Category Archives: Spiritual Formation

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LTP 13- The Most Important Hour You Can Spend This Month

Powerful & practical ways to review your life

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Learn how to use 9 simple questions to review the end of the year, or even your life. In this podcast Episode, David Loveless talks about the most important hour you can spend this month, and why he has done it every year, for more than 3 decades.

To listen to the audio of this podcast, click the above play arrow.

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Here is a brief summary of today’s episode of “The Live True Podcast.”  You can use this as a reference or reminder of key things you feel like you need to pay attention to or pass on to others, in the next 7 days of your life.

Most every year, over the past 3 decades of my life, I’ve gotten away for a couple of days, at the end of the year, to review the previous year, before planning the new one.

One of the primary values of doing a “Year-End Review” is having a process to complete the past so you’re able to bring forward, into the new year, lessons learned from the previous one.  But then you don’t want to drag any of the unnecessary parts into the future, where it might sabotage it.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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LTP 12- Finding Your Way Home

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Why is there always a gap between the home we long for and the home we have? How can you find your way home today to a place that represents the answer to that.

Click the above audio play arrow to listen to today’s podcast.

Here is a brief summary of today’s episode of “The Live True Podcast.”  You can use this as a reference or reminder of key things you feel like you need to pay attention to or pass on to others, in the next 7 days of your life.

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Whether at Christmas time or normal time, the theme of “home” has a profound sensation to it.

  • Example of: “I’ll be home for Christmas.”
  • Example of “Home” by Phillip Phillips.

There are few words as powerful as “home.” It can fill your heart… it can make you smile… make you cry… not matter what you age or condition of life.

There’s a longing for Home inside us that NO Home in this world can satisfy.

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5 Meaningful Ways to Experience Advent

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We always meant to observe Advent. We really wanted time for meaningful reflection but there were cards to mail, gifts to buy and wrap, parties to host and attend on top of all our normal responsibilities. As spiritual leaders we found ourselves pulling out the stops for everyone else’s Christmas but not focusing as thoughtfully as we would have liked on own Advent experience.

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The Christmas season can distract us all from what we most truly want. So, we’ve learned it helps to have a simple devotional guide.

One resource we use is Advent Reflections by one of our spiritual mentors, Ruth Haley Barton, founder of the Transforming Center (www.transformingcenter.org.) It has powerfully spoken to us so we wanted to pass on some of Ruth’s thoughtful insights to you.

The season of Advent gives us the opportunity to practice waiting for the light of Christ’s coming into the dark places of our world and our lives. Advent literally means “arrival,” and the themes of this season sensitize us to the coming of Christ—not just back then—but now, in the places we long to see his presence and need his intervention.

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LTP 11- How To Curb Christmas Crazy

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In this podcast Episode 11, David & Caron Loveless discuss how you can curb the Christmas crazy in your life with 10 simple guidelines.

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Here is a brief summary of today’s episode of “The Live True Podcast.”  You can use this as a reference or reminder of key things you feel like you need to pay attention to or pass on to others, in the next 7 days of your life.

 1.  I will let this year stand on its own. I will try not to compare it to other years when people were more … This year has it’s own gift for me and mine and I will receive it as it is without judging it by other years.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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Nothing to Prove: Chapter 2: What We Know Now

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The following is an excerpt from our new ebook that is available beginning today.  This book is a a very candid, behind the scenes look, at the journey of transformation that we’ve been on the last several years, and the things we’ve learned that can help change your life as well.

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Chapter 2:  What We Know Now

 

You can never be other than who you are

until you are willing to embrace the reality of who you are.

David Benner

You don’t have to experience a tragedy like ours, or any other failure with a thousand different names, in order to identify the real root of your own internal issues. We hope it won’t come to that. Our purpose in writing this book is to help you avoid some of the ditches in your future if at all possible. Unfortunately, for many of us it often does take a serious trial, illness or loss to break us open enough to see parts of our life that aren’t working so well.

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An Unexpected Place to Meet God

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To connect and be close to God is really the most natural thing in the world. Unfortunately, religion has often made it complicated and un-natural.  Here is just one of five simple ways you can use to bring an extraordinary God into your ordinary day.

Meeting God where your wild beasts roam

Have you ever noticed what happens when you’re all alone… when it gets quiet… when there is nothing to distract you?  Often times, that’s when the “wild beasts” appear.

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These ‘beasts’ are the things we would rather not deal with… un-healed hurts… past negative conversations that prick your ego…reminders of past failures… current lack… or anticipated need.

When most of us feel these beasts lurking, we immediately try to distract ourselves because we get fearful or uncomfortable with the feelings they stir up. Stop right there. That is exactly the place, that uncomfortable, fearful, anxious moment, where God is.

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LTP 10- The Spiritual Practice of Gratitude

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We’re suspicious that one of the primary reasons God urges us hundreds of times in the Bible to be thankful is because He knows how beneficial it is to our true, created identity and how detrimental it can be to our compulsive one, that never feels like it has enough of anything.

It’s also fascinating when we realize gratitude is the healthiest emotion to have.  It leads to emotional, mental, physical, spiritual, and relational well being.

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Here is a brief summary of today’s episode of “The Live True Podcast.”  You can use this as a reference or reminder of key things you feel like you need to pay attention to or pass on to others, in the next 7 days of your life.

Very often, we hate that we don’t have what we think we want. We think we need more or deserve more and it drives us crazy that we don’t have it in the moment.

The transformational practice of gratitude is to: Love what you have, instead of struggling with what you don’t have.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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Banking On the Benefits

Thoughts on gratitude

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Gratitude

sees the good in things

and drops it’s anchor there.

 

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Like muscle

gratitude grows

when it’s put to work.

 

It is active

not passive

moving mountains

to find diamonds in the rock.

 

Gratitude is vocal

it speaks to what is working-

it always says the kind thing.

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LTP 8- Redefining the Family and Mission (with guest Dave Rhodes)

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What’s the best way to live?  By re-defining what “Family” is and what “Mission” is and then learning how to integrate the two… for a powerful new way to live.

Here is a brief summary of today’s episode of “The Live True Podcast.”  You can use this as a reference or reminder of key things you feel like you need to pay attention to or pass on to others, in the next 7 days of your life.

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Most of us value the WHAT of our life over the WHO of our life. That happens when we make decisions concerning our WHAT before our WHO.

* Our WHO has to do with an extended family (often not biological family, but can include parts of it) given to us to experience the relational community we yearn for.  WHO is about family.

* Our WHAT has to do with the job or mission we’ve been given in the world. Everything in the marketplace has a higher purpose than what we first imagined.  WHAT is about function.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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The Unexpected Path to Humility

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I am always surprised when I meet a truly humble person – first, because it is such a rare event. But, what I’ve noticed just getting around them is I feel instantly drawn in. Maybe, this is because, for a few minutes, at least, their calming presence convinces me to release my constant, unconscious vigil to convince everyone I am a wonderful, capable and very special person.

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Maybe, I feel comfortable with humble people because they seem so ordinary, like they have nothing to prove and no desire to compete with me in some life defining turf war.  They just seem so comfortable within themselves. Maybe this is why they seem so strange to us! Who do you know that is truly content within themselves?