So I have a wild and crazy idea that was birthed somewhere over the Pacific Ocean last month as I winged my way home from Singapore. I wonder if you’d like to join me?
Through the years, God has used Oswald Chamber’s devotional, My Utmost for His Highest, to help shape my spiritual life. I’ve thought about inviting people to join me online to converse about this transformative book, but I think watching the inflight movie, Julie & Julia, (a true story about a woman who blogged her way through Julia Child’s famous French cookbook) finally crystallized the format. While I have no desire to learn how to debone a duck, I certainly want to learn how to be more like Jesus.
I’ve been feeling a little stuck in my walk with the Lord, a little complacent about the things that tend to distract and absorb me, compromise and anesthetize me. I want to be different, I long to be less like me and more like Him. But since we all tend to go where we are looking, we must choose where we fix our eyes – even the best athlete goes off course when his eyes are focused on his surroundings rather than on the goal ahead.
Oswald Chambers’ words have always had the incredible ability to pull me back to center. To challenge me in my walk with God, even frustrate me at times as his words cut across my own self-centeredness and force me to think deeper about what it means to follow Christ to the utmost.
Though I tremble at the audacity of promising to regularly blog for a year (especially when I know my tendency toward good intentions and lousy follow through), I’d like to invite you to join me for A Year with Oswald.
I’ll post the first entry tomorrow. If you’d like to become part of the ongoing conversation, you can sign up to follow the blog (right hand sidebar). I plan to post once a week, writing about the thought that spoke most to me during those seven days. But I’d love to hear from you as well.
I suggest finding a copy of My Utmost for His Highest to make your own, something you can underline and highlight. My book is tattered and torn with jotted responses to the Lord and dates next to things that impacted me. If you struggle with Chamber’s 1930 English, there is an updated language version available at bookstores and online as well. If you’d like to get started right away¸ go to www.myutmost.org and enter today’s date. Read the entry and then journal what you hear God saying.
I don’t want to remain the same and unchanged, I want to be more like Jesus. I know you do too. So let’s dedicate this year to…
Becoming His,
Joanna
P.S. If you’d like to add this button to your blog so others could “join us”, just copy and paste the code!