Spiritual Practices

 

Welcome! I don't believe that God is a "tool" we can use to fix our problems, and I don't believe that if you're depressed you just need to pray harder and read your Bible more.

At the same time, God is a huge source of comfort and meaning to me, and there are many practices that I've found very helpful. You won't find a classic list of spiritual disciplines here, but still, some of them are classics. Prayer is a classic, and a key practice for all believers. Not as a way to push buttons on a vending machine, and God is not Santa, prayer is no instant fix, but it's part of a relationship with the God who, incredibly, is with us. The God who cares, the God who truly does feel our pain, the God who wept when His friend Lazarus died, even knowing that He was about to bring him back to life. In that light, knowing that I can cry out to God and even yell at Him, and He can take it, yes, prayer is a mental health tool for me, besides also being a classic spiritual discipline. A few sub-categories or tags I'm planning to use under this Spiritual Practices tag: Contemplative, People, Prayer, Become Like a Child, and Rhythm of Life. Eventually each one of these will be a link; click on the links here to go to more of an explanation of and introduction to each sub-topic. Some of these may have a few more topics or categories under them later on, some will not.