Navigating Spirituality: Building Habits and Rituals Amidst the Chaos - Episode 9

Imagine navigating the intricacies of modern life while staying spiritually grounded. That's the challenge I often face as a pilot, constantly on the move and away from the comforting rhythms of home and church.  In this episode, I share personal insights on establishing spiritual habits that act as an anchor, especially when the regular church attendance isn't always feasible. Together with my wife, Tiffany, I've discovered the transformative power of simple rituals, like prayer, that fortify our connection with the divine and nurture our spiritual journey.

As we delve deeper, I draw upon my insights which emphasizes the role of rituals in enhancing our spirituality. These practices are not just about repetition but about enriching our relationship with the divine and positioning ourselves for revelation. We discuss the importance of maintaining the essence of these rituals to avoid falling into a mundane routine that lacks depth. Whether you find yourself disconnected from church or simply seeking a more profound spiritual experience at home, this episode offers ideas and inspiration. Plus, I promise a more in-depth discussion in our next session on how to elevate your spiritual practices daily and weekly.

Chapters

• 0:13 Developing Spiritual Habits and Rituals
• 16:19 Strengthening Spirituality Through Daily Rituals

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:13

all right, all right, all right. Yeah, I know I'm not as good as, uh, matthew mcconaughey at that, but all right, welcome to your spirit by Design with Todd Andrewson. I know it's been a couple of weeks. I get busy doing the things that I've been doing with flying and traveling around and I missed recording, of course, to be fair. I was gone for a week working 10 hours a day, 12, 15 hours a day, at a convention up in Georgia. It was pretty cool, helping out my cousin, and Very interesting, kind of back to my roots in military sales, even though Tiffany and I were working behind the scenes. It was a tactical UAV drone convention. It was pretty cool.

Speaker 1: 1:14

Anywho, welcome to your Spirit by Design, coming back to you with some words of advice things to live by, things to help you stay spiritual when you can't always make it to church. Once again, I'm on a trip as I am traveling with my job, working for Delta as a pilot, which I love Best job ever. Well, except that takes me away from home and takes me away from family, takes me away from being able to go to church all the time. So, as I was thinking what to talk about today, it's very important to conceptualize what is something that you can focus on, to do in order to improve your spiritual life. There is a lot of craziness going on. I'm sure you've been watching the news. There have been elections, there have been all sorts of craziness, accusations thrown always thrown on both sides. There's some people happy, some people sad, some people fearful, although I personally believe that if you trust the Lord, as he says, doubt not, fear not, trust in me, and you have no reason to fear. So that's one of the takeaways, I believe, from this situation is there's no reason for people to be afraid like they are If they're trusting in the Lord. That is neither here nor there, really, for what I wanted to talk about today. I just bring it up because, you know, there's a lot of things in the world today that are trying to drive you away from the spirit, trying to drive you away from being able to hear, know, do that which the Lord would have you do. In fact, there are what I would say I believe there are forces that are actually using elements of truth and elements preying on people's desire to be right to kind of focus this fear and causing people to have doubts but, even more so, causing people to distrust others in a language that is just not becoming of a follower of Jesus Christ.

Speaker 1: 4:52

Now Christ cleansed the temple. Christ has talked about and I was listening to a podcast that his church will be cleansed first. Before his coming, there will be a siphoning and a sifting of people, the wheat and the tares. As we get closer to the second coming, it is going to be harder to follow and do that what you're supposed to do, if you don't have a backbone, know who you are, the ability to receive personal revelation and a willingness to do the things that the Lord tells you to do. So because of that, the things that I'm teaching or talking about really are to help you in my, in my. They're there to help you, there, to help me because I'm going through this as well to be able to maintain that spirituality so that we don't get deceived by the crafty, fiery darts of the evil one.

Speaker 1: 6:12

So what is it? I'm now six minutes in. I haven't even talked about what I want to talk about. So one of the things that you can do to maintain and build your spirituality is to develop habits and rituals focused on increasing it. So one of the very first episodes that I talked about prayer. Right, I've made it a habit that I don't leave without saying prayer with Tiffany. I don't go to bed at night without saying prayer with Tiffany. It is a habit, it is a ritual that, even if we're both half asleep, I make sure that it happens, because to me, that is one way I can maintain communication with the Lord, but also that purpose with my wife stating that the Lord is one of the primary rocks and foundations of our marriage. Okay, so habits and rituals can be very effective, very important in helping you to develop spirituality and develop into the kind of things that you want to do, what to do.

Speaker 1: 7:55

So I was looking at a, an article called the magic of habits, routines and rituals with Sharon Dansker, by Senia Maimon, phd. So this is not specifically about spirituality, but it is about habits and rituals and why they're important. So she says maybe I'm just a big kid, but I really do like to have routines so that I know what to expect. Okay, even more important and a little more challenging is to have an end of day work routine. Okay, do that final scan, things that can signal your brain that I'm done working. Right, I can close my computer because I know what to expect when I come to work tomorrow. She's talking about work, right?

Speaker 1: 8:53

The way we can focus that with spirituality is similar things have a routine that at this time of day, you read your scriptures. At this time of day or location, you say prayer, tiffany and I, we get in bed before we go to sleep. We say prayer together. It's a routine, okay. Okay, we say prayer together. It's a routine, okay. Now, a ritual is a routine. I'm quoting her again. That has meaning beyond what you're actually doing. Okay.

Speaker 1: 9:29

So there are rituals that we do in religion. There are rituals in the temple, temple ceremony. There are rituals on Sunday that we go and we take the sacrament the bread, the water or wine, depending on your church to commemorate and renew the covenants we made at baptism. Baptism itself is a ritual. There are rituals that we do in order to help us to focus our learning on Christ, to focus our spirituality, to be able to feel the spirit.

Speaker 1: 10:22

You can develop rituals at home, not the rites and rituals of the church, but at home you can have rituals that have deeper meaning. I know how would you do this. Well, every family is different, but really you decide to place more meaning on a habit. More meaning on a habit, or you have a habit that you've started that has meaning behind it beyond just the action of the habit. So just a silly example when I used to fly the C-130, I would walk around, do my walk around, and every time I'd pat the nose on of the airplane and tell her that she was a good girl and to treat me right. And if I forgot to pat the nose on a couple of flights, those were the worst, worst days mechanical failures, all sorts of problems, because I didn't complete my ritual. Yes, it's a superstitious ritual, but it was. You know it was something that has deeper meaning for you, has deeper meaning for you because you're setting yourself up, you're setting your mind up for the task at hand or for what you're doing.

Speaker 1: 12:03

So in a religious sense, setting up a ritual, which is a habit with deeper meaning at home that can focus your spirituality, focus your thoughts on the Lord, focus your attention to receive personal revelation. It could be a ritual of meditating after prayer to try to receive, to listen and be quiet to receive an answer. It can be pondering, a ritual, of pondering a scripture after you read it, trying to find the deeper meaning in the scripture. It can be a ritual of talking to somebody each week about the deeper things in life. These are ideas, you know you have to come up with your own. You have to come up with your own.

Speaker 1: 13:15

But habits, rituals, they're important. Why? Because they form a foundation for success. When you make a habit, establish a habit, you're setting yourself up for something that you want to do, because we all have bad habits, things that we maybe don't like to do, like it took me 40 years to stop biting my nails down to the nub and to're looking for Because anything with a deeper meaning that's worth it, like building your spirituality, strengthening your relationship with your Heavenly Father, with Christ, it's worth the time that takes to do it. Now, any habit, um, it's been shown it takes about 21 days to establish a habit that's doing it over, repeatedly, over and over, until it becomes a habit, not just routine. Routine you have to yourself. So it takes 21 days of setting a routine to build a habit and then you will be able to do it. Then for a ritual, you have to add the deeper meaning behind the habit.

Speaker 1: 15:12

I hope this is making sense. It makes sense in my mind because I have these habits and the little rituals that I do, and I know that you probably have some sort of habit or ritual that, if you think about it, you'll recognize them in your life. That's something that you should do is ponder, ponder upon what habits, rituals you have, habits, rituals you have. Get rid of the ones that you don't, that are not serving you, and replace them with habits or rituals that do serve you to strengthen your spirituality. I know this is kind of going everywhere today, but my brain's been up forever.

Speaker 1: 16:19

It's midnight, all right, so the takeaway for today is the world's going crazy. You need to develop good spiritual habits, rituals or habits with deeper meaning, and if you set up some of those at home, you can strengthen your relationship and ability to receive revelation. Go to church when you can Perform the rituals at church to strengthen that relationship that can cement those habits. For when you're unable to go to church and you're just able to perform those habits that you've set up at home, it's a circle. It's just a never-ending circle that you have to keep working at it. If it's something that just becomes routine and you're not thinking about it and you don't have meaning behind it, then it's not going to be strengthening your spirituality.

Speaker 1: 17:39

On that note, I'm going to call tonight. But may the Lord bless you, the devil miss you, as my seminary teacher used to say. I hope something that I said today made sense and next week I'll have a much better prepared, thought-out discussion of some more things that you can do to strengthen your spirituality on a daily and weekly basis, especially when you can't make it to church. On that note, this is Todd and I'm signing off. Have a blessed day, thank you.