Five Ways to Accelerate Your Spiritual and Emotional Growth in 2022: Adding a Spiritual Exercise

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Five Ways to Accelerate Your Spiritual and Emotional Growth in 2022: Adding a Spiritual Exercise

It is hard to change, especially as we age. We tend to get in a rut and stay there. However, there are things we can do to keep our brains active and flexible. One of them is to increase cognitive effort by doing something new at work or home, such as learning a new skill. In today’s blog, I am going to describe three spiritual practices that you can add to your daily rhythms that will help you grow spiritually as well as help your brain by giving you a new skill to master in 2022.

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I Want to be a Community Elder

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I Want to be a Community Elder

At the beginning of each new year, our Healing Center International community habitually looks to see where God has been at work over the past year and asks him what he desires for us and where he is inviting us to join him in the coming year. Not only as a community habit, but also as a personal habit, I began seeking God and interacting with him on his dreams and desires for me for this coming year. Unexpectedly to me—not to him—I found I had a desire to become a community elder, a community guide.

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Eight Things I Want You to Know About the Eschaton!

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Eight Things I Want You to Know About the Eschaton!

More than two thousand years ago, God the Father sent his son to earth to take on human flesh. In that moment, he who is fully God became also fully man. Advent, the season when we celebrate this miraculous event started this year on November 28th and will continue through Christmas Eve. We are grateful to God for his mercy in reaching out to us in our broken humanity, for living among us, and for dying for our sins. We celebrate his resurrection.

Most Christians know about these wonders. But if you are like most believers, you don’t know much about eschatology, when history ends, and Christ comes again. Advent celebrates both, the first coming of Christ as a babe in the manger as well as the second coming of Christ.

It’s important to know about eschatology because there are so many misconceptions presented in popular literature. There, the authors (I assume) tried to fill in the blanks with exciting fiction, but to be honest, there is quite a bit we don’t know . . . yet. But if we learn what is known, we will recognize the eschaton it when it happens.

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Gratitude in Community

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Gratitude in Community

The calendar page has turned to November. Thanksgiving plans are being made, and the Christmas season approaches. This is the time of year most of us naturally turn our attention toward gratitude. And with good reason. Not only do we celebrate Thanksgiving; but we are entering into a season of gift giving, and everyone knows you say thank you for a gift.

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Human Developmental Maturity - Elder Stage

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Human Developmental Maturity - Elder Stage

ELDER (when the needs and tasks of the Parent have been fulfilled or the youngest child reaches adult maturity):
An elder is a father or mother to his/her community. They are able to treat children who are not their own with the same unselfish care they learned to give to their own children.

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Human Maturity Stages - Parent Maturity

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Human Maturity Stages - Parent Maturity

PARENT (from birth of first child to when the youngest child becomes an adult)
The Goal of the Parent stage is to learn to give sacrificially with joy, without expecting to receive in return.
Anyone who has ever been a parent knows that this new stage requires all we learned in the earlier stages—infant, child, adult—and more. Welcome to the parent stage! Only a person who has mastered the first three stages will have the capacity to give sacrificially to an infant.

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Human Developmental Maturity - Adult Stage

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Human Developmental Maturity - Adult Stage

ADULT STAGE: Young Man or Woman (age thirteen/puberty) to the birth of his/her first child)
The goal of this stage is to learn to satisfy the needs of two people—his or herself and one other person.
Ideally, the ADULT STAGE begins at age thirteen. A fully mature 13-year-old can take excellent care of herself. As s/he enters the adult state s/he will learn how to satisfy the needs of more than one person at a time.

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Human Maturity Stages - Infant Maturity

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Human Maturity Stages - Infant Maturity

The goal for infancy is for babies to organize a strong, joyful, synchronized identity. An infant must learn to receive.
Ideally the infant learned that they have value for “just being me.” The infant must experience strong, loving, caring bonds with his parents. These bonds must meet his needs without his having to ask. He must receive life and also learn to express the life that is in him, to everyone's delight. During infancy, the baby learns to live joyfully in his mother's world.

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Snapshots of Elder Level Maturity

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Snapshots of Elder Level Maturity

Catherine Curtis, our HCI Community Coordinator sat down with Jewell B., one of our community members operating from elder level maturity. Below are some "snapshots" from Catherine and Jewell's conversation.

Several years ago, my husband and I had the opportunity to spend extra time over several months with our grandchildren. This gave us precious bonding times together. The grandchildren are now doing well in school so our contact with them is quite limited (they live in another state from where we live). But on Richard’s 80th zoom birthday party this year their faces reflected much joy and delight to be together virtually!

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