Chapter 8, The Discipline of Submission: Make a list of opportunities you have in the course of daily living to give up your own rights for the good of others, and choose one opportunity on which to act this week. Afterward, reflect on how this practice of submission helped free you from the need or desire to have things go the way you want.

Chapter 9, The Discipline of Service: Look for an opportunity to bear another's burdens this week—for example, help . . . a child who is experiencing some personal disappointment . . . a friend or loved one whose anxieties could be lightened by your attentive care . . . a lonely person who needs a visit . . . someone who could use a helping hand.

Chapter 10, The Discipline of Confession: Be alert to needs or opportunities to practice the Discipline of confession (whether giving or receiving) without forcing them into expression. In the Corporate Disciplines it is especially important to draw on relationships with others—a spiritual mentor, a fellowship group, close friends, and so on—since these Disciplines cannot be practiced in isolation from other people.

Chapter 11, The Discipline of Worship: If you are dissatisfied with your participation in corporate worship at this point in your life, choose a trusted friend or mentor who will listen to your concerns and reflect back to you any helpful comments or questions which will direct you toward appropriate paths for growth in this area.

Chapter 12, The Discipline of Guidance: Think of someone with whom you might want to develop an ongoing relationship of mutual spiritual direction. Take him or her out to lunch to get better acquainted.

Chapter 13, The Discipline of Celebration: Pick one creative activity to do with family or friends: throw a party for any reason—or for no reason; play a game, indoors or outdoors, playact an event or satirize your usual routine and patterns; and so on.

GOING DEEPER

What more is there to say about Celebration of Discipline than to quote from its foreword by D. Elton Trueblood:

There are many books concerned with the inner life, but there are not many that combine real originality with intellectual integrity. Yet it is exactly this combination that Richard Foster has been able to produce. . . . The greatest problems of our time are not technological . . . not even political or economic . . . The greatest problems are moral and spiritual. It is for this reason that I welcome a really mature work on the cultivation of the life of the spirit.

Written twenty years ago, Trueblood's prophetic words point toward the deeper morass our world finds itself in today, and he recommends a solution— cultivating the life of the spirit by practicing the Spiritual Disciplines. For the sake of our own souls and those around us, we must heed his counsel.

Two different approaches are used in the two companions to Celebration of Discipline. Richard J. Foster's Study Guide for Celebration of Discipline provides a series of brief, incisive essays that expand the discussion, focus and clarify key issues, and encourage a fuller understanding and practice of the Spiritual Disciplines. Each essay is followed by Scripture