Transformative joy in the daily walk:
Growing into communities of disciples, friends of Jesus

Facilitated by Constance Bair-Thompson

These things I have spoken to you, that My joy may remain in you, and that your joy may be full.  This is My commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.  Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one’s life for his friends.  You are My friends if you do whatever I command you.  No longer do I call you servants, for a servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all things that I heard from My Father I have made known to you. [John 15: 11-15, NKJV]

A disciple is not above his teacher, but everyone who is perfectly trained will be like his teacher. [Luke 6:40, NKJV]

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What do our daily lives look like when we live in the joy of Jesus in our daily walk with Him, both personally and in community?  His joy is a joy that can coexist with suffering, a joy that carries us through suffering, ours or others’.  His joy is a joy that when it overflows in us can lead us to love more fully.

As disciples of Jesus, as His friends, we walk with Him daily, individually as well as in community, looking to Him as our Inward Teacher and Guide.  As we trust Him to transform us from the inside out, He enables us to grow more and more like Him, just as His original disciples did in the first century.  

The twelve men that Jesus chose to be his disciples while he walked the earth left everything to follow Him.  They lived with Him and each other listening to Him, learning His ways, learning His practices, observing Him in different situations.  Their transformation from ordinary fishermen, tax collectors and the like into a community of disciples did not take place instantly, but rather over a few years, and even then, they seemed not to fully understand who He was or what His mission was until after His death and resurrection.

If it took the original disciples so much preparation when they were first-hand witnesses to so much that we cannot be, how then can we hope to grow into discipleship, even friendship, with Jesus today?  The answer seems to lie still in preparing ourselves by engaging regularly in spiritual practices, many of them that Jesus Himself followed in the Gospel narratives.  We can learn from Him through the Scriptures, in community, and directly as we learn to better recognize His voice in our heart in prayer.  

During this retreat, we will learn from each other, surveying some of the spiritual practices, a few in depth, that can bring us into an ever deeper relationship with Jesus.  Some, like prayer, can be practiced both personally and corporately.  Participants will be given opportunities to journal, and to share together in different ways.

Everything Jesus asks of His disciples is at its core centered in His radical and transformative love and joy that He places in each of our hearts, enabling us to know Him better.  As we find our rest in Him, He empowers us over time to come to a place where we are like Him in our thinking, in our doing, in our loving, in our everything – ever more closely.  His joy.  His love.  Love of God and of neighbor.  Love of each other.  Love even of our enemies.  Love of Creation.