A call to return to good practice….
It’s the start of the month of October. Each month has a particular kind of character, doesn’t it?
I’ve just returned from an Indian Summer yoga retreat, where the focus was putting the summer behind us and preparing for the months ahead: stripping back, evaluating, setting an intention for the winter months. The summer is often a whirlwind time of fun and sun and holidays (although not so much sun up here in the North East!). Routine of any kind goes out of the window. September is a shock to the system: a return to school, to routine, to work. It takes time to settle into that. Maybe we don’t get all our routines and good practices all established at the same time.
As I was on the train home from the retreat last night, I noticed a couple of posts about intention setting for October. Someone was going sober for October: for charity, but also for the challenge and for personal wellbeing, I suspect. These thirty day challenges are a great way to prove that you are not dependent on any one thing, that you can live without it, simply that you can do anything if you put your mind to it. Another was about a personal morning routine and self care practice around hygiene and meditation and preparation for the day that this guy had practised for a long time and then let slip ‘for a whole host of reasons’. He explained the ritual and invited us to join him in establishing/re-establishing this good routine. Which I may well do – especially if it staves off ‘that cold weather lethargy’.
Which led me to reflect on other things I may have let slip. It’s so easy to lose focus, lose sight of our intention. The beginning of this month is a good time to re-establish good practice in our lives.
The beginning of a month means the beginning of a new book in the Bible for me to study and write about. I’m over three years into this practice now and have arrived at Zechariah, the second to last book of the Old Testament – can you believe I’ve read and written on nearly the whole of the Old Testament?!
And the title at the start of the book of Zechariah is this:
A call to return to the Lord
It seems we’re not the first to let good habits and practices and intentions and rituals slip. And we won’t be the last. ‘The Lord’ may not be a name you’re comfortable or familiar with. Maybe God or the Divine or the light resonate more with you. Or something else entirely. But it’s easy to lose sight of the awareness of something/someone greater than us outside of us, isn’t it? We get so focused on our own lives and desires and needs that we forget to look beyond – at what’s going on in the whole universe and how we fit into that. We get distracted by the world’s distractions – the material – and forget how important it is to connect with the spiritual.
So maybe this is the time to reconnect. To re-establish practices that have worked for you in the past or to find new ones that connect you to the divine. I’m beginning to discover the power of meditation for the first time (although I have prayed throughout my whole life and at times, that’s merged into meditation at the moment where I learn to ‘Be still and know that I am God’). I invite you to join me.
This is ‘A call to return to the Lord’. Not necessarily a call to return to church or any other practice that currently makes you experience fear or anxiety or reluctance. But a call to be open to what this month may bring, to what the call of God in your life may look like right now.
We’ll work through this sacred text, this Book of Zechariah, and see what it throws up. I have no idea what we’re getting ourselves into either, but I trust that God is the light leading us into this adventure and God is good.
Come with me.
