Rhythm and Spontaneity

This is one of several attempts at describing discipleship for a friend of mine.  The challenge- to stay around three hundred words.  Epic fail.  I probably wrote 15 pages, writing and rewriting to say what I mean.  This was one of the lost attempts, but still good.  Takes a slightly more pragmatic approach, which I hope to dig into later.
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Hebrew discipleship prescribed learning through imitation. While actions were instructed and theology taught, the intended transference was something much less tangible: relationship, which the instruction of words and the modification of behavior could never truly achieve. Thus, Jesus's discipleship of the twelve did not focus on orthodoxy, nor orthopraxy, but on a learning of discipline and attentiveness, of the rhythm and spontaneity of loving God and loving man, which produced right belief and behavior as its wake.

It was not behavior nor belief which brought us into the kingdom, but His initiation. It is in and by the presence of God that we are still changed into the image of Christ. This is why the relationship into which Jesus enters, that which He commissions to establish and expand the church, is discipleship. It is a yoking, a learning to walk together that teaches us to abide in love.

In reading Numbers recently, the contrast between the first eight chapters and the ninth surprised me. The first section delineates feasts and protocol. The relationship of the Israelite to the Lord is defined exclusively by disciplines, rhythms. Yet in nine the Lord instructs them to camp and move whenever the cloud moves. Suddenly their previously ordered lives hinge upon the unpredictable movement of God. They are forced into attentiveness, spontaneity.

Every relationship exists between these poles. Our friends are those with whom we have regular rhythms of interaction, yet without attentive spontaneity any relationship falls stagnant, becoming duty instead of love.

It is helpful, for me, in discipleship, to think less about what the student needs to believe or do, and more about how I engage in relationship with the Lord, and to invite them there. In this way I begin to lead them, not in correcting thoughts and behaviors (that will happen along the way), but instead in submitting to and listening for the Lord, as He calls me in rhythm and spontaneity.

What are the rhythms and spontaneities in which you follow the Lord?  How can you share them with others?  This is the beginning of discipleship.