A six week series where we try to answer questions like these:

• – What is God trying to do in my life?
• – Why is that so hard sometimes?
• – What is Christian character and do we cultivate it?

Video Message	Resources
Week 1: Of Flesh, Spirit, and Fruit	Monday Memo notes For This Week 1. Maybe most importantly, pay attention this week to how God’s Spirit, right in the midst of your everyday life, is trying to steer you toward and build in you the “fruit” in Galatians 5.22-23. Stay on watch for these signs, and then find ways to lean into what God is doing or how God is shaping you.  2. Helpful scripture reading this week:  – Galatians 5.16-23 is one of Paul’s most practical passages about how God’s Spirit shows up in and influences our lives. Another is Romans 8.1-30 – There are other “virtue” or “character” lists in the New Testament, for example 2nd Peter 1.5-7, 1 Timothy  6.11 (about church leaders), and 2 Corinthians 6.3-10 (about Paul himself) – Jesus used a similar metaphor to Gal. 5.16-23 in His Sermon on the Mount, namely, good trees produce good fruit, whereas if we’re yielding bad fruit, we may be a bad tree: Matthew 7.15-19 NRSVUE – “Fruit” is a common Old Testament metaphor for the outcome or results of a faithful, enduring, virtuous life, here are two examples: Psalm 1.1-3 NRSVUE and Jeremiah 17.7-8 NRSVUE 3. Sprinkle these devotionals through your week:  – Bear Fruit – d365 Daily Devotionals – Help Fruit Grow – d365 Daily Devotionals – “You can’t carry two watermelons with one hand.” –  Proverb – United Church of Christ – Enmities – United Church of Christ
Love	See Love Big series
Joy	See Choose Joy series
Week 2: Peace	Monday Memo notes A Week for Peace 1. Pray at least once of a day the famous prayer of St. Francis of Assisi about being an instrument of peace:  “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace: where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy. O divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive, it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.” 2. Focus this week on one of the practical habits for cultivating inner peace:  – Per Dr. Linden Nelson, spend the week trying to exercise greater self-compassion and self-acceptance and/or trying to bring all the various parts of life together as one whole governed by one set of values.  – Or work on your habit of releasing to God all the things that worry, overwhelm, or overload you during the day.  – Or focus this week on coming back to the present moment when your mind pulls you back into the past or into the future or outside of yourself into things you can’t control. Mindfulness practices are a big help with this – 7 Christian Mindfulness Exercises to See God in Daily Life 3. Ask God this week to identify one place in your life – a relationship, a setting, etc. – where God wants you to work on outward peace. And get specific about how you can seek to bring peace to it – by acknowledging and resolving a conflict, by being mindful of your words, etc.
Week 3: Patience and Faithfulness	Monday Memo notes A Week of Patience and Faithfulness – Pray the full Serenity Prayer (in the sermon notes above) daily this week. – Keep a log of what tries your patience this week. Grow in your self-awareness of what tempts you to be impatient.  – As described in the sermon notes above, find deliberate steps that you can take to slow your life down overall. It’s hard to be patient in a hurried life.  – Journal or pray a little this week about how you can approach your life more like a farmer or prophet.  – Every day this week, remember to entrust your whole life to God in prayer. You can do this with a physical gesture: as you pray, lift your cupped hands to God, as if you are giving God your life and removing it from your care and control primarily.  – Try for one day to trust God without reservation. And every time you start to worry, repeat a short prayer telling God that you’re choosing complete trust instead of anxiety or taking back control.  – Do a trustworthiness audit of your life: journal about every facet of life – home life, friendships, work, church life, creation, money, your health, your hobbies, and so on (you can make your own life) – and see if you’re proving to be faithful and dependable everywhere, or if an area or two might need some attention.
Week 4: Kindness	Monday Memo notes A Week of Kindness Here are some ways to spend a week leaning into the Spirit’s effort to make you kinder:  – Begin everyday reminding yourself in prayer that God is kind through and through, is kind toward you, and is kind toward everyone you’ll meet throughout the day.  – From point 9 in the sermon summary above, pick 1-2 concrete action items that you want to focus on all week long. If you want to read some more on practical ways to be kind, try this – How to Be Kind | Psychology Today. And here’s a big long list of ideas – 50 Ways to Be Kind. – Get a sense of your own current capacity for kindness by taking one of these assessments – Are You a Kind Person? and Hostility vs. Kindness Test – Want to read a little more about the psychology of kindness? Try these short, accessible articles – The Positive Psychology of Kindness | Psychology Today and Random Acts of Kindness | Psychology Today and The Importance of Kindness | Psychology Today – Want to help your kids or grandkids be kinder? Try these – A Call for Kindness | Psychology Today and Kind Kids | Psychology Today
Goodness	This will be its own series in the future.
Week 5: Gentleness	Monday Memo notes A Week of Being Gentle – Use the word pictures in the sermon summary as a prayer or meditation prompt. Use one per day this week. Mull and reflect on how you can move in the world like those metaphors day by day.  – Focus on your words this week, namely using gentle words to bring life into even difficult situations.  – Be committed to pauses, momentarily and longer ones, because the restraint of gentleness occurs in pauses. Slow down, don’t react quickly, measure your strength.  – Some short, inspirational reading on how to lean into the gentleness God’s Spirit is trying to bring about in and through you:    God’s Gentle Partners Finding Rest Gentle ≠ Weak – And these are a little longer on the countercultural practice of gentleness: The Counter-Cultural Virtues of Gentleness and Kindness – De Pree Center The Demise of Gentleness – Christian Scholar’s Review
Week 6: Self-Control	Monday Memo notes A Week Focused on Self-Control and God’s Spirit – This week following Pentecost Sunday, maybe you’d like to spend each day considering what it means to be filled by God’s Spirit. That’s how D365 – a great online devotional – spent last week, and you make you way day by day through its entries, starting on June 2: Devotions Archive – d365 Daily Devotionals – If you’d like to weave a written prayer into your week, try this one that we used to end the service yesterday – from Common Worship (The Church of England):  “Lord God, may Your Spirit who hovered over the waters when the world was created, breathe into me new creation. May Your Spirit that propelled the prophets and apostles propel me out into the world to speak up, love, and serve. May Your Spirit, who at Pentecost set the church on fire, refine, purify, and illuminate me. And may Your blessing – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – be with and through me for the sake of the world, now and forevermore, amen.” – Build purposeful time outs into your week, and make sure those breaks require you to exercise very little self-control. In that respite, find ways to replenish and refuel yourself.  – Begin every day this week with a simple prayer in which you let God know that you cannot manage your own life or exercise self-control without the Spirit being front and center in your life.  – Here’s some great insight from modern psychology on self-control… – First, a TED talk on cutting-edge research into self-control: The secret to self control  Jonathan Bricker – Second, two articles that get very concrete about how to build your self-control muscle: Does Self-Control Have a Limit? and 10 Strategies for Developing Self-Control – Last, here’s a free self-control assessment: Self-Control and Self-Monitoring Test – And for your kids (or the young at heart), here’s Cookie Monster and NPR on self-control (5 min. video): Cookie Monster Practices Self-Regulation | Life Kit Parenting