I’m fairly certain I’ve lost some friends this past couple of months. Now, in the past I’ve had that happened and I’ve lamented the decisions I’ve made. Well, not much lamented the decisions as lamented the fact that I really thought that God was leading me towards making those decisions and lamented the fact that some people aren’t good about dealing with people they find inexplicable. They didn’t agree or understand, and drifted off.

Now, though, I realize I made decisions and if I’ve lost friends over it it’s entirely my own fault. As I wonder about this I wonder both about what to do and I wonder about the inner workings of my own soul that led to this unfortunate state. Now that I’m starting to feel more open again I’m feeling it a lot more heavy. Which is basically the one negative aspect to my decidedly more cheery state of late.

It is often thought that the spiritual quest is one of finding out our callings, or our goals, or our focus, or otherwise those enriching points of interaction between God and our lives, so that we can set aside the frustrations of mundane life and move onwards to the higher planes of fruitful existence.

Only, from what I can tell, while that’s a part that’s not nearly the whole of spiritual progression, especially at its more mature phases.

Finding a calling or purpose or focus is all well and good. Gives a bit of hope and purpose to what might otherwise be long seasons of slogging.

But, the more mature phases, from what I can tell, involve already knowing the calling then sloughing off those inner realities that hamper and restrain. Which means we go from rejoicing in being saved by Grace so that we can learn who we really are, to being propelled by grace to overcome those issues and tendencies which are not part of who we really are. God teaches and we reach, straining because of the grace and light of Christ, through the power of the Holy Spirit, but straining still because, you know, those parts that aren’t who we are really seem like they are ever so precious to who we thought we were.

It gets complicated. But, it’s the way of wholeness, stillness, and peace.

More later.

For a while I had a blog called Morning and Evening. This was more about my personal inner life, a place where for a little while at least I posted in the morning and in the evening, journaling my thoughts on the spiritual life. That regularity fell off a good time ago. Still, I kept going sporadically, moving to doing more of a pictorial interpretation last year. Pictures, I thought, were an interesting way of looking in when my mind seemed unable to wrap around the right words.

Well, I moved webhosts earlier this year. Part of the reason for that was the servers at my last host were a mess. Constant problems. My databases were affected again and again, so I moved to a new host, siteground. Love it in the new habitat. However, even though I somehow managed to get all the information moved over, something happened with my morning and evening blog. I couldn’t log into it. All the admin stuff was totally lost. I could keep it up but I couldn’t add to it. When it started to get spammed a lot I couldn’t do anything so I took down the blog.

Now, however, I’m getting a bit of a drive to get back to this online journaling. I’m also thinking I need a place to gather assorted writings and thoughts on the spiritual life that make it to various other forums or sites. So, Learning to Dance is born. No commitment other than to be a renewed spot of my thoughts.

And, I’ve saved the posts of Morning and Evening, adding them to this page. Now it’s a lot more complete, updated, and more fitting to my purposes.

What got me thinking about doing this again? It was the fact that the online journaling I did over at Barclay Press was so helpful.

I’m going to also get my old morning and evening posts up, from the first full year I did them, which weren’t in a blog format, but just updated separate pages. Those were the beginning of the dance for me, in a way.

If you want to skip to my earlier writings, that went up to about September 2005. Wow, it has been a while since I mused properly.

Enjoy.