Week One: Day 4 – Rhythms in Nature

Welcome. We’re so glad to have you join us for this program over the next few weeks. We’ll be working on a focus of growing a Rule of Life. We’re hoping over the next few weeks through these videos and through questions that we pose, to help you reflect on your own lives and to imagine structures or disciplines or practices that might help you to live that life more fully and more abundantly.

The scriptures say, “The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament shows His handiwork.” And we believe that in the natural world around us there are lessons to be learned from the patterns and rhythms of nature that we see around us, patterns that can inform our own patterns of living and our own ways of structuring our lives. Jesus often drew from the natural world when he spoke in parables or used examples in his teaching. He talked about sowers sowing seed, and vines and vineyards. He talked about the birds of the air and the flowers of the field, and he drew spiritual lessons, spiritual truths from these. So we’re going to invite you to reflect on the natural world. Particularly we’re going to focus on the metaphor of a garden thinking about our lives as “garden plots” and thinking about what we choose to plant there, and how we can nurture those plants and help them come to their full expression.

So over the course of the next few weeks, we’re going to be moving through several phases and in each phase we’ll consider a different part of our life. There will be an introduction to each phase, a series of videos and questions that help us probe some of the aspects of that phase, and then a summary at the end, where we get a chance to reflect and maybe pull a few ideas or “seeds” from those things that we have been talking about for our garden plot – for this part of our garden plot. We’re looking forward to having you join us in these weeks. God bless you.

– Br. David Vryhof

Question to Journal
How might the rhythms you observe in nature inform the way you live?