Spiritual Direction

What is it?

  • The primary intent of spiritual direction is to deepen your intimacy with God.  Together with your spiritual director, you explore God’s presence, voice, and activity already happening in your life.  Through scripture, prayer, conversation, listening, and asking questions, your spiritual director can help you respond to God and take steps to further your relationship with Him.

  • Spiritual Direction is a conversational and prayerful relationship of seeking God together, through the journey of life.  It focuses on the directee’s personal experiences of God.  The spiritual director helps a directee listen, notice, and be open to God and His love.  

What is it not?

  • Spiritual Direction is NOT the same as Christian discipleship, counseling, or coaching.  While areas overlap, spiritual direction is unique.  

  • Discipleship: Discipleship usually follows a program of lessons from the Bible on becoming more like Jesus.  Spiritual direction does not follow a curriculum -it is customized to the person seeking God’s presence and guidance.  

  • Counseling:  Counseling focuses on resolving specific problems.  It’s natural for stressors and hurts to surface in a spiritual direction, but the focus is less on solving those problems and more on understanding the person’s experience of God.  

  • Coaching:  Coaching helps people set and realize their goals, to advance their life or work.  In the spiritual direction, the goals are to improve their relationship with God and to become more like Jesus.  Ironically, spiritual direction is not directive.  It’s not advice-giving or teaching… instead, it’s collaborative, empathetic, and prayerful.

    What To Expect:

    There are countless scenarios where it’s beneficial to meet with a spiritual director. You don’t have to wait to reach a certain level of spiritual maturity or have all of your stuff together. You don’t have to be in a crisis or have “something” to talk about either. But here are some of the biggest reasons people do begin seeing a spiritual director:

    1. Discerning a life decision.

    When faced with an important decision, many of us may pray or seek counsel from others who know our hearts. We may also seek after a feeling of “peace.” However, that peace may not always be clear—nor is it always our best indicator of God’s desires for us. A spiritual director discerns with you by listening to your heart, noticing how God might be guiding. However, they don’t direct you in what you should decide.

    2. Discovering and exploring new practices.

    Some practices in our faith never change—but many evolve. This can happen for different reasons. If we’re curious, lifelong learners, we might just want to try a new way to pray or interact with Scripture. Other times, shifts can happen in our spiritual life that make our usual ways of praying or reading Scripture less and less fruitful—even difficult or impossible. All of this is OK, and a spiritual director can help introduce and instruct you in different practices that can help advance your conversation (or silent being) with God.

    3. Navigating a time of dryness or darkness.

    When you’re walking through that desert space, a spiritual director isn’t going to try to fix you. That’s not what you need. What we’ll do is walk carefully and compassionately with you while your life of prayer changes, while you hold hard questions that may not fit in other places in your life, while you deconstruct and reconstruct....with the understanding that Jesus is at work in the unseen.

    4. Uncovering your true self and calling.

    For many years in our faith, we’re responding to what we’re “supposed” to do. Everything is external. We listen to God’s will for our lives expressed in Scripture, taught in church, and heard in prayer.... but that’s not the ultimate design. Eventually, God invites us to live out of the heart God is creating in us...uncovering our true self, and the big desires that God is planting in us. It involves uncovering some illusions about ourselves and about God; it involves deep listening.

    5. Finding a safe space to be heard and heal.

    There’s no substitute for authentic community—the kind where there are no masks and no pretenses, where someone asks you on a Sunday morning how you’re doing and you can say something more than, “All right,” or, “Busy,” with a forced smile. However, not all of us get to enjoy relationships where it’s safe to talk about struggles. Spiritual direction provides a sacred space for you. It’s a confidential, non-judgmental and non-anxious space.

Next Steps: