Hi geard lynch

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Sorry, post in error.

Be that as it may, I have a different view on this discipline thingy, and these facts are pertinent to that vision: I was a long distance runner and played football (American version) and loved every part and aprticle of it. Perhaps I was a strange kid. I remember after one track meet where I won four gold medals, the kids at school heaped lavish praise and I kept silently waiting for just one of them to say the praise was God's for how he made me. Still waiting.

In these things, sacrifice was celebration; burden, loss, and suffering were not involved. There was no prize down the road or price to pay. There was no way to train for the moment was in, no thought of what could be: Oddly graced, I suppose, it was really all joy as is. 

"And who would run London’s rain-slick pavements as the cold bites and the traffic fumes choke if there was never an expectation that there would one day be a marathon to run and a medal to claim?" This really gets to the crux and I feel is the fork (therein the rub) where our paths divide. I did not such a motivation. It used to truly puzzle me the fuss about competition and winning, although to watch me at either sport you would have thought me the most fanatical of competitors. It was just this love that was in me, put there, I felt, by Christ; I could never see how I could have produced it. A gift, end of story, and Christ was always with me in it.

I see a spiritual discipline in much the same way. The toil is not what makes it a dsicipline or adds to my maturity; the toil shows me where I am off the mark and lacking in maturity; there is no merit to it. This is no cause for depression or guilt or re-doubling one's efforts. It is time to be still and allow the source of that resistance which produces toil to surface, to place ourselves as securely as we can in God's care. It is a time to trust more, not try harder. What fruit of the spirit we may appear to gain, is simply the removal by grace of what diminished or blocked the working of the spirit. Unlike the body that builds strength, the soul grows by reduction, losing all of what we have made of ourselves for what God would have us be.