Developing a Rule of Life

This week, as we all think about what it means to develop a "rule of life," I've gathered some resources that might be helpful in the process:

The Society of St. John the Evangelist offers a short workbook in pdf format called Living Intentionally: A Workbook for Creating a Personal Rule of Life.  The workbook includes some suggestions for how to approach the development of a personal rule of life, as well as questions (with blank space for writing answers) to help a person walk through the process of thoughtfully developing such a rule.

The C.S. Lewis Institute also offers a guide called Instructions for Developing a Personal Rule of Life. This guide offers some thoughts and suggestions, such as:

Ultimately a Rule should help you to love God more, so if it becomes a legalistic way of earning points with God or impressing others, it should be scrapped. If the traditional, ancient term “rule” concerns you because it sounds legalistic, think of “rule” as a “rhythm of life” or as a “Curriculum in Christlikeness” (Dallas Willard), or as a “Game Plan for Morphing” (John Ortberg).

 ...and then leads the reader through some guiding questions for developing a personal rule of life.

Finally Crafting a Rule of Life is an entire website devoted to helping individuals to develop their own rule of life, based on the book of the same name by Stephen A. Macchia. Particularly, their myRULE page includes resources for writing a personal rule with a downloadable pdf table AND examples of "rules" written by others. Of note, there is a Visual Rule of Life example (see Lisa Forkner's Visual Rule of Life 2014). Another rule is written as a "Recipe for Daily Bread" (see Leslea Linebarger's Rule of Life 2013). Nearly all of the examples have some sort of visual representation - wheels, flow charts, photographs, etc. Lots of creative inspiration there!