Jonathan Nation

Exploring Grace

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Will you join me?

I’m on a journey and part of it is trying to develop a habit of getting into spiritual materials every day. Some times I have done well, other times I have sucked, but I am trying to do one thing of keep it small and just be consistent. Where it does not require a lot of effort & little or no will power.

A couple years ago I took up Obstacle Course Races. It was the first time in my life that I consistently ran for any real training & cut 13 minutes off my second Warrior Dash time … in less than six months between them. It was just starting slow, one day at a time, doing just a little bit.

This time

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Spiritual

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For many, this is the hardest area of your life to accept, or consider.

I am not going to spend a lot of time making the case that there is more then the tangible world we see, touch, and feel around us, but the bottom line is we all have the basic questions that Thomas Anderson in The Matrix asked:
– Who are we?
– Why are we here?
– What’s happening to us; why?

Lets just assume that the reason we all ask these seemingly bland and obvious questions is because there is more then meets the eye, and that is what happens in the spiritual realm.

The spiritual aspects of your life deal with connecting with, and understanding the deeper aspects that cause us to ask those questions, to not know but to know that we don’t know. In my own spiritual walk, it’s really not about traditions, rituals, costumes, meditation, good works, or studying some text. All those play a part, however the main focus is a relationship with my Creator.

It’s working on myself in regards to my character, integrity, personality, and world view. Always attempting to gain a larger, deeper, broader, and bigger understanding of the world, or worlds around me.

Faith
Everyone has faith; everyone trusts something or strives to be loyal to a promise. One definition that I use outside what is found at dictionary.com is the ability to deal with the unknown or chaos.

Faith is not necessarily the absence of your own knowledge, but it is how you use your knowledge and experiences to grasp, comprehend, or move forward.

Faith plus your world view determines how you act and react to anything.

Spiritual side of your life is in part dealing with that second part, your world view, more so then the first part … your ability to trust and deal with the unknown.

Improvement & Measurement
This is the hardest area for me to measure.
You can apply many of the ideas found in the mental and physical sections.

There are two big suggestions for improvement:

  • journaling & documentation – just take some time on a regular basis and keep track of what is going on.
  • don’t ignore it for too long – it is easy to go about your life and not even think about anything outside your filling your perceived wants and needs.

Exploration into the questions behind the questions, or needs causing the needs and facing the brutal facts that either your life is providing the abundant life we believe it should have, or it is not.

This is the most ignored area of life in our current culture, yet and thus it is also the key aspect that you probably need to spend more time on.

Giving Thanks

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Rule #1: When the world goes flat, and you are feeling flattened, reach for a shovel and dig inside yourself. Don’t try to build walls.

~ Thomas L. Friedman, The World is Flat
Sitting on some clifs above the Stones River

Sitting on some cliffs above the Stones River

There are many different ways to approach a challenge, issue, problem, or opportunity, but one of the common ones is taught in life guarding:

  1. Survey the scene – you need to grasp what is going on, the status quo, and what resources are available.
  2. Check the individuals – the general question is “Are you OK?” – gathering more information on more specific parts of a scene that you cannot get from a distance.
  3. Call for help – contact 9-1-1 or Emergency responders, or the appropriate professionals who are better equipped to help long term.
  4. Preform additional evaluation & take action

Going into the Thanksgiving holiday, third weekend in November in my part of the world, I try to do a similar approach as if I was an outsider approaching the scene of my current life. It is vitally important that on a regular basis I take time to reflect on a deeper level then I normally do. It is necessary for me to review my days, weeks and months soon after they happen, but mostly to keep account of what happened, this period of time is different. It’s to force me into looking at longer periods of time, comparing to the goals I had set, and seeing not the individual threads in the rug of my life, but the big picture the best I can.

The goal: To reflect on this past year, find the good parts [the wins], and be thankful for it all.

First I take time to look at the past year and the major changes that occurred over the last 12 to 16 months. Then I look closer at the seven areas I view my life. By the time I celebrate Thanksgiving I should have a good list of accomplishments, treasures, moments, and praises both for me and for others. After Thanksgiving I typically go to work on steps 3 and 4 with goal setting, education planning, and targeted networking, but this writing is focused on just the first two: Surveying the Scene & Checking the Individual parts of a life.

Over the next 20 days or so, the plan is to write about what I am focusing on, maybe not at the exact time, but on a regular basis releasing a new item or area. To get started, the seven areas of life are:

  • physical – taking care of your body is important
  • mental – your mind determines much of your abilities and how far you will go
  • spiritual – deep inside you, you know there is something you don’t observe in the physical
  • production – career, jobs, it all comes down to providing or producing value to someone else
  • personal finances – inflows and outflows of money, dealing with giving, spending, and saving
  • family – the closest people around you, no matter if they are biologically related or not
  • social & community – the broader group of people you interact with on a regular basis

You made it this far …

I am always looking to me more leaders, linchpins, and problem solvers. We need more people to take on a business owner mindset, to seek out pains and problems then find ways to provide value to others.

Let's connect.

~Jonathan Nation

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