Spiritual Formation

I've been reading Richard Foster's book The Celebration of the Disciplines. It's a book that talks through various spiritual disciplines, defined as "any activity within our power that we engage in to enable us to do what we cannot do by direct effort." The obvious ones are fasting, but others are things like meditation, simplicity, prayer, silence (yikes!), solitude (even scarier to me) confession and serving to name a few. These things have been around forever and in the most spiritually mature people I know that have the kind of faith that I want, these things are a staple in their lives.

I've been trying to incorporate different aspects of these disciplines into my life over the past few months and I've seen changes in me and been challenged by what comes to the surface. I'm currently trying to fast from buying stuff for myself for 30 days. As a result, I've been having to battle my addiction to stuff, dealing with why I buy stuff, how stuff placates me and the deeper issue of how I find contentment along with what simplicity looks like for me. I'm amazed at how frequently I buy things and what it is I actually buy and how I justify it. It's impressive the way I will try and justify things things to myself and why I need these things, and it's only been about a week. Anyways, I haven't got this stuff figured out yet, but in some mysterious way, these different disciplines have been changing me inside and in turn changing me on the outside. I love the results.