REV. DR. STEVE STUTZ
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Theology at the Threshold

What Lutherans Mean by “Calling” — and Why Yours Might Not Feel Like One

9/24/2026

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​Somewhere along the way, “calling” started to mean the work you would gladly do even if nobody paid you for it: your passion, your purpose, the thing you were supposedly made for. That sounds beautiful, of course. But it can also put a heavy burden on an ordinary Tuesday. It sets an impossibly high bar for most real jobs, and it is not what Luther meant by the word in the first place.
 
So if your job does not feel like a calling in that modern sense — if it is mostly how you pay the bills, not something you would frame on the wall — it may be worth taking a breath before deciding something has gone wrong. The older meaning of the word may fit your actual life better than the modern one does.
 
The word is Beruf, and it was not mainly about fulfillment
 
Before the Reformation, vocation usually meant one thing: a call to religious life. Monks, nuns, and priests had vocations. Most everyone else simply had work to do — necessary work, sometimes honorable work, but not work people tended to describe as spiritually significant.

Luther challenged that hierarchy on purpose. His German word, Beruf, applied to everyone — the farmer, the magistrate, the mother, the cobbler, the milkmaid at her pail — with no lower tier. Underneath that shift was the priesthood of all believers: every baptized Christian stands before God on the same footing. That means every station in life can become a place to serve God, not only the obviously religious ones.
 
You may be wearing a mask, and that is a compliment
 
Luther had a strange but vivid image for this: larvae Dei, the masks of God. God feeds the world, Luther said, but usually not by doing it directly. He does it through the farmer growing the grain, the baker making the bread, and the person at the register handing it to you at the end of a long day. Ordinary work is one of the ways God does ordinary things in the world. The person doing the work is, in a sense, wearing God’s mask for that particular task.
 
That may sound like a strange thing to say about a shift at a call center, a warehouse, or any job that mostly leaves you tired. But if you take it seriously, it becomes a deeply dignifying claim about work the culture rarely treats as dignified. The job does not have to feel personally meaningful every hour for it to be doing something real. Its meaning comes from the neighbor it serves, not from how inspired you feel while doing it.
 
The neighbor is the point, even when the paycheck matters
 
Here is the practical shift: if you are waiting to feel called before your job counts as a calling, the focus has quietly moved toward your own fulfillment. Luther’s version points in the other direction. The calling is recognized by looking at who is being served: the coworker who needed the shift covered, the customer who needed the problem solved, the family the paycheck supports. That is where the calling shows up — not in your enthusiasm level on a Thursday afternoon. 
 
This is not a way of talking yourself into liking a bad job. Bad jobs are still bad. Underpaid, mistreated, precarious work does not become fine because you have found a theological frame for it. But it does mean the dignity of the work is not dependent on the work also being your passion. You do not have to love it for it to count.

Two kinds of calling, not one

It helps to separate two things our language tends to collapse into one word. There is the general call — the call to faith itself, the same for every Christian and not tied to any job. And there is the specific call — your actual station in life right now: this job, this family, this set of responsibilities, whatever it currently is. The specific call can change. It can eveninclude a job you are actively trying to leave. It does not need to become your permanent identity in order to be the place where you are currently living out the general call.
 
That distinction does a lot of quiet work. It means you can be faithfully called to a job you are also trying to get out of. Those two things are not necessarily in conflict. The calling is not an endorsement of the job’s rightness for your whole life. It is a claim about what is actually happening while you are there.
 
If you are between callings right now
 
If you are unemployed, underemployed, or between jobs entirely, this framework still holds, even though it can be harder to see from there. The searching itself — the applications, the waiting, the interviews that go nowhere — is not a gap in your vocation. It is what your specific calling looks like at the moment, however unwelcome that may be. Dignity in this framework was never tied to having landed the job. It was tied to something underneath employment status entirely, which means it does not switch off during the gap.
 
That is not comfort dressed up as theology. It is simply this: whatever you are doing right now to get through this stretch is not outside the reach of what Luther was describing. It is inside it.
 
 
Rev. Dr. Steve Stutz Ordained Lutheran Pastor · Intentional Interim Minister · Certified Spiritual Director La Porte, Texas · Houston Area
[Contact] · [LinkedIn] · [The Marginal Note on Substack]

The Marginal Note — Theology for people who are still paying attention.
 Free monthly newsletter. Subscribe at Substack.
​

©2026 Steve Stutz. All rights reserved. Brief quotes welcome with attribution; full reprints require permission. Details at https://www.stevestutz.com (bottom of page)

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When You Say “I’ll Pray for You,” What Comes Next?

9/17/2026

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A friend tells you they’re sick. Someone you love admits they’re scared. Another person quietly says their marriage is coming apart. And almost without thinking, you say, “I’ll pray for you.” You mean it. Of course you do. But then, if you’re honest, you may not be entirely sure what happens next. Do you whisper one sentence in the moment and call it done? Add their name to a mental list you’ll probably lose by Thursday? Wait for church and hope their name comes back to you during the prayers of the people?
 
After twenty-eight years in ministry, I’ve come to believe that many of us were never actually taught how to do this. We were told that Christians should pray for one another, and we believed it. But few of us were given a simple, livable way to carry another person’s need past the moment when we first heard it. So we fall back on a sincere impulse, call it intercession, and then feel vaguely guilty when it fades faster than we meant it to.
 
Why Pray at All?
 
Before we talk about how to pray, it helps to name the quiet question many of us carry but do not always say out loud: If God is really God, why do I need to tell Him what is happening? If He is sovereign and His purposes are already unfolding, why open my mouth at all? Doesn’t He already know what my friend needs?
 
He does. But intercession is not only about informing God. It is also about letting God draw us into His care for the world. Prayer slows us down long enough to notice another person’s burden, softens what has grown hurried or numb in us, and gives us a real part in loving our neighbor. God does not ordain only the ends; He ordains the means. In His providence, He freely chooses to do particular goods through the prayers of His people. So we pray seriously and persistently, while remaining humble enough not to claim that we can trace every outcome back to one particular prayer.
 
Across Christian history, both liturgical and evangelical traditions have treated intercession as a normal way of loving one’s neighbor. Think of Monica, who wept and prayed for years over her wayward son until an unnamed bishop — worn down by her persistence — finally told her that “it cannot be that the son of these tears should perish” (Augustine, Confessions III.12). Augustine later understood his conversion within the providence of God, and Monica’s faithful prayers were woven deeply into that story.
 
When Martin Luther addressed this in his Large Catechism (1529), he did not get lost in speculation. He pointed to two steady pillars: command and promise. Prayer, he says, rests on obedience to the God who commands us to pray — and because God has attached His promise to that command, Luther is confident God “will not suffer our prayers to be in vain or lost.” 
 
Refusing to intercede because of a lofty view of God’s sovereignty is not deeper theology; it can become disobedience dressed up as humility. We do not pray to manage Heaven’s inbox. We pray because God has invited us to bring our neighbor’s needs before Him, and because He has promised to meet us in the asking.
 
So here is a simple place to begin — not because prayer is a technique to master, but because a habit needs a shape if it is going to survive an ordinary, busy week.
 
Start with a List
 
Good intentions are not enough by themselves. If “I’ll keep you in my prayers” is never written down somewhere you will see it again, it may remain a sincere feeling rather than become a steady practice. Keep it simple: a notecard, a notes app, the inside cover of your Bible. Write the name. Write one line about what they are facing. That is enough.
 
A list does something a feeling cannot: it makes forgetting visible. You may notice that a name has been sitting there for three weeks without being spoken to God. That is useful information, not a reason for shame. It is simply an invitation to begin again with the person still in front of you.
 
Pray by Name
 
“Be with everyone who is struggling” is a real prayer, and it is not nothing. But intercession becomes more loving when it becomes particular: this person, this situation, this need, brought honestly before God instead of waved at from a distance.
 
When Luther wrote his little guide on prayer for his barber, Peter Beskendorf (A Simple Way to Pray, 1535), his counselwas wonderfully practical. Do not let prayer dissolve into vague goodwill. Say the name. Say what is actually happening. Pray specifically enough that, if God grants help, you would recognize the mercy.
 
Give It a Rhythm
 
Once a day, tied to something you already do — coffee, the drive to work, brushing your teeth — run down the list. It does not need to be long. A sentence per name is enough, spoken aloud or silently. What matters most is that prayer has somewhere ordinary to live in your day, instead of depending on a burst of willpower after everything else is already loud.
 
Luther urged Peter to guard this daily time against procrastination, warning him about the tempting thought that prayer can wait “a little while” until the next urgent task is finished. Those small delays are often how a whole day passes with no prayer at all. If mornings do not work for you, try evenings. If daily is too much to sustain honestly, weekly is better than a daily practice you abandon by the second week and never restart. A prayer list you actually keep is better than an ambitious one that quietly dies.
 
When Words Run Out
 
Sometimes the situation is too tangled to know what outcome to ask for. A marriage may be so broken that you cannot simply pray, “Fix it,” as if you know what faithfulness requires. A diagnosis may be so grave that “heal them” is a true longing, but not the only honest prayer you can bring.
 
Paul names this directly in Romans: the Spirit intercedes for us with groans too deep for words when we do not know how to pray as we ought (Romans 8:26). That is not a loophole for becoming vague or careless. It is permission to bring the situation honestly, without pretending you know the right outcome, and to trust that prayer does not depend on you finding perfect words.
 
When you are stuck, borrow a simple tool from Luther’s own practice: a four-strand “garland” he used to pray through each phrase. Begin with instruction: what promise or truth from Scripture speaks to this suffering? Move to thanksgiving: what is one good thing you can genuinely thank God for in this person’s life right now? Then confession: where does your own powerlessness, fear, or desire to control the outcome need to be laid down? Finally, petition: what specific request are you handing over — “Lord, take this mess and hold them in it,” not just a softer version of the same anxiety. You are nottrying to orchestrate the outcome. You are anchoring your friend to the character of God.
 
When Nothing Changes
 
Every seasoned intercessor eventually learns this painful truth: sometimes we pray for years and the sickness still wins, the marriage still ends, or the wayward child still does not come home.
​

Christians do not measure the worth of prayer only by what we can see. We bring the person to the Father through Jesus, trusting that Jesus’s own intercession is never futile, even when the outcome we asked for is not granted. To keep naminga friend before God when nothing seems to be changing is not wasted energy. It is quiet, stubborn faithfulness. It is love that keeps showing up when there is no visible progress to reward it.
 
Let Prayer Move You
 
Prayer may also open our eyes to a concrete act of love that is ours to do: making a phone call, bringing a meal, sitting in a waiting room, helping arrange care, or encouraging someone to seek wise professional help. Sometimes the next faithful prayer is followed by the next faithful errand. We should not use prayer as a substitute for the practical love that prayer itself awakens. When we ask God to care for someone, we should be ready to become part of His care if He gives us something to do.
 
Tell Them You’re Praying
 
Not as a performance, but as encouragement. “I’ve been praying for you by name every morning” lands differently than “I’ll pray for you” said once and never mentioned again. It closes the loop. It tells the person that your prayer was not a polite reflex; it became an actual practice they were included in.
 
Why It Matters
 
We have quietly outsourced a lot of intercession — to prayer chains, to “thoughts and prayers” as a kind of condolence, to the comforting assumption that someone, somewhere, is surely doing the praying so we do not have to. None of that is malicious. It is what happens when a practice is commended but not taught, and we are left to improvise.
 
Luther warned that if we wait until we feel like praying, or until we have the perfect words, we may never pray at all. Intercession is not sending warm feelings in someone’s direction. It is a spiritual duty, yes, but also a form of love. When you speak your neighbor’s name before God, you are standing with them — and sometimes for them — when they maybe too exhausted to pray for themselves.
 
So the next time you say, “I’ll pray for you,” let it become more than a kind sentence in a hard moment. Write the name down. Bring it before God. Return to it tomorrow. Intercession does not have to be complicated to be faithful. A list. A name. A rhythm. Offered on purpose, with love, more than once.
 
 
Rev. Dr. Steve Stutz Ordained Lutheran Pastor · Intentional Interim Minister · Certified Spiritual Director La Porte, Texas · Houston Area

[Contact] · [LinkedIn] · [The Marginal Note on Substack]

The Marginal Note — Theology for people who are still paying attention. Free monthly newsletter. Subscribe at Substack.

©2026 Steve Stutz. All rights reserved. Brief quotes welcome with attribution; full reprints require permission. Details at https://www.stevestutz.com (bottom of page)


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How to Actually Keep a Sabbath (When You Can't Afford Not to Work)

9/10/2026

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Most advice about Sabbath sounds like it was written for people who already have room to breathe. Turn off your phone. Leave the errands alone. Let the inbox wait. That is good advice, but it can land hard when every hour feels claimed already. If you are picking up gig shifts, working a second job, caring for your family, or searching for work with the kind of urgency that makes rest feel irresponsible, the problem is not that Sabbath is a bad idea. The problem is that the usual advice may not be speaking to the life you are actually living right now.

So let’s be honest about Sabbath when a full day of rest simply is not possible — not in theory, but in the actual week sitting in front of you.

Sabbath Was Never Really About Having Nothing to Do

The commandment was not first given to people with open calendars and flexible schedules. It was given to a people who had just left slavery — people who knew what it meant to have rest refused to them. In Exodus 20:8–11 and Deuteronomy 5:12–15, Sabbath is not presented as a perk for people who have finished everything. It is a sign that God’s people are no longer owned by endless labor.

Martin Luther says something similar in his treatment of the Third Commandment in the Large Catechism. The day of rest exists for ordinary people, servants, and laborers, “that for a day they may retire in order to rest and be refreshed.” Rest is required “so that both man and beast might recuperate, and not be weakened by unremitting labor.” In other words, the call to stop is not, “You’ve earned a break.” It is, “You are not a slave anymore, and the proof is that you are allowed to stop.” Sabbath protects the worker’s body, but it also tells the truth about the worker’s worth: you are not only what you produce.

So if your honest question is, “What if I truly cannot afford a full day off?” that is not a sign that you have failed the commandment. It is a hard circumstance, and sometimes a painful one. The commandment is not blind to that kind of pressure. Scripture makes room for real necessity: an ox in a ditch, acts of mercy, healing that cannot wait. The principle survives contact with hard constraints because it was made for real human lives, not ideal ones.

What This Isn't

This is not a productivity hack with a spiritual label slapped on it. “Rest better so you can work harder” misses the point. Sabbath is not another way to optimize yourself. And it is not another reason to feel guilty because you cannot manage a full day of stillness in a season that will not allow it.

Measuring your Sabbath by whether you hit a perfect twenty-four-hour mark can turn a promise into another performance. It can make God’s gift feel like one more assignment you are already behind on. Luther warned against treating the commandments as a new spiritual burden; they are not meant to crush people who are already tired. If this season only allows for an hour, take the hour, and let it truly be Sabbath instead of treating it like a smaller version of failure. That does not mean a partial practice has to stay partial forever if your circumstances change. It only means grace can meet you where you actually are.

Start Smaller Than a Day

If a full day is off the table, Sabbath does not have to arrive in a twenty-four-hour block to be real. It can be an hour. It can be a meal. It can be putting your phone away and actually keeping that boundary. For some people, that hour will come late at night or early in the morning — the only opening the week gives them. That still counts.

The theological point is not the exact length of time. It is the act of stopping on purpose, even briefly, to listen to something larger than your own survival. Sunday morning worship can be that one sacred hour when nobody gets to demand your labor. A family dinner with notifications off can become unhurried holy ground. Even the fifteen-minute commute between shifts can be spent in quiet instead of job alerts, mental math, or work-related noise. An hour kept faithfully every week can do more than a perfect day you keep planning and then losing under pressure.

Before that hour begins, give yourself one small signal that this time is different. Close the laptop and set it in another room. Step outside. Light a candle. Or simply say out loud, “This hour is not for work.” The boundary does not have to be dramatic. It only has to remind you who gets to interrupt you — and who does not.

Separate "Can't Stop Working" from "Can't Stop Striving"

There is a difference between the hours you are actually on shift and the hours you spend anxious about work while technically off it — refreshing job boards at 11 p.m., running numbers in your head at dinner, carrying the job search into every unscheduled minute. The first may be a real economic constraint. The second is often anxiety wearing a productivity mask. Sabbath cannot give you more hours, but it can give you permission to stop inventing work when none is required of you. That, too, is a real form of Sabbath, even inside a week that has no room for a full one.

Let It Be Communal, Not Just Personal

In Scripture, Sabbath was never only a private discipline. It was something a household and a community practicedtogether. If your week has little room for solitary rest, look for the kind that happens in company: a shared meal where nobody checks their phone, Sunday worship as one hour genuinely set apart, or a standing coffee with someone who will not immediately ask what you have lined up next. Rest does not have to happen alone to count. For many people, shared rest is the version that is most possible — and most sustaining.

The Stopping Is the Point

Whatever size Sabbath comes in — an hour, a meal, a walk without your phone — the stopping itself is doing the theological work. It reminds you, week by week, that you are not only as valuable as your last shift, your last application,or your last productive hour. That was true for people who had just left slavery, and it is true for you now, in whatever version of rest this week can actually hold.
 
This week, pick one hour. Not the perfect hour — just one you can protect. Put it in your calendar as a recurring appointment, and treat the reminder the way you would treat a shift you cannot miss. When it comes, do one thing: stop calculating. Let the hour be received instead of achieved. That is Sabbath, and for now, it is enough.
 
​

 
Rev. Dr. Steve Stutz Ordained Lutheran Pastor · Intentional Interim Minister · Certified Spiritual Director La Porte, Texas · Houston Area

[Contact] · [LinkedIn] · [The Marginal Note on Substack]

The Marginal Note — Theology for people who are still paying attention. Free monthly newsletter. Subscribe at Substack.

©2026 Steve Stutz. All rights reserved. Brief quotes welcome with attribution; full reprints require permission. Details at https://www.stevestutz.com (bottom of page)
 
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How to Take a Personal Prayer Retreat: A Lutheran Guide

9/3/2026

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In 1998, while I was serving my first parish out in west Texas, I found out the nearest retreat center was about ninety miles away. I had no internet search to prepare me, no reviews to read, and no real idea what I was walking into. So one day I simply got in the car, drove down there, and walked through the door without an appointment.
 
The place was Christ the King Retreat Center in San Angelo. They gave me a tour, introduced me to a few staff members, fed me lunch in the dining hall, and sent me home that afternoon with an appointment for the following month — my first meeting with a spiritual director, along with plans to stay for two days. Before long, it became a monthly rhythm.
 
After a while, the director there, Fr. Andy, told me about some Carmelite hermits living a few miles farther out. So I did what apparently had become my method for spiritual exploration: I drove over unannounced, rang the bell, sat down, and waited. Eventually a brother appeared. I did not actually say, “Take me to your leader,” though I admit the line crossed my mind. After we talked for a bit, he went and got the abbot, and the two of us visited for a while in the guest area. From then on, I would stay at the retreat center for lodging and direction, then stop by the hermitage on my way home to say hello.
​

Eventually I asked about making a retreat with them. Instead of putting me in the guesthouse with everyone else, they brought me inside the enclosure and gave me a hermitage of my own — same as theirs. I lived their horarium. I went back for a week every year I was out there. I got to know them well.

My Lutheran church treasurer, meanwhile, was not nearly as impressed. Every time I turned in mileage and expenses for the retreat center and the monastery, she would raise an eyebrow and make her objection plain. “We’re Lutherans,” she’dsay. “We don’t do retreats. That’s Catholic.”

What Jesus Did With Solitude

In one sense, she had a point. This practice did not grow out of Lutheran soil. It comes to us largely through monastic orders and older traditions of ascetic discipline, and the Reformers had real, careful arguments with those traditions — especially when withdrawal from ordinary life was treated as a higher calling, or when spiritual disciplines were made to sound like ways of earning grace. Those concerns still matter. We do not need to smooth them over or pretend they were minor.

But retreat itself — quiet, deliberate withdrawal for the sake of prayer — didn’t start with monasticism. It started with Jesus. “And rising very early in the morning, while it was still dark, he departed and went out to a desolate place, and there he prayed.” — Mark 1:35 Luke says much the same thing: Jesus “would withdraw to desolate places and pray” (Luke 5:16). This wasn’t occasional. It was a pattern — mountains, gardens, wilderness, repeated throughout his ministry.

If Jesus, who lived in perfect and sinless communion with the Father, still made room to withdraw and pray, then surely the rest of us should be slow to dismiss the practice.

Answering the Treasurer

So my answer to her — and to any Lutheran reader who feels the same hesitation — is this: the problem was never quietitself. The question is what we think quiet is for.

Prayer is not a good work by which we earn God’s favor or prove our seriousness. Luther is blunt about this in the Small Catechism — prayer is simply talking to God as dear children talk to a dear Father. God speaks first, through his Word. Prayer is our response to that, not a transaction that buys us anything.

A retreat simply gives that response room to breathe. It gives us space to look at our lives honestly under God’s Law — to stop managing the story we tell ourselves about ourselves — and then to let the Gospel land again as good news, not just familiar words we have heard so often that they have become background noise.
 
None of this means daily life is spiritually inferior, or that the hermits had something figured out that ordinary parishioners do not. God calls people to serve him as parents, spouses, workers, and neighbors. Those vocations are not distractions from the Christian life; they are the places where much of the Christian life is lived. You do not step back from them because they are beneath prayer. You step back so you can return to them without running on fumes.

And a personal retreat is never a substitute for the gathered Church around Word and Sacrament. Whatever happened in that hermitage stayed accountable to what happened the following Sunday — Jesus’s promises are anchored to the Divine Service, to preaching, to absolution, to the Supper, delivered through his called servants, not to whatever I worked out on my own in the desert. The fitting end of any retreat is showing back up to receive those gifts alongside everyone else.


When a Retreat Is Worth Taking

You do not need to be in crisis to take a retreat. But some seasons make it especially worth the trouble: a major change in vocation — a new job, a move, a marriage, a birth, retirement. A decision Scripture does not answer directly, where you need to sit with it under the Word instead of waiting for a private inner voice to settle it for you. Plain exhaustion after a hard season, the kind Jesus had in mind when he said, “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28). The weight of a sin you have been carrying quietly, when you need space to pray Psalm 51 instead of skimming past it. Or maybe nothing more dramatic than wanting real time in Scripture without your phone within reach.

How Long, and Where

Every time I made the drive to the hermitage, it took roughly a day for my mind to catch up with my body. The first several hours were usually restless — bored, half-anxious, still running the parish in my head. That is normal. It is what unwinding sounds like. The Carmelites did not fill my time with a schedule of activities. They gave me a cell, folded me into their horarium, and let the discomfort run its course, because they knew the second day was often where the real quiet began.
 
You do not need a hermitage for that. But if your schedule allows two nights somewhere — a cabin, a retreat center, a church camp — take them if you can. The first day often empties you out. The second day is when you may finally bepresent.

If two nights isn’t realistic, scale down and it still works. A half day, three or four hours, at a park or a quiet library room. A full day off, spent at a state park or an empty sanctuary or a bench by water.

What to Bring

Keep it simple. Bring a physical Bible, so you are not reading Scripture on the same device that buzzes with everything else. Bring the Psalms. Bring Luther’s Small Catechism, especially for meditating on the Commandments, the Creed, and the Lord’s Prayer. A hymnal with the daily offices — Matins, Vespers, Compline — is helpful. So is a notebook. If you want a companion voice, bring something like Luther’s A Simple Way to Pray, Gerhard’s Sacred Meditations, or a serious spiritual author you trust.

How to Spend the Time

Do not over-schedule the time. Let the day move gently between Word, prayer, and rest. Luther wrote A Simple Way to Pray as a letter to his barber, Peter Beskendorf, who’d asked him how to pray well. His method takes a single text — a Commandment, a line of the Lord’s Prayer — and works it four ways: what is this teaching me, what can I thank God for in it, what does it show me I need to confess, what can I ask for on the strength of it. It’s simple enough to use on a walk.

Use the daily office if your hymnal has one — Matins in the morning, a midday prayer, Vespers in the evening, Compline before bed. Get outside if you can. Take a long walk. Pray the Psalms out loud if no one is nearby. And if you arrive exhausted, sleep. Rest is not a failure to be spiritual enough to stay awake. It is a gift (Psalm 127:2), and often it is the first thing that has to happen before anything else does.

A full day might run something like: Matins and a passage worked through with Luther’s method in the morning; a long walk with the Psalms at midday; free reading, journaling, and a nap in the afternoon; Vespers and a last round of thanksgiving in the evening; Compline before sleep. Treat it as a shape, not a checklist.

Coming Back

I do not visit that hermitage anymore. I moved on from that parish years ago, and the annual week is now something I remember more than something I do. But the pattern it taught me has stayed: step away, get emptied out, let the Word and the silence do their work, and then go home a little more ready to love and serve the people actually placed in front of you.
 
That is what a retreat is for. Not proving your devotion. Not climbing some spiritual ladder. Not becoming the sort of Christian who needs a hermitage in order to be taken seriously. Just quiet enough, and long enough, to let God’s Law show you what you actually need and his Gospel meet you there — and then the drive home, back to your spouse and kids, your work, your neighbors, and the pew where the treasurer is still keeping an eye on your mileage receipts. And somehow, even then, the whole thing keeps being worth it.

“For thus said the Lord God, the Holy One of Israel: ‘In returning and rest you shall be saved; in quietness and in trust shall be your strength.’“ — Isaiah 30:15

 

Rev. Dr. Steve Stutz Ordained Lutheran Pastor · Intentional Interim Minister · Certified Spiritual Director La Porte, Texas · Houston Area

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    Rev. Dr. Steve Stutz is an ordained pastor with nearly three decades of ministry in parish, retreat, and teaching settings. He holds a Doctor of Ministry in spiritual direction and serves as an adjunct professor, teaching courses in spiritual direction and discernment. His work focuses on helping individuals and congregations listen more carefully for the movement of the Holy Spirit in everyday life. Through spiritual direction, pastoral consultation, and writing, he explores themes of discernment, spiritual formation, dreams, and the sometimes perplexing experiences that arise in the life of faith. Steve has served congregations in a variety of contexts and currently offers spiritual direction, pastoral consultation, and retreat leadership. When he is not writing or meeting with directees, he enjoys reading widely in theology, philosophy, and the Christian contemplative tradition. Learn more about his work at stevestutz.com.

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