Welcome

The current installment of the COEC began meeting in 2007.

We are currently on a "break," for no particular reason, and many little reasons - mostly pertaining to life circumstances. If anyone is interested in calling a meeting, feel free to post on the blog, join the google group (see link below) and send an email, or contact either Nancy (nancykj10@yahoo.com) or Jesse (schroeder.jesse@gmail.com) for more information.

To receive cohort emails, join our Google group.

12.28.2008

The past year has been a very important one for my own faith, and the I think the main change, and the theme of this little post, is that my life is now much less separated from my faith for better or worse. Jane and I decided after a very long time of struggling to leave our home church at Xenos. This was not easy to decide and I believe you can probably find some posts about it on the blog, so I won't lament over it any more.
The primary consequence, as I now realize, is that I have no element of my faith that is separate from my actual day to day life. I rarely go to a church (when I do it is usually with people from the cohort anyway) and my faith community is made up entirely of people I know very, very well and consider very important friends. It is odd how I have very few casual Christian friends in my life (people I see twice a month and talk to even less). Furthermore, I don't really have any friends in Columbus not attached to the cohort. This isn't something I'm really proud of - people in our department at school just really don't like hanging our with us....Also, we have no family within a ten hour drive of Columbus.

So, what this all means is that our social lives are now completely a part of our faith lives as well. The main thing I have noticed about this is that since I am surrounded by people of similar convictions most of the time I do far less thinking and (sadly) far less praying than I used to. I'm not sure if that means my faith is stronger, or if this is a nice little break that God has given us before our lives get much more complicated very shortly. I think that my faith dictates my actions stronger than in the past, but I do less purposeful actions...maybe that doesn't make sense.

Okay, I will go ahead and end this to leave some time for comments. I'm looking forward to seeing you all again very soon.

1 comment:

Greg said...

That your social life, Nick, is by all accounts integrated with your faith life is an important insight, which I had not really considered, but with which I can similarly relate. And for me, this integration has brought great joy and is a much closer approximation (I would argue) to what Church is supposed to be when it is healthily functioning.

I am curious to hear what has prompted you to necessarily assume that being around those with similar convictions has been the catalyst for what you acknowledge to be a decreased prayer life? What prompted your (and my) prayers when all we had were casual Christian friends?

Finally, that your actions are dictated more strongly by your faith now than in the past, but that those actions seem less purposeful, could suggest that those actions are now more naturally partaken, so that you are unconsciously and uninhibitedly engaged in Kingdom living.