Spiritual House Cleaning

by Keith Miller | Christian Living, Weekly Devotional

Keith, I’m not a pious person and have never liked doing things that sound like they will look more “religious.”  But I was fascinated to hear that God wants to transform me into the person God designed me to be.  Can you suggest an approach to spiritual transformation that has its feet on the ground?

Great question.  In my case, before I could begin a serious journey toward the radical transformation that they said would follow the daily disciplines of living a new life, I needed to clear my path of the pitfalls and snarling vines growing out of the past that kept tripping me up, and also to inventory the assets and gifts I had.

When Jesus said specifically to “worry about the beam in your own eye,” (Mt. 7:4-5) I think he was referring to whatever is in my life that prevents (or hinders) God from working within me to transform me.  For me these blocks seem to come from the virtually universal tendency to put ourselves in the center where only God should be, which is Sin (with a capital “S”).  And in my case, all the other “sins” (lower case “s”) stem from that one act.  And these dishonest, petty or terribly destructive habits or controlling acts in relationships are what block God’s transforming work in me.

I needed to see clearly what was in my life now (and in my past history) so that I would have nothing mysterious (denied) to hide that could jump up and scare me; because by this time I knew that my Sin would use anything that “pushes my buttons” to threaten me with: the specter of failure, fears, guilt, shame, rejection, and spiritual death.  For me it was crucial to make as clean a beginning as possible if I hoped to stay close to God.

So I was helped to begin by confessing what I could see of how I have hurt others.  I learned that when I began to think about these things, the natural response was to feel sadness and/or guilt about what I had done.  But as I kept focusing on the damage my controlling and self-defeating behavior had caused, the resulting sadness began to produce the motivation to turn away from a particular sin and confess it to God, asking for his power and help not to repeat the harmful behavior.  So I had to confess not only the act of putting myself in the center where only God belongs (Sin with a capital “S”) but also make explicit (in detail) as many of the shadowy deeds and thoughts as I could see at the time.  I was told to make a list of all people my behavior had injured. This act of confession of what I could see brought a number of hidden sins and unconscious self-centeredness and habits out of my unconscious and into my memory and helped expel them and their destructive power from my heart.

I had to find a small group of men on this spiritual journey to find the courage to even see much less confess before another person.  But I discovered that was evidently normative behavior for the early Christians (e.g. “Make this your common practice.  Pray together and confess your sins to each other so you can live together whole and healed.”  James 5:16, The Message).

Over the years as I confessed to God all the specific sinful acts I could recall, the past felt clean and not as painful.  I began to realize (and it took a number of years and different groups and mentors) that I am forgiven.  I could embrace the gift of a new chance at life.  It is as if God has erased the black board on which the sins I had confessed had been listed and handed over a piece of chalk and said, “Here, you can write a new chapter for your life.”  The peace, joy and motivation to live for God that come from these actions is incredible to me: one’s spiritual life can come alive!  But it has not felt like I was getting more religious, but rather more caring and sensitive—and real somehow—than I had ever been both to God and to the other people in my life.  And in looking back, I realize that the transforming work of God had begun to occur in my life.

In addition to the gift of a new life, God has given me the security of his love and forgiveness.  As a forgiven person, I don’t need to hide my Sin from God.  On the contrary, I can afford—and want to see even farther—even behind walls of delusion and denial—and begin to have a clearer and deeper view of the harmful behaviors and attitudes that have been brought on by Sin.  Then I pray sincerely for God to remove them.  I never thought I could do that.  Most of the things I’ve discovered about my selfish attitudes and behaviors were not even conscious to me when I began.

But how do we do this specific housecleaning today when everyone seems to be embarrassed by the idea of confession and horrified at the prospect of revealing anything that might make them look inadequate or sinful?  The saints have given us an answer to this dilemma regarding the exhuming of our buried sins—as a bathing and cleansing of the infectious self-destructive material.  But this course of action is so terrifying that many of us in contemporary religious denominations have discarded it as too severe a remedy—“exaggerated” by the writers of the past to pressure their disciples.  But this very attitude of thinking that they exaggerating their “righteousness” was an example of my projecting my own Sin of pretending to be better than I am.  And this hiding my own Sin by doubting the saints’ sincerity  is just another universal habit that is part of my Sin that has kept me from growing and finding the freedom and courage to receive and give love.

This is one way it works: we begin cleaning out the debris of the past by making a thorough examination of our own lives and bringing what we find out into the light (see 1 John 1:5-9).  We face these character defects and moral transgressions as thoroughly and honestly as we can—and go back and make things right where possible. (See Matthew 5:23)

And we also need to include the positive character traits and abilities that God has given us along with our list of sins.  Because these are some of the assets through which he will work to transform us into the people he designed us to be.

When we seriously commit our lives to God, it’s as if we are agreeing to transfer to him all the assets and liabilities of a business we own.  If we were doing that, we would take an inventory of the damaged goods and the valuable assets that are stored in the warehouse of the past.  And to transfer to God these things we must make the inventory very specific.

For instance, for years I would, on occasion, do something helpful for someone that might cost a significant amount of money or time.  I would tell myself (and sometimes the one “helped”) that I didn’t expect anything in return.  But if the person I’d helped did not express what I considered to be “reasonable” gratitude, I resented him or her—a lot.  I finally realized that my real motive was not just to be loving, but that giving of my help had been sort of an “investment” for which I expected a dividend: to feel like and look like a good  Christian.  My dishonesty about my expectations also set me up to resent people I wanted to help.  So my failure to clean my own house made me into a “generous” Pharisee.

This may sound bizarre to you.  It did to me for years.  But I was fortunate enough to get caught in a serious moral failure and that destroyed and/or almost destroyed my deepest relationships.  I hope you won’t have to do that to find the life, love and settledness about who you are and what you’re “designed” to do and be in your life.  Thanks for asking that question.  It made me feel closer to you, and my prayers come with this for this new chapter in your adventure with God.[1]

Lord, thank you that you forgive us our Sins, especially when we can become aware of them and confess them to you.  Help us to allow you to transform us into the people you designed us to be.  And Thank you for such an incredible opportunity.  In Jesus name, amen.

“This is how I want you to conduct yourself in these matters. If you enter your place of worship and, about to make an offering, you suddenly remember a grudge a friend has against you, abandon your offering, leave immediately, go to this friend and make things right. Then and only then, come back and work things out with God.” (Matt. 5:  23-24) (In other words this kind of honesty takes precedence for Jesus even over public worship.)

“If we claim that we’re free of sin, we’re only fooling ourselves.  A claim like that is errant nonsense.  On the other hand, if we admit our sins—make a clean breast of them—he won’t let us down; he’ll be true to himself.  He’ll forgive our sins and purge us of all wrongdoing.  If we claim that we’ve never sinned, we out-and-out contradict God—make a liar out of him.  A claim like that only shows off our ignorance of God.”

1 John 1: 8-10 The Message

Angry All the Time

by Keith Miller | Christian Living, Weekly Devotional

Keith, in a group sometime ago I heard you say something about anger, and it got me thinking about my situation.  I have a problem with being angry a lot.  About the only feeling my father ever expressed was anger—he thought that real men get angry; other emotions were for women and wimps.  We’ve become Christians and my wife is all over me trying to get me to express more love to our sons.  But that makes me angry too, and yet down inside I hated it when my father was angry with me and was afraid of him.  I really would like to quit feeling so angry, but it always seems like my anger is justified by things people do or say.  Any magic bullets?

No magic bullets, but it’s a great question.

Most of my life it was not okay with the people around me if I’d get angry.  So I pushed a lot of my anger out of sight and said, “No, I’m not mad,” even when I was seething inside.  But it was like pushing a beach ball under water.  The farther down I pushed it, the greater the explosion when it suddenly surfaced—often about something someone said or did that was far too insignificant for the anger explosion.

I got on a spiritual journey with a group of men in which we make an effort  to be honest with each other in order to grow spiritually.  One of my mentors in the group told me that he’d discovered that explosive anger was really the other side of a fear.  He suggested that I might ask myself “What am I afraid of?” when I get angry.

So the next time my wife gave me some suggestion that I interpreted as “being criticized” I started to get very angry.  But I remembered what my mentor had said and asked myself, “What are you afraid of losing Keith, or not getting, or feeling.”  And the answer to those questions was pretty clear.  I was afraid I’d look like a weakling to my wife (as my father appeared to me to be when my mother criticized him in front of his sons).  Other times I was angry because I was afraid my wife’s criticism was a veiled warning that she didn’t respect me as I am or might not want to make love to me.

In fact over a period of time I realized that most of my anger was because I was afraid what someone did or said that “made me angry” would make me lose something I didn’t want to do without, like respect, reputation, money or love—or the fear beneath my anger (at something someone did or said) was the fear that I wouldn’t get something I wanted very much to have (like a promotion at work or to be elected to an office in an organization).  I began to see my anger is often about my own fears that I am not enough (of a man, a father, a husband, a lover, a valued worker, or friend) or that I’m not a fair, generous and/or caring person.  (Of course that attitude made me a little more difficult to live with.)

My question then was, “How can I overcome the fear feelings of imaginary loss and shame that trigger my anger at people who say or do things I think might hurt my reputation as an intimate, unselfish and caring man?  I’ve discovered that my outbursts of anger only work to make me look precisely like the selfish, uncaring and week defensive person I do not want to be seen as.

In our group I learned the biblical truth that we could begin to get over our fears of inadequacy by confessing our attempts to control other people’s opinion by being angry, shaming the one trying to straighten us out, etc.  The writer of the book of James advises new Christians to “confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you can live together whole and healed.” (James 5:16, The Message).   And sure enough, by confessing to my small group my petty angry responses that shame or put down people who trigger my anger/fear, I began to be able to hold my tongue and listen to criticism aimed at me.  This has a wonderful effect in our home (when I finally really wanted to know what I was doing that hurt my family members so I could quit hurting them.)[1]

I guess what God has been doing for me is showing me through the men who are on the same spiritual journey I’m on, is that when I could surrender my whole life to God, then I was on a search to discover and offer to God the very things I’d been hiding and was afraid I’d be rejected for feeling or thinking.

This didn’t happen overnight, and it is only a part of the way of living for God in all areas of our lives.  This is a journey I’m still on after more than forty years, and it has has already transformed my life and relationships more than I would have imagined—even though I’m still seeing new aspects of my self-centeredness and lack of concern for others.

But the bottom line discovery I’ve made with regard to the anger question you wrote about is that it is not the courage I was looking for to face the fear I’d hidden from, courage that would cause the fears to be defeated.  I learned that when I began to pay attention and care about other people who were struggling with problems in their lives and relationships—when I cared about them that way—I was actually loving them.  I never would have guessed that when I was actually loving that way I would not be afraid.  Jesus said it this way:  “You’re blessed when you care. At the moment of being ‘care-full,’ you find yourselves cared for.” (Mt. 5: 7, The Message)

I know this may sound naïve or simplistic, but I don’t care how it sounds, because the honest truth is that this way of life some of us are trying to live is actually giving self-centered fearful and even angry people like me a whole new way to live and love, and let God and other people love us as we seriously buy into the process of living to help other people.  And although I am still just beginning to learn the power of God’s way of loving to make angry fearful cowards into caring and happy and helpful people, I can say to you from one who is only a work in progress that Jesus was really on target regarding the anger-fear problem when he said that it is “perfect love—not courage—that casts out fear.”

Lord, help us to put our lives in your hands—seriously to trust you to lead us into the courage and willingness that can transform us into the courageous lovers we—and people everywhere—are longing to be—beneath the anger that is driving us apart.  Amen

When Prayer Feels Like ‘Talking To Myself’

by Keith Miller | Christian Living, Weekly Devotional

Sometimes when I’m praying my rational mind jumps in and says, “Do you suppose anybody is really listening?”  Or I simply wonder if I’m talking to myself.  That often makes me want to stop praying until I feel clear about God’s presence.  But then I feel bad because I’m not praying regularly.  It’s a vicious cycle that seems to engulf me at times.  Does this ever happen to you?  And if so, what do you do to get past it?

As I read your question, I thought of the dozens and dozens of times this has happened to me.  And when it does, I almost invariably feel as if I must be doing something wrong and need to “straighten out my life” so that I can get through to God better.

But I came to realize a long time ago that this experience of doubt in the midst of prayer is just part of the human condition.  Yet many people I’ve talked with have been taught that it means some hidden evil is in our lives—and of course that can be sometimes.  But when that occurs to me I just ask God to show me anything that is blocking my relationship with Him—or other people—and to help me face what ever comes up—and ask Him to help me deal with it.

I suppose Paul is right in implying that we all will see through a glass dimly as long as we are in our human bodies.  But it also makes me realize that there are a lot of notions about prayer that are simply not true and distract us and tempt us to withdraw or sit in judgment of the real rough and tumble struggles that are evidently parts of everyone’s experiences of trying to communicate with the living God.

This notion that if I am really in a good relationship to God I will always feel the warmth of His presence when I am praying to Him is, for me, a gross misconception and was certainly not Jesus’ experience (he “sweated blood” praying in Gethsemane).  I am always reminding new Christians that Jesus did not say to me, “I will give you goose bumps.”  Instead, he said, “I will be with you unto the end of the age.”  Goose bumps represent physiological feelings, not faith.  If we have the goose bumps, we don’t really need faith to believe God is with us.  Faith has to do with believing when there is no physical evidence that convinces the mind.  In other words, on those mornings when I get up and do not feel God’s presence, I now thank Him that He is with me even though I don’t have a lot of excited feelings.  I tell him I want to give Him back the only thing I really can give Him and that is the gift of faith for this day.  I tell Him that I am going to try to live as if I had enormous feelings of His presence.  This may sound like some sort of autosuggestion, but in fact it is simply behavior based on a belief in His word in the scriptures that He would be with us “day after day after day, right up to the end of the age.”  (Matthew 28: 20 The Message)

Another closely related misconception I have to fight my way through is that if I committed my life to God and gave my whole future to Him, then I would be happy and contented and would avoid the usual pains and agonies of life.  The assumption behind this kind of thinking is that suffering and pain are punishments for misbehavior or lack of commitment.  I’ve come to believe deeply that much of what we call suffering and pain are parts of the fabric of all living and can be important blessings.  And that what Christianity does, instead of eliminating these things, is to give them meaning.  As I confront the universal problems, doubts and heartaches of life, I find that they can bless me by teaching me how to love God and people better and make me more sensitive to my own needs to grow as I face pain the way our Lord did.  “You’re blessed when you’re at the end of your rope. With less of you there is more of God and his rule.”  Matthew 5:3 The Message

What’s happened to me in my prayer life is that instead of praying “Lord, take this anxiety and pain out of my life today,” I might pray (on my best days) something more like, “Lord, help me to understand why I’m anxious and to learn from this pain and agony I’m going through something about the meaning of life, and how to love people more nearly as you do.”  Then I am not so frightened about the anxiety that comes into my life.  It’s not that I don’t still have anxiety, but I don’t find so much fear about the experience of having it as I once did.  I realize now that difficulties, pain and frustration are always to be experienced somewhere in the life of people who are growing and developing, leaving old securities and trying to establish new ones.  I am more at home in the world and feel better when I come to God with these problems openly, rather than trying to get them all cleaned up before I come to Him in prayer.  And of course this means that I can come to Him anytime, since I know that He is not going to be disappointed in me for continuing to have problems that are a natural part of the fabric of living and particularly ‘growing’.

In my opinion God has not given us a “status” of perfection when we are filled with the Holy Spirit, but rather He has given us a process that allows spiritual growth and maturity to take place.  The process includes an awareness of sin or incompleteness, a struggle not to admit our own responsibility in the problem, a confession that in fact we have sinned, a turning to God and asking His forgiveness, and then a thanking Him that He builds His kingdom out of the broken pieces of our lives when we bring them to Him in prayer.  After this process there sometimes comes an understanding or a grasp of the sin in which we’ve been involved that can sometimes help me recognize sooner and avoid this sin.  As I see these kinds of insights age over the years in people’s lives, their ‘troubles’ may eventually be transmuted into what the Bible calls wisdom and understanding.  And as soon as one receives the forgiveness each time it is as if—in forgiving us—God has taken a damp cloth and wiped off the blackboard of our cortical slate so that our minds are clean and fresh.  Then He hands us a new piece of chalk to write the next chapter of our life on that day, that hour.  And the process repeats itself again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again . . . and again.

Lord, thank you that we can trust that you are with us whether we can “feel” your presence or not.  When experiences of doubt enter our minds, help us to remember your promise.  And Lord, as we encounter problems, pain, and struggles, help us to know that we can bring them to you so you can teach us what we need to know about our part in these problems.  In Jesus’ name, Amen.

“I’ll be with you as you do this, day after day after day, right up to the end of the age.”

Mt. 28:18b, The Message

“The fundamental fact of existence is that this trust in God, this faith, is the firm foundation under everything that makes life worth living. It’s our handle on what we can’t see. The act of faith is what distinguished our ancestors, set them above the crowd.”

Hebrews 11:1  The Message

“I truly delight in God’s commands, but it’s pretty obvious that not all of me joins in that delight. Parts of me covertly rebel, and just when I least expect it, they take charge… Is there no one who can do anything for me?…The answer, thank God, is that Jesus Christ can and does… With the arrival of Jesus, the Messiah, that fateful dilemma is resolved. Those who enter into Christ’s being-here-for-us no longer have to live under a continuous, low-lying black cloud. A new power is in operation. The Spirit of life in Christ, like a strong wind, has magnificently cleared the air, freeing you from a fated lifetime of brutal tyranny at the hands of sin and death.”

Romans 7:22 – 8:2  The Message

“It does sometimes happen that my prayers degenerate into introspection.  I can soon sense the difference: I begin, in fact, to listen to myself more than to God, to concentrate on myself instead of Him.  It is then that the human dialogue can help to revitalize the dialogue with God.  Contact with other Christians, their witness, what they have to say about their own experience of the activity of the Holy Spirit, renews the quality of my own prayer life.”

Paul Tournier, The Meaning of Persons, 169

Back to Basics

by Keith Miller | Christian Living, Weekly Devotional

Happy New Year!  During the last week of 2009, Andrea and I made some plans for 2010, including plans about this weekly blog.  We will be starting 2010 by addressing how one might deal with some of the basic questions of life from the perspective of living one’s entire life for Christ.  I’ll be writing blog posts about making a beginning (or renewed) commitment, about finances, sexuality, parenting, work, relationships, prayer and meditation, and many other topics.  I’ll start with questions I have already received, but I’m interested in hearing what’s on your mind right now.  So send in your questions.  We’ll keep your question anonymous when I address it.  If you prefer to send your question by mail (unsigned), send it to me at: P. O. Box 203061, Austin, Texas  78720-3061

Today I’ll begin with making a commitment to live for Christ.  The material for today’s post is excerpted from a booklet called “How Can I Find God?”  You can download the entire booklet (at no charge) from our web site at www.keithmiller.com under “Free Resources”.

HOW CAN I FIND GOD?

What Makes Us Ask the Question?

“I’ll never see my husband again.  He’s dead.”  … This intelligent, haggard-looking woman sitting across from me in my office was saying that suddenly she had realized she didn’t know God personally.  She was looking down at her hands which were clenched into fists, one holding a tear-soaked handkerchief.  Finally, after what seemed like several minutes, she looked up and asked quietly, “Keith, how can I find God?”

As I sat there thinking about her question, I could remember the faces of dozens of people who had sat in that chair over the years and in different ways asked that same question.  I could see again the bewildered look on the lovely white-haired lady’s face as she told me through her tears that she had committed adultery—after having been faithful to her husband for thirty years.

I felt once more the numb despair of a fifty-seven-year-old man.  Without any explanation, he’d just been fired from a fine position he’d held for twenty years.  He could find no other job.  The world has no use for the old—and “old” is getting younger every year.

Then there was that long line of ancient-looking teenagers.  They seemed to be feeling blindly along the wall of life looking for a doorway, wondering if there is any entrance to a world with meaning for them.  Was there anyone anywhere who would love them specifically?  Many of these emotional nomads with the haunted cynical eyes said they did not believe in God. Yet their presence in my office made their agnostic pronouncements sound a little hollow.

Finally, I saw the stunned faces of women whose confidence had been shattered when their husbands had deserted them for no apparent reason, and who were trying to put the pieces of their personal worlds back together.  They silently cried out for some new support since all the props which had held life in place for them had been swept away.

And many times through the specific disappointments and despair of all these people I had heard the deeper question they had not had time for when things were going well: “How can I find God?”

The Problem with Success

But I can also recall another sort of person who, far from having failed, had succeeded marvelously in life.  These were the fortunate ones who had reached the material or professional goals on which they had counted to bring them happiness and fulfillment.  But to their surprise and confusion, the success many of them had sought so compulsively left them empty and alone.  The great purpose which had made their journey toward the top so exciting disappeared when the goal was reached.  Long-repressed anxieties and insecurities arose to fill their days and nights.  These men and women too asked, “What does it all mean?  Is there anyone out there beyond ourselves?  And if there is a God, how can someone like me find him?”

You may think I am painting a black picture of modern life—that I am exaggerating the problems, the loneliness and restless incompleteness around us.  But I do not think so.  … We seem to be caught up by forces both beyond and within us over which we have little control. …  And to people searching urgently for personal meaning and hope, the fact of God’s “existence” means very little if they cannot find him and know him personally.

A Case History

How does a person describe a new beginning with God as the motivating center of life without basing that experience on some vague mystical feeling?  How does an individual who wants to have intellectual integrity describe the experience of encountering God as the personal, the immediate, and limitless Thou in life?

(What happened to me that brought me to make a beginning commitment is too long to include here, but it’s in the booklet.)

Finding God Where You Are

I have become convinced that the things which keep us from finding a live relationship to God are often not the bad things in our lives, but the good things which capture our imaginations and which keep us from focusing on Jesus Christ.  I think this accounts for much of the frustration of moral people.  One looks around and says: “No stealing, no murder, no adultery!  Why, God, am I so miserable and frustrated in my life?”  But we have not seen the fact that we have never really offered God the one thing he asks—our primary love.

What do we do when we find out that we love something more than God?  For me it was rather terrifying, because that which was keeping me from the freedom of Christ was my desire to be a great Christian leader!  It seems evident that our decisions will ultimately be made to conform with whatever has truly captured our imagination.  My own decisions and sacrifice were not being made purely to love and feed Christ’s sheep out of obedience and love of him. Rather, my decisions were made to help the church’s work (my work) to its greatest fulfillment.  This led to chaos and frustration.

When we see and can honestly face the fact that our world is really centered in something besides God, in ourselves, I think we face the most profound crossroads in our lives.  Because this is to recognize that we have separated ourselves from God by taking God’s place in the center of our own little world.

What do we do?  For me the answer is paradoxically the simplest and yet the most difficult thing I have ever done.  In our age of complexity we want a complex answer, but Christ seems to give us instead a terribly difficult one.  I think there are basically two things involved in coming to God at the center of life: (1) to tell God that we do not love him most and confess specifically what it is that we cannot give up to him; and (2) to ask God in the personality of Jesus Christ to come into our conscious lives through his spirit and show us how to live our lives for him and his purposes, one day at a time.

But what if you recognize that you honestly do not want God more than whatever is first in your life?  I think this is where a good many perceptive people find themselves.  In that case I would recommend that you (1) confess (as above) and then (2) tell Christ that honestly you cannot even want him most.  Tell him that you want to want him most (if you do), ask him to come into your life at a deeper level than you have ever let him before, and give him permission to win you totally to himself.  This may be your first honest encounter with Christ, and he will take you wherever you are.  As a matter of fact I believe this is really all any of us can do — give God permission to make us his. I, nor anyone I’ve known well, could not be his by our own strength of will.

If you made this new conscious beginning in a conversation with me, this is what I would tell you: From now on you are not responsible to exert the pressure or to carry the burden of muscling yourself up to be righteous.  You are not promising to change, or to have strength, or to be a great Christian.  You have only confessed your need and turned your life over to Christ.  What a relief!  It is his responsibility to furnish the forgiveness and motivating energy for you to live in a new and creative way.

***

Now you can begin a whole new way of living—at your own address!

Dear Lord, Thank you for your never wavering commitment to be with us and guide us.  Help us to find the courage and humility to begin to recognize what we may love more than we love you, and help us to come clean and confess whatever it is to you, and give you permission to draw us more and more toward loving you with everything we’ve got!  In Jesus’ Name, amen.

Love God, your God, with your whole heart: love him with all that’s in you, love him with all you’ve got!  Deut. 6:5, The Message (See also Matt 22:37-40).

Jesus said, “Love the Lord your God with all your passion and prayer and intelligence…[and] love others as well as you love yourself.”  Matt 22:37-40 The Message

P.S.  If you would like to learn more about living your entire life for Christ, try the newly released Third Revised Edition of The Taste of New Wine, available at www.keithmiller.com/store/