Your Annual Examination
How reflecting can help you experience transformation!
It’s the time of year where I take the time to review my past year. I do this by reflecting with “The Great Annual Examen.” It’s a tool where you can look back, look within and look up. The Great Annual Examen offers you a series of questions that help you reflect upon five areas of your life. It’s like an excavation to explore your inner world and your inner ruts you may have fallen into this past year.
Another year is almost over and it’s possible, if not likely that something in you needs some attention and some adjustment. This past year is a window of time to look back on to see how you’re doing: relationally, emotionally, vocationally, physically and spiritually. These five major areas compose the human soul. By looking at each area, through some probing questions, we can gain insight about how we’re actually doing!
Let’s face it, there are ruts in the road that all of us can get stuck in and lose our momentum, balance and perspective. It’s been a challenging year, again. Life may have not turned out for you how you thought it would. It happens to all of us. That’s why there is such power in taking the time to look back and evaluate how you’ve been doing. When we reflect back by looking in, we can learn the truth—and the truth sets us free.
How have you been doing?
First, just sit with this question: How has this past year really been for you?
Questions help to peel pack the layers in our busy lives. A good question can be like a knife that peels away the outer, calcified layers around our hearts and allows us to pay attention to our inner life. Our busy lives, can cover up the source of life, itself within us. That’s precisely why we need to pause; to reflect and to explore good questions that help us evaluate how we’re really doing.
Asking people to pay attention to their inner life is what I see Jesus doing best. His stellar questions caught people off guard when they were so preoccupied with survival, doing “it” right and making the ends meet in their day-to-day lives.
For Jesus, life was so much more than survival. He knew that real life begins on the inside and that if we could tap the sheer power of our inner desires, then the fruit would be change and transformation. Tapping into desire is tapping into the power of the Spirit.
Without being called to look inside, we will remain creatures of habit—doing just what we need to get by. We may attend church. Do our work. Take care of our families and all the while feel numb inside to an inner current alive in our hearts that invites us to something “more.”
Recently, I led twelve leaders in a global ministry and asked them to do The Great Annual Examen with me. I gave them the directions and I allotted the time in our day retreat to begin this work. I gave them two hours to begin to just slowly sit with the questions and to begin writing out their responses.
When I called them back together to process how this went, the collective response that I heard was this: “Steve, this was hard. I don’t like to take the time to reflect.” I heard this from several people and felt the vibe in the room shift as they echoed their shared experiences. Busyness tends to numb us out. And then there is this: Often, we don’t want to really know how we’re doing—so we just keep our lives filled with noise and events to distract us. In short, we use religion to do this. But Jesus didn’t offer people a religion. He offered a new way to live altogether.
We don’t like to reflect. But why is this?
I’ve come to the realization that the answer is very simple. When many of us reflect, we come face to face with the news that we’d rather stay busy than look inside. We’re rather do almost anything than to take the time to see how our soul is really doing. I get it. I really do.
When I start answering the questions about my physical life—my health and well being, I feel my own anxiety rise up within me. I’ll have to face my weight—again and realize that I did not lose the weight I intended this past year. I’ll have to face other things as well as I focus in each aspect of my soul.
But as I try to be gentle with myself in these excavating questions, I also realize that I unearth deep desires within me. Like this: “I really do want to be healthy.” “I want health—I really do.” Any real change begins with discovering what you really want. There is no other way to be transformed than by taking this important step: What do you want?
The questions, tap into the deep soul reservoir within us that contain our deep desires. It’s these inner desires that Jesus seemed to always be concerned about. He always seemed to be asking people to look inside. He often asked people “What do you want?”
Reflecting helps us uncover the layers we’ve shoveled onto our over crowded and busy lives. We cover up our inner lives by our events, meetings, parties and on and on. By reflecting, we discover that we are not the living dead after all and that we all have deep desires within us that are active and dormant at the same time. By sitting quiet for a few minutes and focusing on a few aspects of our lives, we get in touch with something we put on auto-pilot.
Here’s the challenge: the soul cannot be put on auto-pilot. Our souls need constant attention and consideration.
I’ve noticed, over the years, that even though people attend a retreat, finish a program or read a book on the value of caring for the soul---that after a while, life takes over and we put our own souls—our own lives on a shelf—as if we will get to “it” later. But here’s the thing, caring for the soul is counter-cultural. And for many of us soul care is counter-intuitive.
Many of us find ourselves almost deaf to hearing the permission to take care of ourselves—because we are so busy and so well trained and educated to take care of so many others.
But we cannot give, what we do not have! It’s that simple and it’s that alarming.
By waking up to how we are really doing, we can begin to live with the end in mind and live with what’s most important in our hearts. This is the beginning and this call to reflect on these questions is how we begin this awakening. It’s how we begin to give attention to what really matters in our lives. When we coast through life, we run the dange of running our lives on empty. We can burn out. We can accept that the tired life is the abundant life. We can live in the shallows without experiencing the depth of a life intended for us by the Creator.
As you enter the season of Advent and Christmas and especially as we anticipate the New Year, do yourself a “favor” and just take the time to reflect on five areas of your soul and how you’re doing. Tap into the reservoir of your desire and find out what you really are wanting at this particular stage and phase of your life.
Remember these words: “Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.” (Proverbs 4:23)
Above all else…
Read that again would you? Above all else… It’s like that annoying smoke detector going off in your house of office because the battery needs changing. That blasted chirping sound…. That means you have to get the ladder; change the battery and then go back to your life. Proverbs is considered to be a “book of wisdom” containing the wisest collection of truths and proverbs for us. The writer says it plainly: “Above all else… guard your heart.” We guard our heart by first, knowing our heart. Our hearts contain the depth of longing, desire and passion. So it only makes perfect sense to “guard” what matters most. To guard then is to notice, be aware and be prepared to take action.
In soul care, the chirp means, this life—the one you are living right now and here, really is the ONLY life you and I are given.
Pay attention to it.
You are worth it!
The Great Annual Examen is available in two formats. First, it’s available for you to get and download as an individual. Second, there is a licensed version where you are given permission to make as many copies as yo want and need. Get the one that fits you and your need.