Day 57 “A Year of Thoughts”: This is Something

This is something isn’t it?

Life that is, the breathe, the air

We breathe don’t we every second

Yet no human taught us or told us

We just did in the moment we had lungs

We found our breathe and learned

As if God were telling us in the womb

One moment explained, next in the experience

This is something isn’t it?

Life that is, who we are and become

We hope don’t we, move forth

Into each moment slowly turned to memories

The air shaped and bent by the wind as we hold together

By the elements mined deep within our soul

For where ever we are or where ever we go

This is something isn’t it?

Life that is, calling us to live it.

 

-Caleb Ross Hunter

Day 44 “A Year of Thoughts”: Angry? Joy is Also There

The LORD is my shepherd, I lack nothing.

He makes me lie down in green pastures,

he leads me beside quiet waters,

he refreshes my soul.

He guides me along the right paths for his name’s sake.

Even though I walk through the darkest valley,

I will fear no evil,for you are with me;

your rod and your staff, they comfort me.

You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies.

You anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows.

Surely your goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life,

and I will dwell in the house of the LORD forever.

Psalms 23 (NIV)

Every time I read this each line speaks to me. The picture that David has painted here is beautiful and refreshing but often times I forget that God has restored my soul. I use to be an angry kid and found myself battling depression from time to time. Sometimes when I didn’t know how to communicate my feelings as a kid I would just cry, I’d cry myself to sleep, I’d cry when I was angry or sad. But as I’ve slowly learned to allow God to lead me to the place where I am not in want, the place where I can lie down and find rest in him, there he has restored my joy, my soul, my life.

Angry? There is still Joy.

Joy is always there, we have to receive it, allow God to lead us, let go of our anger and lie down in green pastures. God pursues us because he loves us, he can breathe life back into your soul.

Love will follow you.

Each day we have a choice to dwell in the presence of the Lord our God. To accept his love and forgiveness. To live a life full of him. Full of the joy only he can give. There is also JOY…

-Caleb Ross Hunter

Day 32 “A Year of Thoughts”: Observe. Ask Questions.

How often do we stop and observe the world around us? While on a walk today with my best friend we talked a lot about a number of things but we came to this point where we stopped on this dirt road that runs between two fields, in that moment we just took in the view. A pheasant spooked us a little when it flew out of the tall grass on the side of the road. Some birds were thought were orioles sung from their perches, the sky was bright blue and the moon stood out though the sun was clearly in the western sky. With each slow in take of breathe I tried to see something new and beyond what I saw I imagined what might be there.

 

In that moment there were four questions I asked my friend.

 

 

 

What do you hear?

What do you see?

What do you feel?

What is troubling your soul?

Ask these questions everyday. Observe the world around you. Take a deep look into your soul, what is troubling you? What we see, hear, touch, and feel, forces us to be honest with ourselves and our world. What are we observing? What are we experiencing?

Observe.

Ask Questions.

-Caleb Ross Hunter

Day 30 “A Year of Thoughts”: Take a Walk

“Enoch walked with God; then he was no more because God took him away.” – Genesis 5:24

“Before he was taken, he was commend as one who pleased God. And without faith it is impossible to please God’ because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him.” – Hebrews 11:5-6

On many nice sunny days and warm evenings I really enjoy taking walks through town and down the country roads. But those walks are best when I can share them with someone else. My best friend and I like to get out of town and walk through the fields.

The wind whistling in every direction, the tall dried grass clapping as if a parade were in line, the clouds making shapes like dragons or horses in the sky and the sun slowly setting to the west. The walk is full of adventure, excitement, long conversations and meaningful silence. The birds catch our eyes as they float and turn like synchronized areal swimmers. Our shoes kick up the dirt with each step we take.

Sometimes when we walk we don’t have a certain place to we have to go or anywhere to be. We are simply taking the time to walk together, to experience the day together, to get away and see that there is to see. On those walks we learn a lot about each other, we learn how ti slowdown, to skip together, to run, to sit, to stand and to pause to take in each moment like it might be our very last.

It’s walks like this with my best friend that I picture Enoch walking with God. As if they are best friends experiencing each step together. Seeing the world, God created, together. Each step of theit walk more intimate, God learning how Enoch sees the world and Enoch experiencing little by little the presence of God. A walk hardly a walk without a little conversation, the ones with Enoch and God are long and meaningful but not without pauses and silence that carry just as much meaning.

Enoch lived his faith, he walked with

God, he didn’t just practice the presence of God he got to experience it.

I long for me life to be like Enoch’s. For my faith to move me to daily walk with God, daily grow to know his presence more, to learn him, to be intimate with him, to hear and listen and have long conversations.

The story of Enoch is one of hope. Hope that through the weariness of our souls longing to walk with God, that God is already walking with us. Sometimes we have to wake up, open our eyes and see that God is right there, Maybe you should take a walk, get out of town and talk to God, he’s right there.

-Caleb Ross Hunter

Day 28 “A Year of Thoughts”: Eat this book

“Reading is an immense gift, but only if the words are assimilated taken into the soul- eaten, chewed, gnawed, and received in unhurried delight.”- Eugene H. Peterson

This quote is one of the many that has stood out to me as I have had the opportunity to read Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading by Eugene H. Peterson. If you were able to see either my dorm room or my room back in Indiana you would find shelves, drawers and stacks of books. Some of them I have read and reread. Some wait their turn to be read and some may someday be opened for the first time. But reading is a gift. One of the early points that Peterson makes in this book is that the Bible is not simply another book.

Growing up in family that reads, a lot, I have been around books and have heard the continence of the Bible from a very young age, but it’s not about the books that you read but how you respond. Peterson’s in this book is trying to explain that eating the Bible is not a book that you can read and not respond to. It should move you, effect you and change you. Reading is a gift but scriptural reading needs to go deeper than a surface level. It needs to be eaten, chewed, gnawed, and taken in a way that is refreshing and nurturing to our souls.

I understand this now, that reading is like eating. You take in the information, but you can’t stop there. You can’t just take in the food without digesting it. It’s pointless to shove a banana down your throat without chewing it first. Your body was not made for steak to be taken in and passed right through, likewise Peterson continually reminds us in this book that we are meant to consume God’s word for more than just the mere means of saying we have read it. We must eat it. It would be unfortunate to have read the Bible or any book for that matter and not be in some way challenged or changed.

Our culture feeds off the mindless activities that do not have any intention of moving our souls to wake up and to thrive. Reading the Bible should not be a mindless activity that leaves us with no reason or place to respond. In the words of Peterson “In our reading of this book we come to realize that what we need is not primarily informational, telling us things about God and ourselves, but formational, shaping us into our true being”(pg 24). When we are able to move from just reading to being transformed by the words applied to our lives, that is the point.

We become more out of our reading. It is not all about knowing. What we take in through our minds should penetrate our hearts. Through all the translations of the Bible we have found that the words have become readable for almost anyone in any country, however, Peterson alludes to the text as being more than readable. It should be livable. It is liveable. “The Bible… is the text for living our lives. It reveals a God-created, God-ordered, God-blessed world in which we find ourselves at home and whole”(pg 18).

Peterson, writes of the example in the apostle John being given the command to eat the book that is given to him by the angel. He did not deny the fact that the very words that he was writing must be consumed and lived out through his life. John experienced the gospel first hand. He lived with Jesus and learned to make his teaching a part of his life. John ministered to the broken and poor. He lived the words of Christ. He took them in and ate them, not to simply survive but the thrive and to show Christ to the very world that he lived in.

“Eating a book takes it all in, assimilating it into the tissues of our lives”(pg 20). To follow the example of John is our goal and challenge that Peterson puts forth. But how do we do that? How do we move from just being a reader to being an eater? Moving from just consuming for the knowledge of knowing all the words of the text to assimilating them into our lives. First we must allow the Holy trinity to work through our reading. We have to keep it personal, real, honest and applicable to our lives today. It seems easy to say but harder to do.

We must allow God to speak through the scriptures. It is his voice that we hear in the words and should lead us to live them out. God is at his core relational so it would only make sense that when he calls us to take in his words and apply them it is in a personally relational way. When we eat the scripture we are participating in that relationship. There is this personal understanding that God can work through and in our lives. When we can understand that God can work in us and change us, the text becomes almost in a sense more eatable, more applicable, and more personal.

Peterson gives a great example of the tool of Lectio Divina. Simply put Lectio Divina is practice of or way of reading the scriptures that guards us from doing so in a depersonalized way. The opposite of this kind of reading would be skimming simple to take credit for reading something. Lectio Divina is more than that. It’s a deeper more personal reading of the text. It’s slow. It goes against our consumer mindset of devouring what we read with no assimilation or growth. We consume the text through spiritual reading. Lectio Divina means spiritual reading.

How do we spiritual read something? For centuries the practice of Lectio Divina was carried out in a slow and contemplative way. Contemplative means to slow down and take in. Like eating again contemplative spiritual reading is reading that is meant to nourish and become a way of living. There are four parts to spiritual reading. The reading, the mediation, the prayer, and contemplation.

The reading as Peterson explained through most of the first half of the book is getting in the word and chewing on it. Reading may be understanding the context, style or way in which it was written and pouring through that reading. An example of this for me is taking a pen to what I am reading, writing between the line or underling the voice that seems to be speaking through the text. This reading takes intention and openness to grasp the many metaphors of scripture.

This openness and understanding is carried over to the second part of the spiritual reading which is mediation. This is often where we have to think upon the text and allow God to reveal himself through it. Going back to the Peterson quote, “The Bible… is the text for living our lives. It reveals a God-created, God-ordered, God-blessed world in which we find ourselves at home and whole”(pg 18). When we are reading we have to listen for God’s voice in our lives, that shows through when we mediate and continue to eat the words slowly.

This mediation of the text is also paired with prayer. Prayer is the third step of the spiritual reading. From my understanding of the reading this book, prayer is a part of the relational and personal act of interacting with the text and God speaking into us. In prayer we are in conversation with God over the text and allowing him to move through our words and requests. “Prayer is language used in relation to God… the most universal language, the lingua franca of the human heart”(pg 103).

It’s from prayer that we move to contemplation. This almost a soaking in of the reading, prayer and mediation. In contemplation we might do all the other steps again, but ultimately contemplation should move us to application. Where the text is integrated into our lives. It become not only what we have read but what we are living. That is what the Bible calls us to, is to live it.

In the closing chapters of Peterson’s book he writes about the many translations that have come over time. However, through all of those translations the message has stayed the same. The story from Genesis to Revelation is still the same and it still call us to live. To eat this book and find true life in our savior Jesus Christ.

In all I really enjoyed reading this book and have found it very helpful in my understanding and application of spiritual reading. It challenges me to eat what I read. To take it in and apply it. Reading is not always the problem, moving to a place where the reading becomes life is the challenge. Peterson through his book Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading has challenged me to rediscover my passion for reading the scripture, but not only reading it but living it.

-Caleb Ross Hunter

P.S. sorry for the length of this post but my hope is that you might be able to take something away from this as I have.

Day 26 “A Year of Thoughts”: BE

To be or Not to be

 

Those famous lines of Shakespeare haunt the nurseries, play grounds, and high school halls to the cubicles, kitchens and government buildings where human beings dwell. It is the question that every human being must face. To BE or not to BE? It sounds so simple yet it’s not.

 

While in Brazil I had the opportunity to help teach an english class at a church about 45 minutes away from the international school where I worked. One of the first lessons we went over in that class was the verb “to be”. For those of us who grew up speaking english this lesson would seem very simple and very elementary. Even a small child would understand what it means to be hungry.

 

However, for someone who does not speak english to be is a hard thing to understand. To Be is a very powerful verb. I even have a hard time still explaining it in a way that doesn’t use an example of to be. Many times we put to be with other verbs or nouns to describe who we are or what we are going. But what if we looked at to Be by itself.

 

To be or not to be.

Do we know how to just be?

To be ourselves.

 

Honestly in your soul what does it mean to be.

 

What is it that stands alone “to be”?

 

Do we need other things to define us or is to be to hard for use to understand by itself.

 

When it comes down to it I want to Be who God asked me to be. To understand who God asked me to be I must be. I must look deep within the reaches of my soul, I must throw off the labels, definitions, and feelings to honestly look at who I am. Who I am in the moment if I were to just be.

 

To Be Caleb Ross Hunter.

 

Many times people go through life trying to find the answer to their existence. They try to find just the right definition as to who they are, just the right label to fit under, just the right group to join, just the right family other than their own. But can we accept that God made just the right you to be you. Yet he also has given you the choice to ask the question to be or not to be?

 

Part of life is finding out the be, finding out what it means to be a human being. When God created Adam, God didn’t define Adam, he gave him the job of naming the animals and taking care of the garden but he seemed to let Adam explore, God walked with Adam in the garden. Adam’s job did not make him who he was, Adam was a man. There were not men in the beginning, and the story goes that woman came later. So Adam could simply be and in his being human he was in relationship with God. No label, no definition, just simply a human created by God to be in relationship.

 

So if for the first human being to be means to be in a relationship with God than to not be is going against everything that means to be a human being. When sin entered the world to be was complicated…

To be yourself is to be in relationship…

 

To be a human being is to be in relationship…

 

You know those moments when a conversation stops and you wonder what is going to happen next or someone breaks the silence with “awkward”, really in that moment just be. No awkward, no need for words, just be. Take in the moment and experience it. Sometimes my relationship with God brings me to those moments where I simply need to be.

 

I need to stop talking, stop trying to be anything, stop trying to figure out where I fit in the world and trust God enough to be the person he created me to be. That sounds complicated but really it’s simple when we are in relationship with God, it all makes sense. It’s like learning english, to be is a given for those who speak it or is is? Maybe we should rediscover what it means to be.

 

To Be

 

I wish to be…

 

-Caleb Ross Hunter

Day 2 “A Year Of Thoughts”: Underneath there is a Soul

 

 

At the core of each and every man there is a Soul. It waits to come alive, bursting forth from underneath the brokenness, now no longer bound by the past! The soul was never meant to be chained to the walls of hopeless hearts, never meant to be locked away in the back of a closet of memories past, never left alone to fend for itself. It’s begging, longing, aching, breaking, dying to come alive and be filled with life.

Who are we that we have tried to kill our souls?

 

WE ARE THE BROKEN.

 

When I woke today there was heaviness upon my heart that I did not understand. The snow on the ground came and went, the hours past and still my heart was heavy with something that I needed to hold, to experience, to let go. I set to the task of clearing off a shelf that has stored my college notes from the past four years and as I did I found myself.

 

I know, I know thats a weird thing to say that I found myself on an old dusty shelf full of note books and little scribbles on pages, but there I found something beautiful. I found the words from the times where I was fighting to survive in my brokenness. Some of the words are hard to read but there, those words were true for the moment. My soul was begging to come alive, begging to be free, begging for me to stop surviving and start thriving. But I had to admit my brokenness, I had to face the pains of my past, I had to let go. I had to forgive myself, I had to be honest about who I was and who I am.

 

In 2005 I wrote these lines in a song,

 

Hello are you there?

Do you want to know what’s going on?

Do you really want to know?

Are you there for me?

Do you want to know what’s going wrong?

Let’s talk please lets talk

 

When hurt and alone

Please be my friend

Listen and see me the way I am

 

Those questions in that first verse seem to have come screaming from my soul “Hello are you there?” At the time of writing this I know that I was fighting through depression, thoughts of suicide, and really dealing with my brokenness in really unhealthy ways. But I found the greatest friend in the midst of that brokenness, it took me a while but I found that I could be honest with God because he had made me, he carried me out of that place of brokenness to a place where my soul could breathe new life.

 

Underneath all my brokenness, depression, sins, and past, my soul was longing to live life to the fullest. I want people to see me for who I am, yeah I have been broken, I am a sinner, but I have a savior who didn’t just save me from eternal death. I have a savior that knows me, a savior that has brought my soul back to life, a savior that has given me reason to live and to live to the fullest.

 

My savior did not just save me for later he saved me for now.

 

He saved me from me so I can be who I was made to be.

 

Underneath I have a soul, it screams, it sings, it dances, it paints in the most brilliant colors with gratitude for each moment that I have to live. The brokenness of the past hurts. It’s not easy to look at. It’s not easy to read about. It’s not easy to remember. It’s not easy to admit. It’s not meant to be easy but you know what? It is Beautiful.

 

How?

 

How is the brokenness of the past beautiful? How can I admit that my sin is now made beautiful? How can I face it and say wow that was a beautiful mess of a time I went through? How?

 

Because the past is not the end! It’s beautiful because it is part of what makes me, me. It’s part of what drives me to want to love the BROKEN. It’s part of who I am and it’s beautiful because it does not define me any more. Don’t have to prove myself to the world, but I do have to be honest with the world about who I am.

 

I am…

 

Beautifully Broken but Wonderfully Healing.

 

 

The former british band Vega4 recorded a song titled “Life is Beautiful” on their album You and Others that seem to capture this idea of how life is beautiful even though we have the monsters staring us in the face, even though we are hurting, even though we barely make it… but when we come alive there is a lot that we can give… Here are the lyrics to that song.

 

Life is beautiful
We love until we die

When you run into my arms,
We steal a perfect moment.
Let the monsters see you smile,
Let them see you smiling.

Do I hold you too tightly?
When will the hurt kick in?

Life is beautiful, but it’s complicated.
We barely make it.
We don’t need to understand,
There are miracles, miracles.

Yeah, life is beautiful.
Our hearts, they beat and break.

When you run away from harm,
Will you run back into my arms,
Like you did when you were young?
Will you come back to me?

I will hold you tightly
When the hurting kicks in.

Life is beautiful, but it’s complicated,
we barely make it.
We don’t need to understand,
There are miracles, miracles.

Stand where you are.
We let all these moments pass us by.

It’s amazing where I’m standing,
There’s a lot that we can give.
This is ours just for a moment.
There’s a lot that we can give.

 

 

Read them again, let them soak in. Life is beautiful. However complicated, broken or a mess we have made it. Life is beautiful.

 

Stop, face your brokenness, face your monsters, smile in their faces, and know that your life can be beautiful.

 

Underneath all that complicated mess there is a soul within you waiting to come alive if you let it.

 

We can not live in the past but we can create the future. It’s amazing where I’m standing, There’s a lot that we can give, this is ours just for a moment, there’s a lot that we can give. Where we are standing is amazing because in every moment we have the opportunity to create, to grow, to be honest, to free our souls.

 

We have a lot to give…

 

We are the Broken but we are becoming the healed, the healing, the love, the lover and we will show the world that Life is beautiful.

 

 

-Caleb Ross Hunter

Justice

We claim justice for those who do not speak

 By the words that they are not able to take

We free them by light of pure radiant hearts won

Through love each day, closer to having another

Rest is far from injustice but granted to each one

The soul, my soul, broken soul justice has come.

 

-Caleb Ross Hunter
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