The Comfortable Yoke

Learning from Jesus through spiritual practices

On Thursday evening,

Jeff Lewis

hosted a book club discussion online for us to talk about Follower: How Getting Close to Jesus Brings You to Yourself. One of the questions he asked me, after we chatted a bit about how most of the chapters in Follower are rewrites of sermons I once preached, was, “Are there any other sermon series you’ve preached that you’d like to make into books?”

This was an extremely affirming question, I feel, since it indicates (to me anyway) that he might like there to be some more books made out of my sermon series. (The nodding heads and audible “mmm’s” among the other zoom attendees ramped up the impression further.) It was also an encouraging question because in fact, there are some other series I’ve preached that I’d like to make into books.

I described a couple of them. Then I said, “The one I preached most recently was about spiritual disciplines, and I really had a shift in how I think about those, but with that one, I’m not sure if I want to write a book, or create a new Pilgrimage class around it.”

I had, as you may know if you pay for Sometimes Saturdays posts (which have been even less than sometimes lately), intended to spend Lent reflecting on these here. But Lent was uncharacteristically and maybe inappropriately full, and I had neither time nor bandwidth for those particular writing intentions. I think now, without the “deadline” of Easter (that’s funny), I can probably pick my way through some spiritual discipline reflections here, so today let’s talk about the framework through which I now look at them.