Remodelling Your Spirituality

“For there is nothing hidden, except to be disclosed; nor is anything secret, except to come to light. Let anyone with ears to hear listen!” ~Mark 4:22-23 (NRSV).

Jesus was in the business of opening things up: the minds of the disciples and others by his parables, and the eyes of the blind and ears of the deaf through his miracles. He opens hearts to the truth, today and eternally!

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Opening Up Our Spirituality

Jamie Durie, the celebrity gardener, has a beautifully basic philosophy that brings the garden alive in our minds to punctuate our lives with flourishing, teeming growth. He extends the living room and lounge room into the garden; curtains are a thing more fitting, he says, to the boundary fence than as awnings to windows. Such extensions expand our thinking of liveable home beyond brick walls to the boundary of our properties.

Such a process of opening things up brings a rejuvenating out-of-doors freedom into the typically closeted home experience.

If we cannot feel at home—physically and spiritually—where can we feel at home?

Opening up our homes by extending the walls into the garden also has a spiritual analogy. Poignantly in this day, when technology and the rapidity of change swamps our minds, cluttering our spirituality, heading out into the garden of our hearts reveals a vital expansion possible to our perspective; and this, against the flow.

Why settle for a constricted, safe, blinkered spirituality?

The Ever Present Spiritual Landscape Is Open

Jesus ever seeks to open us up.

We are recreated, reborn, redesigned, and repurposed to exemplify a multiplicity of blessing—the thriving, plentiful, ever-blooming life.

What has happened is our minds have been transformed, opened up, and made capable of discerning the truth in God’s redeeming universe; an ever-expanding reality normally invisible, but made open to those alive in Jesus’ name.

Notice that it’s never Jesus that blinds us with technology, encroaching change, politics, opinions, conjecture, envy, boasting, pride, social affairs, competing interests etc. The things that confuse and overwhelm us are wrought by Satan. The will of the evil one is to close our minds.

In our busy lives we might have the loveliest of lounge rooms; our houses, perhaps, are decorated in splendour. Yet, we hardly enjoy them.

In a similar way, Jesus has opened up all spiritual possibilities, delimiting us. Life has a beauty hard to reconcile. Yet, we must decide to live it; the simpler the better.

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Throw open the curtains. Better still, take them down. Make curtains, instead, at the extent of your outer boundaries. Learn to live an expansive life. Jesus died for it. We do not hide a shimmering lantern; we place it on the lampstand for all to see.

© 2011 S. J. Wickham.