Practice Participation

Obedience to God is critical in every aspect of leading our tribes well.

'Obedience to God' can be defined as: Participating with what God wants to do in us or through us.

Put more simply, obedience is: Us, participating with God.

Obedience is not usually a big sacrifice – but a small submission to something God calls us to.

But even when small, it is submission. This is why it doesn’t come naturally.
We think we know better. We push back.

Tito Colliander explains with poetic language how we can start practicing – in little, ordinary, every-day ways – so our hearts grow more ready:

…we have other teachers to whom we can show obedience. They meet us every step in our daily life, if only we recognize their voices.

Your wife wants you to take your raincoat with you: do as she wishes, to practice obedience. [A friend] asks you to walk with her a little way: go with her to practice obedience.

Wordlessly the infant asks for care and companionship: do as it wishes as far as you can, and thus practice obedience.

A novice [monk or nun] in a cloister could not find more opportunity for obedience than you in your own home. And likewise at your job and in your dwellings with your neighbor.

Thus, make it a habit to rejoice when an opportunity for obedience offers. It is quite unnecessary to seek one, for [in seeking one] you may easily fall into a studied servility that leads you astray into self-righteous virtue.

You may depend upon it that you are sent just as many opportunities for obedience as you need, and the very kind that are most suitable for you.

But if you notice that you have let an opportunity slip by, reproach yourself; you have been like a sailor who has let a favorable wind go by unused.

For the wind it was a matter of indifference whether it was used or not. But for the sailor it was a means of reaching his destination sooner.

– Way of the Ascetics, Chpt. 12

This is a valuable reminder to see the mundane and ordinary tasks of our day through God’s eyes.

But that is not all – Our children are watching! And what they see us do on a consistent basis is what they will eventually emulate. Not immediately, but eventually. They are disciples of what we do, more than what we say.

Whoever is faithful in very little is also faithful in much… – Luke 16:10