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A blessed 14th Tuesday in Ordinary Time. I’m Deacon Ken Crawford and this is my 7th video as a newly ordained deacon. God bless you to you all this morning and God bless you to your families.
Today I want to talk a little bit about spiritual direction, something I had to engage in during the formation process, with specific spiritual direction with a spiritual director. I started out with somebody who was a dear friend and priest but not particularly trained in spiritual direction. It was an enjoyable experience but later learned when I went to someone who was well trained in spiritual direction that actually it was not good spiritual direction.
I think there is a great need in our world for spiritual direction. It is so difficult to see in ourselves certain patterns. It’s the same reason we need a psychologist in certain cases. But unlike a psychologist who really is trying to deal with negative situations and correcting them, spiritual direction can hopefully be something in the positive direction. We can look at our lives and our spirituality and our relationship with God and finding ways to grow to closer to Him.
It has changed my life to have good spiritual direction. Fr. Dave has done a wonderful job of guiding me, not telling me what to do, but letting God tell me what to do and helping me listen to God better. There was one key moment where I said something and he told me, “Do you think that came from Christ?” And I had to reflect and say “No, I don’t think it did.” It was not something that would have occurred to me without the benefit of spiritual direction.
The difficult part is it is difficult to get a spiritual director. I was able to get one because I was in formation and I have been able to latch on to him and stick with him as a newly ordained deacon, but it is very difficult to find a spiritual director. But I encourage you to try. It’s a difficult thing. It’s worth the effort. It’s not something you only need when you’re in trouble or struggling spiritually. If anything it is at its best when you are not, when you are trying to grow and deepen your spirituality. So go out and find one. Find someone who’s well trained. A clergyman is awesome but it doesn’t need to be. Lay people can do this job wonderfully. Just find someone who’s a good trained spiritual director. I personally I like an Ignatian model but there are other models that are worth investigating as well.
So that’s my topic for today, but I do have one more thing to discuss. I’m going on a backpacking trip and then a trip to my family cabin, starting tomorrow. So I won’t be posting videos but I will be recording videos from the trail. So what you’re going to see is for about the week, you’ll see some short text posts that will say they are from an InReach device (because that’s my satellite device that I can communicate with from on the trail) to the blog portion. But no podcasts and no video diary.
But I will be recording the video diary every day so when I get home I will do my best to post all of those within a couple days of returning, as well as returning to the normal daily format from my home office. So it’s going to be a little quieter for about a week. There will be some content hopefully posted just in text format. But a lot of content coming in about a week, because it’s all going to be queued up waiting on my phone where I’ll be recording on a daily basis. So, look forward to those.
God bless you all. God bless you in all that you try to do for God’s sake, for the Church’s sake. God bless your families. I ask for your prayers as I embark on this backpacking trip with my sons. We’re going to do about 60 miles in 4 to 5 days, so a lot of hiking in front of us. I ask for your prayers for the safe travel of my family because they will be meeting us at the cabin. And God willing (I won’t really see you tomorrow, but I’ll be posting tomorrow) and I’ll see you in about a week.