About My On-Going Pilgrmage

   

When I was a young man, I somehow knew that God remained faithful to me, even during the seasons when I was not faithful to the person He created me to be. Deep within me was the quiet conviction that one day He would redeem every joy, every failure, every question, and every mile of the journey, granting me a voice that could speak with honesty, compassion, and truth. Looking back now, I believe that voice was not something I found.  It was something God patiently formed within me.

 The voice I have become aware of, and now consider myself a steward of, did not emerge from an ivory tower. It was not formed behind a pulpit, a title, or a position of influence. It was forged in the ordinary and extraordinary experiences of life: earning a living, loving a family, succeeding, failing, making more than my share of mistakes, and discovering that forgiveness and grace are almost always the higher road, even when my natural instincts wanted to fight another battle. If my voice has any wisdom, it has been earned through hard knocks, refined by honest self-examination, and, by the goodness of God, covered from beginning to end by grace.

My voice has been shaped by living.

By success and failure.

By joy and grief.

By asking questions that refused easy answers.

By walking through valleys where faith became less about certainty and more about trust.

Looking back over seventy-three years, I realize that is exactly what happened.

I have spent my life paying attention - more than most, but not as well as I do now, until the last three years.  

 Paying attention to Scripture, not merely reading its words, but allowing its words to read me. There comes a moment when Scripture is no longer simply a collection of stories or doctrines, but a living river of truth and love. When I stop trying to master it and quietly surrender to its current, something begins to awaken within me. What once seemed hidden becomes clear, not because I have discovered God, but because, in love, God has gently revealed Himself to me.

Paying attention to Scripture has also taught me to see God's story from its first breath in Genesis to its glorious fulfillment in Revelation, not the end of God, for God has no end, but the redemption of history and the sanctification of His people. Along the way, I have come to realize something the Church has too often forgotten: the New Testament calls those who belong to Christ saints. Not because we are without sin, but because the life we are given is sacred. I am one of those saints. And if you belong to Christ, so are you - because Jesus came to show us what it means to be human as God created us to be.  

I've been paying attention... 

Paying attention to psychology and neuroscience because they help explain why we become who we become.

Paying attention to philosophy because every generation wrestles with the same questions in a different language.

Paying attention to history because human nature changes far less than we imagine.

Paying attention to great literature because the finest stories are never really about stories. They are about the human soul.

Most of all, I have tried to pay attention to the quiet voice of God that so often speaks beneath the relentless noise of the world. My greatest challenge has never been hearing God, but surrendering myself enough to become still. Ironically, the more I surrender, the more I seem to notice. The world has not become quieter; my soul has simply learned to listen.

I have also discovered that an open mind is not a mind without convictions. It is a mind that has learned the discipline of paying attention. Left to itself, the mind is a relentless chatterbox, endlessly producing judgments, gossip, fears, assumptions, illusions, and, at times, even delusions. But when the mind is gently trained to become still, it begins to awaken to something deeper than thought. It awakens to the spirit, to the soul God is forming within us, and through that surrendered soul, to the living presence of the Christ Spirit.

Perhaps that is why contemplation has become so important to me. It is not the absence of thought, nor an escape from reality. It is the quiet practice of allowing truth and love to become louder than the constant noise of the ego. In that stillness, we do not lose ourselves; we slowly discover the person God created us to be.

An open heart is not a heart without boundaries.

An open soul is simply a soul that has learned to tell itself the truth.

It recognizes its own blindness before pointing out the blindness of another. More often than not, the places where I am tempted to judge someone else become invitations to examine my own heart first.

And when I do see another person's struggles, I have learned that love does not begin by trying to fit them into the narrow corridors of my expectations. Love creates space. It trusts that God is already at work within them, just as He is within me. Truth remains essential, but truth divorced from love becomes control, while love without truth loses its way. Together, they become an invitation rather than a demand.

That realization has quietly changed the way I see people.

I no longer feel responsible for making someone conform to my expectations, because I am learning not to live by those expectations myself. Instead, I hope to encourage people to become the unique person God created them to be. That is a very different way of loving.

Perhaps that also explains why some people find me unconventional.  I ask questions more often than I give answers. I am less interested in fixing people than in understanding them. Transformation, after all, cannot be imposed from the outside; it grows from within as truth and love awaken the soul.

The older I become, the more I believe every meaningful relationship is an ongoing conversation. Not a debate to be won, nor a project to be managed, but a shared pilgrimage where two souls help one another see more clearly, love more deeply, and become more fully themselves in God.

What I have learned about a transformed soul is interesting.  

 It knows its own failures.  It knows reality.  It has a good mirror.  

It remembers its own need for grace.

It understands that humility is not thinking less of yourself; it is seeing yourself honestly.

One phrase has become increasingly important to me over the past year:

Two things can be true at the same time.

Justice and mercy.

Truth and compassion.

Strength and gentleness.

Confidence and humility.

Faith and questions.

The older I become, the more I realize that maturity is often learning to live within that tension rather than rushing to resolve it.  Good music on a piano or violin is a string stretched to the right tone.  

For more than twenty-five years, I have devoted myself to the Beatitudes of Jesus.

Not merely to understand them intellectually, but to surrender to them, in essence, to experience the spiral of life through them.  

I have come to believe they are not simply teachings.

They are the architecture of reality.

They describe what the human soul becomes when it is slowly transformed by the Spirit of God.

That transformation has never made me sinless.

It has made me more aware of my need for grace.

A good heart is not a perfect heart.

It is a surrendered heart.

A heart committed to both truth and love, knowing that either one without the other eventually becomes distorted.

At seventy-three, I am still learning.

One of life's great gifts has been the opportunity to move comfortably among people from every walk of life. I have sat with executives whose decisions affected thousands of employees, and I have sat beside people who wondered how they would pay next month's rent.

Both have taught me.

Both have carried burdens.

Both have searched for meaning.

Perhaps that is why I have never felt entirely at home in any tribe.

I am grateful for each one, but I belong to none of them completely.

My loyalty has always been to the pursuit of truth wherever it leads, and to love wherever it is found.

Each of my books represents a milestone along that pilgrimage.

The Beatitude Code became my signature work because it dared to ask what would happen if we actually believed Jesus meant what He said. It is deeply personal because it tells the story of my own failures and discoveries as much as it explores the Beatitudes themselves. I did not write it to defend a theology. I wrote it to invite people into a different way of living.

The Fifth Silence grew out of another conviction—that our culture has become so saturated with noise that many people no longer know how to hear their own souls. Contemplation is not an escape from reality. It is a deeper surrender to it. It quiets the mind, settles the body, and opens the spirit to the presence of God.

Then came Soulprint, where I discovered how beautifully the Enneagram illuminates both our gifts and our illusions. It became a way of helping people recognize the ego's patterns while pointing them back toward the transforming rhythm of the Beatitudes. Unsurprisingly, that journey ended once again in contemplation.

Out of those years of writing, teaching, counseling, and living grew what I now call The Soulprint Code.

It is not another religious system.

It is not another self-improvement program.

It is an ecosystem of transformation.

It is a way of seeing life that welcomes people wherever they are while continually inviting them toward who they were created to become.

Because transformation has always been God's idea before it was ours.

An acorn was never meant to remain an acorn.

It carries within itself the possibility of becoming an oak.

Likewise, every human being bears the image of God, not merely as a theological statement but as a living invitation. We were created to grow, to create, to love, and to become.

That conviction led me to write The Soulprint Trilogy.

The Hidden Scripture of the Dawns explores the eight awakenings of the soul, weaving together the Beatitudes, the rhythms of Creation, and the mystery of the Eighth Day, the resurrection life where everything begins again.

The Serpent and the Mirror journeys into the difficult work of self-confrontation. We cannot become who God created us to be until we are willing to see ourselves as we truly are. The mirror tells the truth. The serpent whispers another story. Every life is shaped by the voice we choose to follow.

Finally, Your Secret Name is a book of hope.

Throughout Scripture, God often gave people new names—not because He changed His mind about them, but because they finally became who He had always seen them to be.

I believe something similar happens in every life surrendered to God.

We discover our true name.

Our true self.

Our Soulprint.

That journey takes a lifetime.

There are no shortcuts.

No formulas.

No two pilgrimages are identical.

Perhaps that is why I have become cautious whenever religion becomes more interested in uniformity than transformation. God has always called people along different paths toward the same destination: love.

As I continue writing, I suspect I will always return to these same themes.

Truth.

Love.

Grace.

Transformation.

Contemplation.

The Beatitudes.

The soul becomes fully alive in Christ.

Everything I have written is simply another attempt to understand what it means to become more fully human and, in becoming more fully human, more fully alive in God.

The older I become, the less interested I am in winning arguments.

I would rather awaken souls.

If my books accomplish anything, I hope they encourage you to pay closer attention to your own life, your own story, your own questions, your own wounds, and the quiet voice of God already speaking within them.

Because I have come to believe that God's greatest work is not merely changing our circumstances.

It is changing us.

And that journey is the adventure of a lifetime.

Grace and peace,

J. Steve Bruner