I wanted to share something that we talked about at Weight Watchers today. The topic was change and the stages of change. The leader was talking about that change begins with pre-contemplation, goes to contemplation, discovering information, taking action and finally maintenance. The idea was that each of us when facing change begins even before we know what it is that we need to change. Once we become aware we spend time thinking about what it is that we need to change in our lives. From there we explore how we are going to go about that change. We need to take action for changing something means we have to change something. The last step is determining what we want to keep doing. The leader was focusing on our weight loss journey.

What struck me was that we could use the same process talking about our spiritual journey. The pre-contemplation stage would be similar to what Wesley stated was God's previenent grace. God's grace is extended to us even before we are aware of that grace. Over time we become aware of our sinful nature and we begin to work on understanding what it is that we need to do to restore our relationship with God. This leads to a conviction of our spiritual life and finally to repentance. That would correspond to the contemplation stage and some to the discovery stage. We then have to ask for forgiveness by taking action through confession which can occur privately between us and God. When we do that, God grants us justifying grace and forgives our sins. That is the action stage. Because of that grace we become transformed and seek to continue to grow into our relationship with God. That is sanctifying grace or the maintenance stage. What was interesting we also talked about relapse. Rather than seeing it as an all or nothing part of our journey, we can look at that as the need to see what stage we are at and begin to focus on that. Our spiritual life is like that. When we fall, we need to focus on the stage of repentance and to ask for forgiveness. At that point we can continue our journey to perfection.

I find it interesting how God can use so many opportunities to remind me of His grace even at a Weight Watchers meeting.