Time to Get Intentional
Maximizing Your Relationships and Family
Today’s guest post is from my friend, Glenn Packiam. Glenn is a faithful messenger of God, the Senior Pastor at Rock Harbor Church and a devoted husband and father. Glenn and his with, Holly, have recently released, The Intentional Year - which I had the honor or reading and endorsing.
This book is a powerful tool to help you make the most of your next year and enjoy the family and relational flourishing we all so deeply crave.
Intentional Spirituality - by Holly and Glenn Packiam
My father is a farmer. That’s not to say I learned much about farming. My parents had two daughters, and they didn’t hold any illusions of our being ranch hands. Still, you don’t grow up on 180 acres of corn and alfalfa, with dozens and dozens of beef cattle roaming around, without picking up a few things.
If there’s one thing any farmer knows, it’s that stuff doesn’t grow on its own. Well, let me rephrase that: Some stuff grows on its own—just not the stuff you want. Weeds run amok with little human aid. But to grow the crops you want, you’ve got to be intentional. You have to have a plan. And a rhythm. Even in Iowa, where the soil is rich and fertile. There are things my father did every spring, things he did every summer, things he did every single fall, and things he did every single winter. You can’t hope for a good harvest in the fall if you wasted time in the spring.
Cultivating fruit may be slow, but it requires intentionality. My farming father once told Glenn that he had to farm slowly on purpose. “Every magazine I read tells me how not progressive I am, and how that’s a bad thing,” Dad said. “I have to be intentionally regressive. For me, farming is a way of life. I think of farming as a vocation.”
Farming is a wonderful picture of the human vocation, the calling to be a human being. When God made the first man and woman, he placed them in a garden and gave them charge over it. Having been made in his image, they were to reflect his wise and loving order in the world. They were to bring order out of chaos and fruitfulness out of potential. There, at the beginning of the world, before sin and sickness and evil had begun to infect everything, human beings were called to be cultivators of creation.
Cultivation requires intentionality. Fruitfulness flows from faithfulness. Growth happens only on purpose.
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The Intentional Year is an invitation to come to Jesus by the power of the Holy Spirit and participate in his work in your life so that you will bear fruit. All of the practices we present in the book—and the particular sequence in which to practice them, whether in a retreat or not—are means of grace, to use a theological term from the English renewal preacher John Wesley. Spiritual practices don’t earn grace; they help us receive it and take it deeply into our hearts and minds, bodies and souls.
Grace produces grateful generosity in us.
Grace fuels our fellowship with God.
Grace empowers our participation with the Holy Spirit’s work in us.
In Christian tradition, spiritual practices are meant to be ways of abiding in Christ by the power of the Spirit so that we might bear fruit to the glory of the Father. Catch that. This is not a book full of new trends for proving our enoughness, attracting God’s attention, or gaining his pleasure. We step into an intentional life as a response to his lavish love, fueled by his grace through the gift of the Spirit, to keep communing with Christ.
The providence of God doesn’t cancel out our participation in his work. In Christ and by the Holy Spirit, we can now live out our original callings—our human vocations—to reflect the image of God and cultivate fruitfulness in the world for the sake of others. So let’s be intentional about it. This year. Now.