Intentionality

There's a terrible comfort in drifting. I've known it myself… the seductive ease of letting the current carry you, of mistaking motion for direction, of confusing religious activity with the dangerous intimacy Jesus actually offers. We sit in our pews, mouth our liturgies, attend our small groups, and somehow imagine that proximity to the things of God will, by some mystical osmosis, transform us into His likeness. But here's the brutal truth that lodges like a splinter in the soft flesh of our complacency: you cannot accidentally become like Jesus.

The spiritual life… that unending, untamed journey into the heart of the Abba who speaks your name in the darkness….demands something our achievement-addicted, passive-entertainment culture finds nearly impossible to sustain: intentionality. Not the grim-faced, white-knuckled determination of religious performance, mind you, but the intentionality of a lover who rearranges everything to be near the Beloved. The intentionality of someone who has glimpsed something so beautiful, so utterly transformative, that all other pursuits fade into the background noise of a life not fully lived.

The gravitational pull of everything else.

We live submerged in an ocean of formation. Every advertisement, every news cycle, every algorithmic feed, every cultural expectation is actively shaping us, moulding our desires, configuring our imaginations toward particular visions of the good life. The world is not neutral territory. It is a field of forces, each pulling with tremendous gravitational weight, promising fulfilment, significance, security, pleasure: all the things the human heart legitimately longs for, but distorted, commodified, sold back to us at the price of our souls.

And here's what makes the drift so dangerous: most of this formation happens below the level of conscious awareness. We absorb the scripts… success means this, beauty looks like that, security requires this much money, meaning comes from these achievements. These narratives seep into us through a thousand small exposures until they become the unquestioned operating system of our lives. We begin to measure ourselves against metrics Jesus never mentioned. We chase identities He never offered. We pursue a righteousness He would not recognise.

The stereotypes are legion. The ‘good Christian’ looks like this, votes like that, is about this, raises children according to this method, consumes these media, avoids those people, maintains this level of certainty, and performs that kind of piety. Strong opinions masquerading as spiritual maturity. Cultural Christianity posing as the gospel. And all of it, all of it, a distraction from the singular, terrifying, simple and beautiful call: to become like Jesus.

The scandal of particularity

But who is this Jesus we're called to resemble? Not the domesticated, sanitised Jesus of religious kitsch. Not the cosmic vending machine dispensing blessings in exchange for correct theological positions. Not the cultural warrior enlisted in our political crusades. Not the life coach helping us achieve our best life now.

The Jesus of the gospels is wild and tender, fierce and gentle, utterly unmanageable and completely trustworthy. He touches lepers. He weeps at tombs. He overturns tables in temples and parties with prostitutes. He speaks with authority that makes religious experts uncomfortable and with compassion that makes sinners feel safe. He demands everything and offers himself entirely. He calls us to die and promises that only in that death will we truly live.

To become like this Jesus requires something more radical than behaviour modification or theological precision. It requires a fundamental reorientation of the soul, a transformation so complete that Paul could only describe it as dying and rising, as becoming a new creation, as Christ being formed within us.

And here's the most remarkable thing: this doesn't happen accidentally. It doesn't happen through cultural absorption or habitual obligation. It happens through choice: sustained, daily, moment-by-moment choice to surrender to the transforming work of grace.

Intentionality as receptivity.

But we must be careful here, because intentionality in the spiritual life is not what our performance-driven culture assumes it to be. It's not the intentionality of the self-made person, pulling themselves up by their spiritual bootstraps, willing themselves into holiness through sheer determination. That path leads only to exhaustion, self-righteousness, or despair…. often all three in succession.

The intentionality required for Christian formation is something different entirely. It's the intentionality of showing up. Of positioning ourselves in the places where grace flows most freely. Of creating space in our overbusy, overstimulated lives for the quiet voice that rarely shouts. Of choosing, again and again, to return our wandering attention to the presence that never leaves.

Thomas Merton understood this when he wrote about contemplation not as achievement but as awakening to what is already true… that we are already loved, already held, already being transformed by a love we could never earn and don't need to. Our task is not to manufacture transformation but to cooperate with it, to consent to it, to stop resisting the grace that has been pursuing us since before we knew our own names.

This is intentionality as receptivity. As the deliberate cultivation of awareness. As the practice of paying attention to the One who is always paying attention to us.

The disciplines of availability

The ancient practices of spiritual formation: prayer, fasting, study, solitude, community, service, Sabbath, are not merit badges to collect or boxes to check. They are laboratories of transformation, spaces set apart where we practice becoming the kind of people who can recognise and respond to God's presence in every moment of our lives.

When we pray, we're not informing God of things he doesn't know or manipulating him into giving us what we want. We're training our hearts to turn toward him as naturally as a flower turns toward light. We're practicing the conversation that will become our native language in the kingdom.

When we fast, we're not impressing God with our willpower. We're confronting the appetites that have become our masters, creating space for a deeper hunger, learning that we can survive, even thrive, on bread that the world doesn't recognise.

When we practice sabbath, we're not checking a religious requirement off the list. We're declaring our independence from the tyranny of productivity, affirming that our worth is not in what we produce, remembering that the world turns just fine without our constant intervention.

Each discipline is an act of intentional positioning, a way of saying with our bodies, our time, our resources: I want to become the kind of person who looks like Jesus.

Community as crucible

And here's what our individualistic age forgets: you cannot become like Jesus alone. The vision of spiritual formation as a solo journey, just you and Jesus figuring it out together, is a modern invention: and a dangerous one.

We need each other. We need others to tell us the truth about ourselves that we're too blind or too afraid to see. We need others to hold hope for us when ours runs dry. We need others to call us back when we wander, to celebrate when we grow, and to weep with us when we fail. We need the friction of other personalities, other perspectives, other struggles to sand off our rough edges and reveal the image of Christ being formed beneath.

The early church understood this. They didn't gather occasionally when convenient. They shared meals, resources, and lives. They practiced forgiveness in real-time, worked through conflicts, and carried each other's burdens. They knew that becoming like Jesus meant learning to love actual people, difficult, annoying, complicated people, not theoretical ideals.

This is where intentionality becomes costly. It's one thing to commit to personal spiritual practices in the privacy of your own schedule. It's quite another to commit to showing up for community even when it's messy, even when it's uncomfortable, even when you'd rather stay home and avoid the complications of actual human relationships.

But there is no other way. The Jesus we're called to become is the Jesus who gave himself for others, who laid down his life for his friends, who created a new family bound not by blood but by the scandalous claim that anyone who does the will of his Father is his brother, sister, or mother.

The long obedience in the same direction

Eugene Peterson popularised that phrase for us from Nietchze’s writing, and it captures something essential about the nature of Christian formation: this is not a sprint but a pilgrimage. Not a moment of decision but a lifetime of decisions. Not a single dramatic transformation but a thousand small surrenders accumulating over years into a life that bears some family resemblance to Jesus.

The intentionality required is the repeated way of faithfulness. Of returning to the practices even when they feel dry. Of choosing love even when we don't feel loving. Of extending forgiveness even when the wound is fresh. Of seeking justice even when the cost is high. Of speaking truth even when silence would be easier. Of trusting even when evidence is scarce.

This is the work of a lifetime, and there are no shortcuts. There is no technique or program or conference that can bypass the slow, patient, often frustrating work of being transformed from one degree of glory to another. The vision is clear: become like Jesus, but the path is long, and it will take us through territory we'd often rather avoid.

The grace that carries us

And here is where the gospel shines brightest… this work we cannot do is being done in us and for us and through us by a grace that never grows weary. The Spirit who hovered over the waters at creation is hovering over the chaos of our lives, bringing order, beauty, and life. The Jesus who began a good work in us is faithful to complete it. The Abba who knows our frame, who remembers we are dust, who sees the whole trajectory of our becoming, is relentlessly, tenderly, fiercely committed to our transformation.

Our intentionality is always and only a response to a prior intention: God's intention to make us whole, to restore the image marred by sin, to bring us fully into the family, to prepare us for an eternity of face-to-face friendship with the One who made us for himself.

So we choose. We show up. We practice. We fail and begin again. We let others speak truth to us. We extend grace to ourselves as we've received it. We fix our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith, and we take the next step.

Because you cannot drift into becoming like Jesus. But by his grace, surrendered to his transforming love, practiced in his presence, held by his community, we can become… slowly, certainly, beautifully… the people he has always been calling us to be.