Soul-Searching

Theologian Karl Barth once said to his student, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, that he sometimes wished he could give up lecturing and just sit across the table from people, one at a time, and ask, "How goes it with your soul?"

My friend Matt started a biker gang. Except he doesn’t have a motorcycle and neither do most of the guys in his gang. They just meet once a week at a bar in downtown Round Rock and ask one another "How goes it with your soul?" They talk to everyone in the bar and everyone talks to them and the things they talk about change lives.

I like this question. It’s the question our small groups try to ask every week. It’s the question, authentically answered, that leads to deep connection and all manner of holy transformation.

It’s a question I ask my girls. I ask, “How’s your heart?” Or “What are you talking to God about these days?”

It’s a question I ask my husband, or the question I mean anyway, when I say, as I do almost every day, “Are you doing okay?”

And it’s a question I ask myself on quiet nights when the girls are asleep and the computer screen glows and I wonder what you and I need to hear from the Lord.

It’s my question for you tonight, a question with the potential to make everything better, a question a little like a flood-gate released and a little like balm…

How goes it with your soul?