Why We Need: Spiritual Direction
“What was said, was for you.” Morpheus
I was sitting recently with a forty-something business executive, discussing the challenges of the marketplace, the burden of leadership, and the choices he was making to navigate his organization through a significant season. We discussed the role of consultants, executive coaches, and other advisors in successfully guiding a company through strategic planning and execution.
“But, honestly, what I really need is someone to help me integrate the different areas of my life—personal, professional, spiritual,” he said. “To be not just the executive, but the husband, the father, the friend…the man that I want to be.”
Enter spiritual direction.
Many of us are familiar with important functions like teaching, discipleship, counseling, mentorship. But spiritual direction is a bit of a lost art, a discipline that is at once from time immemorial but erroneously viewed as antiquated. Desired, but lost in the milieu of modern living. In a world awash with control, hierarchy, expertise, and algorithms, spiritual direction emerges as an enterprise at once countercultural and spiritually relevant.
In short, spiritual direction is an interpersonal relationship in which one person helps another person discern what God is doing and saying. It is one person, free of spiritual pride and well aware of their limitations, walking with and listening for another to determine what the Spirit is communicating to that son of God.
The spiritual director is both a safe and competent person, spiritually tested and thus qualified to walk with another through the canyons of life, all the while attuned to the other’s circumstances, personality, and spiritual needs.
At Canyon Pathways, we believe that to live as sons, we need other sons walking with us, listening for us, perceiving what the Spirit is doing in and through us. It is through this shared sonship that we experience the Father, and hear his voice speaking to us.
Brothers, sons…this is your invitation to new direction. Together.
“Hear, my son, and be wise, and direct your heart in the way.” Proverbs 23:19