Church Life Today

“Seek first the Kingdom of God, and all these other things will be given to you besides.” When the Lord speaks to his disciples about anxieties, about busyness, about the hustle and bustle of the world, he does not lead them to abandon everything and run away; rather, he leads them to put the first thing first, and allow everything to come into the proper place thereafter. The life of integration, of wholeness, indeed of true holiness is rooted in putting God first and giving Him the authority to form you, guide you, and send you on mission. The monastic tradition has long offered pathways to this ordered, harmonious, rightly prioritized life, building communities where God is pursued first and in all things, while work and play and rest and learning and daily needs are organized with this first and truly necessary thing. But for those of us who do not enter monastic life, who live in the midst of the world with worldly anxieties and busyness and the hustle and bustle, we might think ourselves cut off from th