Gary Jansen - Exercising Your Soul: Fifteen Minutes a Day to a Spiritual Life

Copyright 2010 by Gary Jansen

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Unless otherwise indicated, Scriptures are taken from the HOLY BIBLE: NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION. Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House. All rights reserved.

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First eBook Edition: August 2010

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ISBN: 978-0-446-55746-7

For my wife, Grace, and my sons Eddie and Charlie, the joys of my life.

Pray constantly.

Saint Paul

This little book you have in your hands is essentially a book on prayer. Not the namby-pamby, rattling-off-a-wish-list, Oh, please let me have nice things kind of prayer. (Who am I kidding?just five minutes ago I asked to win the lottery.) Im talking about prayer that will, by divine grace, help you experience God boldly, deeply, and intimately. This collection of reflections, anecdotes, stories, and exercises may appear to be masquerading as a self-help book. I can assure you it is no such thing. Exercising Your Soul is a God-help book, not because I have delusions of being the Creator of the universe, but because all life, all people, all thingsall assistancecome from God. If this book helps you in any way, it is not my doing but because God desires every one of us to know him more fully.

Much talk is made of the idea of grace, Gods unmerited gift of love to us, as if the Lord created some people to receive this blessing and others not. For all I know, this may be truemaybe God does play favoritesbut I dont believe this. God is ever-present in all of creation. You. Me. That annoying person at your job. That waffle you ate this morning. The coffee cup you just threw away. Everything.

Many of us may already believe this, but the trick is not perceiving these words in the mind, but feeling them in the heart. It is only when the words are made flesh by sensory experience, by the incarnating of them by the Holy Spirit, that life truly begins. This is when we experience grace. This is when we experience Christ.

Grace, in some ways, is like an inheritance. Its been given to us. Its waiting for us. But we have to reach a certain level of maturity to experience the wealth. Yet, when it comes to spiritual matters, maturity isnt based on age or social standing or whether you marry a prince by the time youre twenty-one. It is measured by a persons openness to God.

If you have ever shared an intimate piece of yourself with a beloved, so that person can experience something you cherish, then you can understand with your mind and your heart why I wrote this book. I am not a theologian, nor am I a mystic or an intellectual. I am a beggar and I have been knocking outside Gods door for some time now. I dont have much, but I would like to share with you the little bread I do have. Just a tiny crumb of it can transform your life.

I have borrowed some practices from Christian traditionssuch as spiritual exercises and the Jesus Prayer, a simple yet powerful prayerthat have transformed not only my life, but the lives of millions of others throughout the centuries. This being said, Exercising Your Soul is not meant to be watered-down spirituality, but a book for the masses, a way of introducing readers to some unique spiritual practices that can bring you closer to God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit.

The exercises in this book are, I believe, a simple way to experience a certain type of union with God. Perfect union with God, as mystics and theologians have said over the years, happens in death. This doesnt mean we shouldnt try to get as close to God as humanly possible in our day-to-day lives. This is our calling. This is the intense desire that lies within our hearts, a yearning to connect with the divine.

The intention of this book is not to busy you with superfluous, unnecessary activity. Nor is it to make you a saint, though if it does, I think I get brownie points in heaven (and to be honest, I could use as many as I can get). The purpose of this book is to bring you to a greater awareness of God, who is already present in your life through the living Christ and the divine person of the Holy Spirit.

If a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, then I hope this book will serve as a pair of good walking shoes you put on before your feet even touch the ground. And if you are somewhere out there along the road already, in a town you never heard of, standing outside an all-night diner, catching a smoke, staring up at a black sky dotted with stars, I hope this book can be a touch of light reading that brings comfort between your arrivals and departures.

The old man said this to the boy:

Imagine for a moment that you are a newly created ship that is being unveiled to the world for the very first time. There is a lot of pomp and circumstance. There are celebrations. There is fanfare. Soon, someone comes along and whacks a champagne bottle against your backside and you slowly descend into the water. You have been christened and you set off on the voyage of life.

Now, you have good days and bad days. Some days are calm, others rage with storms. You are a solid shipbuilt with good materials and thoughtfully planned outand you endure the placid seas as well as the thirty-foot swells.

You are out on the ocean of life for years and overall you feel strong, but time has done what time does. Its aged you. Youre weathered. The sun has helped to fade some of your luster. The salts of the sea have scratched you deeply and penetrated your surface. Many have walked across your deckssome with soft shoes, others with ten-pound clogs. You feel tired. Sometimes you even feel that a piece of you has died. When you feel this way it is time to make a journey back to dry dock, to the place where you were made, so that you can be restored.

As you move into place and the water is drained all around you, it becomes obvious that your hullyour foundationis covered in a thick layer of barnacles. Parasites. Your surface may have been worn down by exposure, but your base has been made inefficient by neglect. Looking at what was once your great hull, it is almost impossible to discern that you are a great and powerful ship. These hangers-on have slowed you down. In some ways they have protected you by covering up tiny holes that may have caused you to sink, but they are not part of who you are and, if left unattended, will cause more damage. These barnacles, these leeches, have slowed you on your journeys.

The barnacles are scraped from your hull. The process is slow at first, slow and tedious. And painful. In time, you feel a great weight lifted from you. Rejuvenated, full of life, and you are ready to set sail on your next great voyage.