. I haven’t had either a Paul or a Timothy in my life for many years now, and it shows. ++Lord, send me a Paul. Send me a Timothy.++

Jon and Kay. I misunderstood Kay’s lack of connection with the things that energize me as a rejection of those things. But I have spent the last few years learning that that’s not true at all. We’re just different people. Our differences have made as a team before, dancing, leaning on each other’s strengths. ++Thank you that you have united us again. Will you also use us again?++

Jesus and Jon. I in you and you in me. ++Come fill me. Let’s dance.++

Update: Dave Ingland has blogged the thoughts I stirred with this meditation.

We don’t get a newspaper, so it was by odd chance (if you believe in that kind of thing, which I don’t) that I was looking at a paper yesterday. The front page had something about “yesterday’s Mardi Gras celebrations”. Lent snuck up on me!

Last year, I practiced lectio divina for lent. This year I will go through the first 40 Psalms. I’ll try to post about them, but given my recent blogging record, I’d better not make any promises. It is more important that I do it than blog about it.

I told the kids over dinner that Lent was here, and what I was doing. Kay & I had just been talking about how we can teach our children to spend time alone with God when we’re so lousy at it ourselves. And even when we do practice it, spending time alone with God is a solitary endeavor, so how do you model it? So I was excited when Kay said that for Lent, we were going to ask the kids to take 5 minutes a day alone in prayer.

Luke 1:67-75 lectio: He set the power of salvation in the center of our lives. At home on Monday, I disassembled the fuser assembly for our laser printer, replaced the teflon roller, and reassembled it. You have to understand that I am not a hardware guy; Kay (who is the nuts-and-bolts person of the house) expressed concern that I was getting in over my head. But thanks to the helpful CD-ROM video included in the kit from fixyourownprinter.com, I pulled it off without destroying anything! The printer still prints, and now hopefully I’ve gotten rid of the annoying black stripes.

In the middle of the teflon roller is this thing called the fuser lamp. This must be what gets really hot and bakes the toner onto the paper. It’s the heart of the printer. If other parts are not functioning well, your printouts will be messy, or get jammed, or something. But without the fuser lamp, you will get nothing but blank sheets of paper — even if all the other parts are perfect.

The video said to be really careful when you pull out the fuser lamp. Don’t touch the lamp part at all, because any finger oils could destroy the lamp. I had to pull it out to remove the teflon roller. Once I had the new roller in place, I carefully set the lamp, the power of the printer, back in the center.

++ Lord, you placed your fuser lamp in the center of my life. Help me not to ruin it with my own messy oils. I need the power of your salvation every day. Burn hot, burn true, at the center of all I do. ++

Luke 1:57-66 lectio: No. He is to be called John. Elizabeth and Zachariah have their baby. On the eighth day, family and neighbors come over for the circumcision ceremony, and they’re all calling the baby “little Zachariah”. Elizabeth says no, but they don’t take her seriously, protesting, “But that’s not the way we do things! We’ve never done that before!”

Whether you’re planting an emergent church, home group, or are just trying to get any sort of group together with an eye on doing something new, a warning: Well-meaning people will come and try to name what you are doing. “Oh, it’s a church. Oh, it’s a Bible study. Oh, it’s a youth outreach. Oh, it’s a Gen X thing.”

God’s power is released only when Elizabeth and Zachariah join together in saying, “No. We have a different name.” Let’s not be pigeonholed by anyone, whether they are Christ-followers, normal people… or ourselves.

++ Father, help us to fight the names that we are given, or even the names we give ourselves. Help us to live by the names you give for the dreams you dream. ++

It’s been a long time since I’ve done Lectio Divina with any consistency. I thought that doing it over the 40-day Lenten period would establish it as a habit in my life, but sadly, it didn’t just happen by itself. I guess I need to make it happen. I want it to happen, because the benefits are great.

One of the things I love about Lectio is that it can lead you down trails you would never find if you just stuck to “authorial intent”. One of the things Leonard Sweet talks about is the difference between deductive or inductive reasoning, as opposed to abductive reasoning. I have discovered that Lectio Divina is truly abductive. The process of meditating on the “shimmering word” by reading and re-reading the passage is the best example I’ve experienced of what Leonard describes as “taking an image, and spinning it until it comes alive.”

What’s interesting is that for me, the “spinning” continues all day long; the image is stuck in my head and I keep revisiting it throughout the day. This is in stark contrast to my experience with the conventional “quiet time”, where I would read a passage, check it off as “done”, and live out the rest of my day with no real connection to what I had read. Quiet times may work better for you, but for me, I’m afraid I fell into the modernistic trap of a well-partitioned life.

Well, I was going to share yesterday’s Lectio which was especially peculiar and fun. But I see that’s for another posting.