In this episode, I welcome back Steve Thomason, an Associate Professor for Spiritual Formation and Discipleship at Luther Seminary. Steve shares insights on enriching your spiritual journey through practices like prayer, silence, and community. He addresses overcoming barriers to spiritual practices in today's world and discusses adaptations for those with ADHD or on the autism spectrum. We also look at how spiritual practices can emphasize genuine discipleship over mere church membership.
Show notes:
Steve's website: https://www.stevethomason.net/
Drawing Is Seeing with Steve Thomason | Episode 69
Overflow: An Introduction to Growing in Faith (Faith Lead Course)
The Book of Acts: The Ever-Expanding Church (Faith Lead Course)
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[0:34] Hello, and welcome to Church and Main, a podcast for people interested at the intersection of faith in our modern world. I'm Dennis Sanders, your host. Church and Main is a podcast that looks for where God is at work among the issues that are affecting the church and the larger society. To learn more about the podcast, to listen to past episodes, or to donate, check us out at churchandmain.org. And you can also check us out at churchandmaine.substack.com. At that site, I do post episodes, but I also include articles that I've written that are related to the subject. You can subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcast app. And I do hope that you will consider leaving a review. That helps others find this podcast. So, do you have a spiritual practice? Maybe you have something like a quiet time, or maybe it's a daily prayer or liturgy of the hours. Maybe you use prayer beads or you pray while walking. Maybe you just tend to spend time in silence. Now, how do you feel about that spiritual practice?
[1:48] Probably guessing like a lot of people, maybe you do these things, but feel frustrated that you're not doing a good job. I know that I feel like that at times. Or maybe you don't do them at all and don't know how to start. Or you're wondering even why you should be doing this at all. So today I'm bringing back Steve Thomason to the podcast. I chatted with Steve a few years ago, who is an ordained Lutheran minister. And we talked about his work as an artist. He's back now to talk about spiritual practices. And spiritual practices matter because they are a way for us to stop in all of our busy work in our day-to-day lives and listen to what God might be saying to us. And sometimes it's not even just what God might be saying to us. Sometimes times, it's really just entering into quiet with God.
[2:45] And so we'll talk about spiritual practices with Steve. He is the Associate Professor for Spiritual Formation and Discipleship at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota. And he describes himself as a post-evangelical, missional, and a neo-Lutheran theologian. You can see his work at stevetomason.net. But for now, let's listen as Steve and I talk about spiritual practices. And I really want to make a note that especially if you're someone like me who is on the autism spectrum, or maybe you have ADHD, or like me, You may have both. You'll really want to listen to this, especially early on. So with all with all of that, let's listen in to this conversation with Steve Thomason.
[3:36] Music.
[4:11] Steve, thanks for coming back. It has been a while since you've last been on the podcast. And since you've last been on the podcast, you've had actually a change in positions. When I talked to you last, you were at a church in suburban Twin Cities, but now you're a professor. Yes. So, kind of share a little bit about that. Sure. Yeah. Well, thanks for having me again. It's a delight to be back. And thanks for the work that you're doing through your podcast and your ministry.
[4:44] Yeah, last time I was here, I was an associate pastor in a Lutheran church south of the metro, south metro, in Egan, Minnesota. And now I am the associate professor of spiritual formation and discipleship at Luther Seminary, which is located in St. Paul, Minnesota. And I'm just finishing up my second year doing that. So really having a great time. Half of my job is the traditional professor work, you know, teaching classes and being a faculty member. And then half of my course load is actually given to Faith Lead and Faith Lead Academy. And so I create asynchronous online courses that are not accredited, that are geared toward what we call the everyday disciple. So I teach, like I did a course on Matthew, a course on the Book of Acts, an introduction course to spiritual formation called Overflow. And I've got one coming out right now that is the.
[5:52] There's a whole series on spiritual formation, and this next one that's coming out this month is called Loving God with Our Mind and the Spiritual Practice of Learning as a Lifelong Spiritual Practice. So, yeah, I make about two courses a year. I'm just having a blast.
[6:10] Did you ever see yourself ending up as a professor at a seminary?
[6:15] Well, actually, when I began my academic journey in 1994, the reason I wanted to get a master's degree was because I wanted to be a college professor and I wanted to get a PhD and you have to get a master's first. And I was kind of accidentally a pastor because the course that I, the program that I entered into was Bethel Seminary back in 1994, which was just on the cutting edge of digital technology back when it was still the information superhighway, you know, and we had dial-up modems. And so I did my whole MDiv as a distance learner through Bethel. But in order to be enrolled in that program and in order for that program to be fully accredited, students had to be already working in ministry. And so the church that I was an uber volunteer in, they actually brought me on as staff.
[7:17] And then I became an ordained pastor there while I was getting my MDiv. So that was a long answer to your simple question. Yes. This is kind of my dream job. So, one of the things that I wanted to kind of talk to you about is spiritual practices. And you did a recent podcast on the Pivot podcast from Luther Seminary about that.
[7:49] And I actually wanted to start that from a different kind of starting point. I think it is important for leaders, obviously, to have that grounding in a regular spiritual practice, but what does it mean for anyone to have it? I mean, why is it important for someone who is a follower of Jesus to have something that is something that they're doing on a regular basis? Yeah, I love that question. It's one of my favorite questions. So, I like to talk about it in metaphors. I mean, I think that's the only way we can understand anything is in metaphors, right? And so, there's two metaphors that are really helpful for me. The first is to think of this as a relationship.
[8:48] I think the best metaphor for me is, in understanding our spirituality is the relationship between a child and a parent, whereas we are the child and God is the parent. And coming from a Lutheran perspective, one of the reasons that some Lutherans don't like to talk about spiritual practices is because it can sound kind of like works righteousness. I got to do something in order for God to love me or to be right with God or something like that. Well, let me just tell you right from the start, that is not at all how I think about spiritual practices. Because like a child, a child doesn't ask to be a child. I didn't choose to be a child of my parents. I didn't choose them. So our relationship with God is a gift. And God loves us. This is my theology. This is my core theology, right? God loves us and God loves me unconditionally.
[10:03] I don't have to do anything to earn God's love, and there's no possible way that I can make God love me more than God loves me, okay? And to put it in another theological frame, this isn't about our salvation, right? This isn't about working toward salvation, right? But it is what Paul called working out our salvation. Our salvation is a gift, right? There's nothing I can do to make me better or more saved or less saved. That's all I get from God. That's called grace. And that's the good news. That's gospel.
[10:45] So, like in a human relationship between a parent and a child, the fact that I am a child doesn't guarantee that the quality of my relationship is any good. Right. So like you have a spouse. Right. You can think about spouses. You can think about friendships. Just think about any kind of human relationship. If you want to have a good relationship with someone, it actually takes work. You have to invest in the relationship. And the most core work that it takes is the combination of being willing to listen, which is a vulnerability and a humility to just sit there and receive the person fully without judgment.
[11:41] And the ability to speak and share yourself, right? So it's this reciprocal sharing. It's called communication, right? That's the core of relationship. To me, that's what spiritual practices are, is they are activities that we do in our life to just grow deeper in the love of God in relationship. So that's one metaphor. So if a disciple of Jesus is out there and then just wants to improve and grow deeper in your loving relationship with your loving parent, heavenly parent, then you need the spiritual practices because that's how you develop the relationship. And we'll talk about what they are in a minute. The other metaphor is I like to play guitar. So I use a musical instrument instrument metaphor, but fill in the blank, like any skill, whether it's cooking or sports.
[12:41] Or mountain climbing, whatever it is, if you want to be good at something, you have to work at it. That's not like works righteousness. That's just a fact of the universe, right? So I wanted to be able to play my guitar to the point where I could play it and my family could sing along. Well, I didn't just pick up a guitar one day when I was 30 years old and get to that point. I had to invest painful discipline of learning my scales and strumming and practice and practice and practice so that someday I could pick up my guitar. So now I'm at a point where I can just pick up my guitar and start playing and we can start singing.
[13:31] Which means... I don't have to do some of those rudimentary practices, but I still need to practice in order to maintain my skills and to improve my skills and expand my skills. And so when I talk about spiritual practices, that's what we're really talking about is things like, how do you grow deeper in the love of God? Well, you listen to God and you talk to God, and you love your neighbor, all of your neighbors. So Jesus made it super simple. Love God, love your neighbors. That's all it is. It's that simple. And so the practices of loving God and loving your neighbor are simple things like Scripture.
[14:22] How do you engage Scripture? And there's all kinds of different ways you can engage Scripture, Because that's a primary way, not the only, but a primary way that we hear God and we see God. Scripture captures the activities of God and humanity in a historical moment over a couple thousand, you know, 1500 year period. And so we get to hear God and see God's actions through humans, right? So scripture is super important, but also the spiritual contemplative practices of listening to the spirit within us, you know, mindfulness and contemplation and then prayer, talking to God.
[15:03] And then corporate worship, you know, this isn't a solo activity. We are relational creatures. We don't do this alone. We do this in community. so we worship God together we serve together we are in community together we love our neighbor together so.
[15:22] Does that get at your question a little bit? There is. And I think there is something interesting that you mentioned that we don't normally hear a lot is because you've, when we think about spiritual practice, we think of it as very two-dimensional between myself and God. And obviously that matters.
[15:40] But you've also added a third dimension of it also including how we relate with our neighbors.
[15:49] And as you've said, all our neighbors. Can you kind of expound about that? Because we don't always pick that up. Yeah, absolutely. So my PhD dissertation was around spiritual formation and the social trinity, which is the relationality of God, right? So I gathered a group of suburban Lutherans, and we spent nine months together in a participatory action research project. And we just, I won't go into all the details, but it was one of the things that we discovered experientially was breaking down that vertical dimension and the horizontal dimension into a circular dimension. mention. So when you think about love God, love neighbor, if you draw it in a circle, love God, love neighbor, love God, love neighbor, neighbor, love, love, God, love, right? You can't actually love God without loving your neighbor. And you can't love your neighbor without the love of God.
[17:04] And it is all interrelated. So, you don't start with your relationship with God. Now, I do have a principle that I call overflow, because I do think it kind of has to start with your heart being able to receive the love of God so that the love of God can overflow into your neighbor. But it isn't like... They're separate. You can't say, well, you can't do it all alone.
[17:40] And even the traditional medieval monks and the cloistered orders of monks and nuns, they weren't all alone. They were still connected in community. Even though they were silent and maybe out in a cave for a few years, they still had some relationality to community. To get all nerdy and philosophical, we being those of us in North America, modern Western culture and society, we are the unfortunate recipients of radical individualism where we have been taught that you are on your own and it's up to you to fix yourself and to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. And that's just untrue.
[18:41] Like you are not alone. You are interconnected with everything and everyone, whether you like it or not you know so you know this also then brings up the um the role of because i know there have to be people out there that are listening to this is thinking well i've tried this but then i you know i forget or i um just aren't i'm not able to do this every day and so it's kind of the role of how failure kind of comes in there. And I bring that up because as...
[19:20] Several years ago, I was tested and, you know, I have both, I think, on the autism spectrum and ADHD, which means trying to sit sometimes and be quiet, not easy. I'm not the one that moves around a lot, but my mind just always wanders. And so, how do you incorporate that sense of failure in spiritual practice, which I guess then leads into how do you incorporate grace in spiritual practice? this.
[19:58] Yeah. So, you said a couple of really interesting things. They're connected and slightly different categories. So, the failure piece and the grace piece is really important. And you talked about how because of your particular brain and neurochemistry, you find one particular practice difficult. And so, let me start with that one and then we'll go back to the failure piece, because I think what's really important for people to understand is that spiritual formation is not one size fits all. There is not like, okay, here's the, here's the seven things that you must do and you must do them this way. Otherwise you have failed. No, this is about your relationship with God. God created you. The way you are, and it's beautiful, and not everybody can sit in silence.
[20:57] I have three basic questions for spiritual formation. The first one is, where am I? And then the second one is, where am I going? And then the third is, how do you get there? Basic journey questions. Well, part of the work of the where am I is becoming that self-awareness of how how did God create me and what is my sacred pathway? The next course that I'm building for Faith Lead is about spirituality and how some people are contemplatives by nature.
[21:34] Others are not. And so, like, I'm a visual artist, and I do a thing called mindful sketching or contemplative sketching, and we actually formed a group at Luther Seminary where every Tuesday we do this. And the purpose for this is some people need their body to do something in order to be able to actually become focused.
[22:00] And so I like to draw, and there's different ways that you can draw. And for me, it connects my body to my breath. Because if sometimes if you just sit there and you try to do like centering prayer uh some spiritual uh teachers call it monkey brain you know your brain just is all over the place well first of all that's okay it's not about not having those thoughts in your mind it's about letting those thoughts come and then letting them go and that's part of the discipline right but moving your body is fine. That's why so many people like yoga, because yoga is another way to, or not true yoga, actually American yoga isn't actually yoga. It's just like an Americanized physical practice, but it's beautiful. I do it because what it does is it connects your body to your mind and your breath and your spirit, which for some people helps them be more present.
[23:10] Now, for some people, the opposite is true. The physicality distracts them. And so just experiment. Find things that help you. The goal is to become present with God.
[23:28] And so whatever you need to do to let those distractions go to the edge for a little while, you know, they're still going to be in the room, but the discipline of making them stand against the wall for a few minutes so that you can become present with the Spirit of God and know, and ultimately the goal of this is so that you can be filled with the assurance of God's love for you. Right? It's like going to coffee with your best friend and being able to sit down and that person is 100% focused on you for however much time you have. That's what we're trying to get after when we do contemplative practices, trying to connect with God. And quite often scripture, that's one of the reasons scripture is so important, because a scripture can help you focus, right? Take a scripture, read it slowly, read it over and over, let it just wash over you. So that's one thing. So, then getting to the failure piece, you can't fail at spiritual practices.
[24:49] You just keep experimenting. And if you try something, you know, it's not, again, it's not, you're not trying to earn anything. God doesn't need you to do spiritual practices. So, you're not going to disappoint God if you don't do spiritual practices. What's at stake in spiritual practices is your ability to receive the love of God and to grow in that relationship. And so, you're not going to fail, but just like playing guitar, if I don't practice, I'm not going to get better at it. So that's not failure that's just delayed improvement, right yeah yeah i just came up with that i don't know if that that might that might be a good phrase delayed improvement i think it is i think it is i like it, you know i think one of the things that i i have learned over the years um Um, and what I think has been helpful actually for me, um, there are several kind of podcasts that are out like, uh, daily prayer podcasts that I will listen to. Um, and that usually is what has worked. Um.
[26:15] Not perfectly, but that's okay. Yeah. But that, that has, has been what worked. Um, that's great. And I think usually I can have some sense of quietness, but it has to be like when I'm doing something like walking that I have to move. I, um, I'm not one that I could just kind of sit for a long time and do that. But, but I, so I agree with you. I think it's, It's trying to find what works and figure that out. And another thing, too, is I think it is less about the what you do as it is about the intentionality of it, right? The why. What is your motivation? Because you could have perfect quiet time, but if you're doing it to think you're better than other people or there's some kind of pride involved in it.
[27:12] Then you kind of like what it's, it's like, I just preached last week on first Corinthians 13, right? And Paul said to the Corinthians, Hey, you can do all this amazing stuff, but if you don't have a gap, a it's worthless. What's the point? But a person and look at King David in, in the Hebrew scripture, that guy blew it all the time in the worst possible ways you can imagine. Yeah. And yet, he was called a man after God's own heart. Like, what is up with that? I think it has to do with intentionality and the ability to be humble and admit when you're wrong and just keep trying, you know? Mm-hmm.
[27:57] And, you know, you brought this up just now and then again in the podcast that I listened to about, and I think you even brought up some things about Henry Nouwen, about kind of entering into the life of the beloved and understanding of God's love. And I think that might be something that we, it's easy to get involved in spiritual practice and not think about that, or experience that sense that God does love you.
[28:30] And that that can go a long way towards not feeling that you have to get it right because that's not the important part of that relationship is not quote-unquote getting it right it's it's entering into that relationship and knowing that you are loved yeah yeah that that's the core right the the love of god is the core and that's why i like the gospel of john so much, and all the John letters, is that God is love, and the love of God is the center of all things. All of creation springs forth from the loving mutuality of the mysterious triune God, right? Right. And this is the insidiousness of sin and the fall. However you want to label the distortion and the brokenness of our world is that we just don't believe that we don't trust that we are worthy of being loved. And we don't trust that we can trust others to love us.
[29:51] Right? Because Because so many people have violated that trust and hurt, you know, we hurt each other all the time. So it's understandable why people don't think that love even exists, right? Because so many people have violated so many people that it is hard to make the leap.
[30:15] But I think that's the biggest challenge for people is to say, you know what? This is one of the reasons why I became Lutheran, because I think the core Lutheran theology of grace, when I encountered it, it just became the breath that I needed, right? Like, no, you are God's beloved. That's it. That's what you need. And that's good news. And if everyone could operate their lives as if they are beloved and as if everyone else is too, man, we would just treat each other differently.
[31:05] So and that's why to me that's the motivation of spiritual practices is to cultivate, to break down those distortions to to receive that's why my core image is the the the deepening and the overflow the when when i'm able to to truly receive that love See, because it's not about earning that love, because that love of God is the constant. But if my spiritual arteries are clogged, if my pipes are jammed, I'm not able to actually receive that love, and then I'm not able to overflow it. But man, so spiritual practices are kind of like spiritual Drano, right? Just clean out the pipes, get the system flowing. And then when it's flowing, that's the kingdom of God right there. Yeah.
[32:09] So kind of moving from our own spiritual practice, how does that then work in a congregation? How do congregations learn to practice both on an individual level, but then also in a corporate way? And you've kind of talked about in the past of how you've talked about incorporating spiritual practice into worship, which I found fascinating. And could you kind of expound a little bit about that? What does that look like? Yeah. It's really a culture thing. And I don't mean culture at the macro level, like different ethnicities. I mean, within a congregation, what is the culture of the congregation? Mm-hmm.
[33:28] Gone through history and as Christendom, which is really a European phenomenon, immigrated to this continent and brought that Western European idea of Christendom and inserted it into this soil, we have this distorted understanding of what it means to be a Christian, that it's just, you just show up and you're a member of a church. And if that's all it is for you, that's all it's ever going to be, right? But, and so what it takes is a recalibration of what it actually means to be the church. But the church is a gathering of disciples of Jesus, right? And Jesus gathered disciples for the sake of transformation, for the sake of following Jesus in the way of the kingdom of God, which brought about the overthrowing of empire, the overthrowing of oppressive systems of evil, bringing about the inclusion of the marginalized. The lives, all of the things that are the love of God at work, if that's why you are a part of a church and that's the culture of the church, then the spiritual practices just become a necessity.
[34:55] It's really hard, though. One of the things we talk about right now at Luther is needing to shift from church membership to discipleship, right? Which has been, this has been part of my thing forever, why I started house church when I did, you know, but talk about failure, you know, I tried that, failed. But that's the core of it. Now, how do you, like, if you're part of a congregation where the culture is, you show up for your 45 minutes on a Sunday, and you go home, and that's all there is, then it's a really difficult.
[35:39] Challenge to convince people that there's more. And we could have a whole other podcast about it. That's kind of what our Pivot podcast was about. The question in that podcast was a leader saying, how do I help my congregation? Well, I will say this. I used that in that conversation too. One of my guiding lights in my spiritual formation has been Dallas Willard in all of his writings. But he often talked about a key parable of Jesus was the parable of the treasure hidden in a field. It's a very short parable. It's like Like one verse, Jesus said, the kingdom of heaven is like a person who finds a treasure buried in a field. That person goes and sells everything that they have and purchases that field.
[36:41] And that's it. Like in classic Jesus fashion, he doesn't explain it. He just leaves it open as an enigma like you figure it out. And I think one of the possible explanations for that parable is when you find something of true value, you will do anything to get it, right? And the kingdom of heaven, which is the actual love of God that transforms you and the world, Jesus said that is at hand. It is available. It is present. And we learn about it through Jesus. If you believe that it is possible to grow deeper in the love of God through Jesus Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit for the sake of the world, if you believe that's true—and.
[37:33] You'll do whatever you need to do to grow in that. And so the challenge for the local congregation today is, how do we ignite that desire in people's hearts? Because right now, in the public media, for a lot of Americans, the church is the problem. And so they don't want anything to do with Jesus or Christianity. And so it's a real challenge to say, well, actually, the spiritual practices are going to get you past all of that and to see the heart of who Christ is for real. That's actually the hope of the world. At least I think so.
[38:28] What do you think in our culture makes it difficult to engage in spiritual practices? You know, I could think of a lot of different things. You know, we kind of live in a culture, as I maybe said before the podcast began, of short attention spans. We are, I think, more of a culture that reacts instead of listens. persons. Everyone throws in social media, but that does have some role in it. But what do you think has been a barrier about engaging in spiritual practices? For culture in general? Yeah. Well, that's a big question, and there's no possible way to come up with the answer to that. Some of my hunches and intuitions around it, just from my limited experience of reality, is that.
[39:32] Like Charles Taylor's famous book, The Secular Age, right? We just live in a world where no one actually believes that God is an active agent. That if you believe in God, you might think about God as the creator, the great watchmaker. So, God is just this abstract concept that's out there, and some really crazy people might think they can talk to God. But in reality, there is research around this that many Christians are actual functional atheists. Because if you don't believe that God is at work in the world.
[40:25] Then why would you be interested in spirituality or spiritual formation? And so that's a huge thing. And it is the air that we breathe, right? It is a secular age. Everything that you see, and ironically, it's the byproduct of the framers of the United States, right? This separation of church and state, which I think is a good thing, but there is this idea that faith is private. And so you can't talk about spirituality or God in the public sphere. And if you do, you're kind of ridiculed for it. And that kind of pervasive secularity just makes it really hard. It's like most people in industrialized Western society are inoculated against the spiritual.
[41:30] That's changing, I think. I think there is an increasing openness to spirituality. sexuality. One of my colleagues, Andy Root, just wrote a book about secular mysticism. Mm-hmm. I'm actually reading that right now. Yeah, it's a great book. It's great. And he just talks about... I mean, he's brilliant, and so he does a great job of articulating why. But what's missing is the transcendent, right? Because he's done all his work around Charles Taylor, which is the imminent frame. We have been so trained in the last 200 years that the only thing that exists is the material world and so the hunger for spirituality that's emerging, is that God-shaped vacuum in everyone's heart but because there is no capacity for transcendence it just loops back on self and that's why it's not actually helping people people. So how do we break into the transcendent?
[42:41] That's the big question, right? I don't know if that helps. Yeah, I do do. And I think that that may be part of why spiritual practice might matter is because that is a way of breaking into the transcendent.
[42:59] I think a lot of how we live today is as if it's all on us, and that even in our churches, that's kind of the assumption. I mean, it's not necessarily always spoken, but it is there. Yeah. That actually brings up another aspect to one of your questions. Another reason why the practices are important, like you just said, is that sometimes we have to practice ourself into belief. Mm-hmm. Yeah. You know, fake it till you make it kind of a thing. There's a great book that was written called, it's not The Power of Ritual. That's a good book. But there's another one.
[43:46] It's like The Celebration of Discipline? No, it's a secular book about why ritual is so important. Oh, I think I know which one you're talking about. It's a yellow cover. I have to look it up. But that author is talking about how even a secular mind needs ritual, and that ultimately, the ritual space will break into the transcendent. Because if we are open to it, the transcendent will break through.
[44:32] I'm becoming increasingly interested in Celtic spirituality. And in Celtic spirituality, they talk about the thin spaces. And one of the things I love about it is it's very nature-centered and it's very interrelational, the interconnectivity of everything, but that a lot of people, even people in a secular framework, are intuitively sensing the transcendent in nature. And if people can just get there and do the practices, is eventually it's going to click, I think, because God is just always present. And it's like the clogged pipes again. It's like something will unclog those pipes and whoosh, the love of God's going to flow into your life. And you know you're the beloved, man. That's.
[45:37] That's the moment. So.
[45:41] You know, I think the person that you're trying to think of is Charles Duhigg. Yeah, maybe. And I cannot remember the name of the book, but I do now remember it was Charles Duhigg that wrote it. I can find it real quick. You can keep talking. I'll just look it up. Okay. Well, I think one final question that I have is, as we're wrapping up, is if someone is wanting to start spiritual practices or they are wanting to start over after maybe not doing it for quite some time, what are some words of encouragement that they should have as they start up? And maybe think, oh, this is going to be hard. It's going to be a slog. I don't know if I can do it. What should they hear? What words of encouragement should they hear? Yeah. Well, first, the word of encouragement is, I found the book. It is The Power of Ritual, Turning Everyday Activities into Soulful Practices by Kasper Terkul. Is that what you said? Nope, I said Charles Duhigg. because he wrote another book about ritual and habit. Yeah. So, okay. The power of ritual. Okay.
[47:08] So to your question, to the person who maybe has tried and failed or they're afraid to start.
[47:17] Just give yourself grace and remember this verse, God's mercies are new every morning it doesn't matter what has happened, today's a new day, and try again and start with five minutes, do something that slows you down that focuses your mind read a passage of scripture and thank God for the day like just start there and then throughout the day start asking yourself, where am I seeing God today, Just that awareness of God's presence. Some people call them God sightings. We do that on youth mission trips every night. We'll just say, all right, so where did you see God today? And we'll say, you know, I saw it when my friend over there picked up that little kid at the park and gave him a big hug. That was God hugging that child. And you just see God in the everyday, just that kind of practice. Just simple things like that, I think, would help people start seeing that it's actually quite easy.
[48:46] So if people want to find out more about you and also about maybe some of the on-demand courses available, where should they go? Yeah, thanks. Thanks.
[48:58] To find out about me and what I'm doing, go to artpastor.com, and you will see that I talk about four different things. I have a cartoonist guide to the Bible, so I've illustrated the Bible. If you want to do some fun visual Bible study, you can do that. I've got a lot of content around spiritual formation on there. I got a lot of nerdy stuff around theology. And I have a lot of fun stuff about art, because I love creating art. So you can check that out, artpastor.com. And you can, if you want to learn about the courses that we're doing, go to faithlead.org slash academy. And that's where we have over 50 courses available now for people to take, and four of them are mine. Okay. Awesome. And I've been meaning, I think, I am looking forward to taking one of those courses pretty soon. Great. Well, thank you. Yeah. Thanks for all the work you're doing, Dennis.
[50:09] You're faithful and committed to your podcast and to your congregation, so appreciate that. You're welcome. And thank you for coming on, Steve, and definitely hope to have you back on again soon. Yeah, anytime. All right, take care.
[50:25] Music.
[50:57] Well, that's it for this episode of Church and Main. I am thankful for Steve Thomason for taking the time to chat with me today. There are going to be links to Steve's prior episode here. I'm also going to put some other links from his website and some other things in the show notes for you to look at. I also wanted to let you know about an update on considering if you ever wanted to make a donation, which is also in the show notes. You can now donate in two different ways. The first is it can donate via Venmo.
[51:35] You can give whatever amount by going to at church and main pod. Again, that's at church and main pod. I've also added another option. It's called tip top jar. Again, you can leave any amount. And for that one, just go to tiptopjar.com backslash electric person. Again, that's tiptopjar.com backslash electric person. And don't worry, I will put that link in the show notes. Your donation on either of these really helps me to keep producing great episodes like the one you just listened to today. Day. Um, I don't really put anything on a behind the paywall, uh, for a lot of different reasons. One is I already work and I'm way too busy and I don't really have enough time to, you know, put in more time for incentives, um, for, for donations. So, um, really what I would love is that you can give what you can to help and to do that. And whatever you give, I will be incredibly thankful for.
[52:51] With that, I just also want to talk about to remember to rate and review this episode on your favorite podcast app. Again, that helps others find this podcast. And, you know, pass this episode along. You have family and friends that might be interested, especially on this episode where it comes about spiritual practices. Please pass it along. It will be of great help to them help spread the word but i think it also is could help them if they're trying to figure out how to better spend time with god so i'm dennis sanders your host as i always say thank you so much for listening take care godspeed and i will see you soon.
[53:33] Music.
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