Soul Keeping: Caring For the Most Important Part of You

by John Ortberg

The Soul Experiment. It’s a simple way of focusing my soul on God throughout the day. I begin each day by challenging myself: How many moments of my life today can I fill with conscious awareness of and surrender to God’s presence? Then I try to deliberately imagine myself doing that at home, at work, in my car, when I’m online, when I’m watching the news, when I’m with others. Can I do the “with God” life all the time? I’ve been trying to make this the goal of my day as opposed to a list of things I have to get done. Can I just keep God in my mind today, regardless of what I’m doing? Here’s a little picture of how it works for me. One day I had a meeting with my staff that lasted about an hour and a half. When it was over, I realized I had failed for an hour and a half at this experiment. I had not thought about or listened for God a single time in that hour and a half — and I work at a church. Then I had to drive somewhere, and I was grousing in my spirit because I felt like I had too much to do and not enough time to get it done. Do you ever have that kind of thought? I was feeling hurried, impatient, and ill-tempered. Then this thought came to me: “John, let’s look at the next two hours. You will go through those two hours of your life with me or without me. You can continue doing life without me and feel stressed, pressured, angry, sorry for yourself, impatient, and be a pain in the neck to the people around you. You can do those two hours that way. Or you can do thos...