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The Promise (Waiting, Part 5)

March 18, 2006 By Leave a Comment

Isaiah 40: 28-31 (NRSV)

    28 Have you not known? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary; his understanding is unsearchable.

    29 He gives power to the faint, and strengthens the powerless.

    30 Even youths will faint and be weary, and the young will fall exhausted;

    31 but those who WAIT for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.

YES!

AMEN

Filed Under: Faith Growth

You Are NOT Alone (Waiting, Part 4)

March 18, 2006 By Leave a Comment
    I will lead the blind by a road they do not know, by paths they have not known I will guide them. I will turn the darkness before them into light, the rough places into level ground. These are the things I will do, and I will not forsake them. (Isaiah 42:16, NRSV)

My last post on waiting (3/15/06) left us in a tough place – with the necessity of waiting and some vague hope of some future transformation – a difficult place to be!

Today we start with God’s promise to us from Isaiah. Look at God’s marvelous promise – I will not forsake you!

Isn’t this fear of being alone and forsaken, the core concern during our times of waiting? We vacillate between feelings of hope and those of uncertainty. God has brought me through hard times before and thus will this time v. God are you still there? I don’t see anything happening!

Spiritual blindness.

Darkness.

Confusion.

Unfortunately, we are definitely not promised only known, familiar pathways, but we are promised that we don’t walk alone. We are promised that God is working to turn our darkness into light and smooth out our pathways.

The problem is nowhere are we promised these things instantaneously!

Which brings us back to waiting.

God has promised that even when we feel weary and forsaken in our waiting – we have not been forsaken. God is always there somewhere in the midst of our waiting working to transform us and our circumstances in ways that we can not currently imagine.

Relax. Be still. Trust the process. You are not alone.

    Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. (Hebrews 11:1, NRSV)
Filed Under: Faith Growth

C. S. Lewis & Time

March 16, 2006 By Leave a Comment

excerpts on Time from C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters

    …The humans live in time, but [God] destines them to eternity. He therefore, I believe, wants them to attend chiefly to two things, to eternity itself and to the point of time which they call the Present. For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity. Of the present moment, and of it only, humans have an experience analogous to the experience which [God] has of reality as a whole; in it alone freedom and actuality are offered them. He would therefore have them continually concerned either with eternity (which means being concerned with Him) or with the Present – either meditating on their eternal union with, or separation from, Himself, or else obeying the present voice of conscience, bearing the present cross, receiving the present grace, giving thanks for the present pleasure.

    …The man can neither make, nor retain, one moment of time; it all comes to him by pure gift; he might as well regard the sun and moon as his chattels.

    … We have trained them to think of the future as a promised land which favored heroes attain – not as something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.

Filed Under: Quotes, Time

Transformation (Waiting, Part 3)

March 15, 2006 By Leave a Comment

Take delight in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart. (Psalm 37:4, NRSV)

It is so easy for us to lose our focus and shift our sight away from God. With all of the distractions in our lives, it’s amazing that we manage to achieve a God focus as often as we do! With discipline and practice we can learn to reconnect with God and to bask in the light of his love for us. The more regularly that we take time to reconnect; the less distance that develops between us and God.

Just as an athlete must train regularly in order to maintain optimum fitness and to develop the skills that are required to succeed, we too must train in order to maintain our connection with the Divine. A connection that grounds us and provides us with the firm foundation that we need to survive. Staying open and actively practicing connecting with God provides the key to maintaining this connection.

We were created for a purpose and gifted accordingly. Our Father loves us and desires to give us the desires of our hearts. Resting confidently assured of God’s desire for us, we are thus able to approach God with our deepest desires. As we approach, we lay our desires open before Him and release them into his loving arms.

This is not an easy task! It can only happen through the faith and trust that we have nurtured during our regular times of prayer. Praying provides the vehicle that we use to span the distance between ourselves and God. Praying transforms us and brings our will (desires) into alignment with God’s will (desires) for us. When we pray our deepest desires, we are opening our desires and ourselves up to God.

God honors our opening of ourselves with the slow steady process of transforming us and our desires and preparing us to receive our transformed desire. The time lag between our initial awareness of the desire and its fulfillment is the time of personal transformation required on our part required to enable us to receive our transformed desire.

Of course, unfortunately, this process is not instantaneous. It takes time – sometimes a seemingly interminable amount. It is certainly not a comfortable place to be – this place of waiting – but it is necessary for our preparation.

Difficult, but necessary.

Filed Under: Discernment, Spiritual Practices

Desire Paradox

March 15, 2006 By Leave a Comment

Celtic Circle

I met with a couple of friends Sunday evening. We were discussing the barriers that are sometimes encountered when one seeks to improve one’s contact with God. We were encouraging each other in our respective journeys and brainstorming ways to overcome the barriers that we each were encountering.

Somewhere in the midst of this I encountered a wonderful paradox.

The desire to find God is one that God honors and promises to fulfill for us. In fact, this desire to draw near to God is one that was planted in our hearts by God in the first place – thus setting up the Divine fulfillment!

    When you search for me, you will find me; if you seek me with all your heart, (Jer 29:13, NRSV) 

    Before they call I will answer, while they are yet speaking I will hear. (Isaiah 65:24, NRSV)

Filed Under: Prayer, Spiritual Practices

Yeasting (Waiting, Part 2)

March 13, 2006 By Leave a Comment

The following is an except from Sue Monk Kidd’s When the Heart Waits: Spiritual Direction for Life’s Sacred Questions

My daughter, [Ann], who was then five, pulled a kitchen chair to the counter where I was baking bread. You might as well know that I don’t normally bake bread. In fact, I had never baked a loaf of bread before and haven’t baked a loaf since. But that day my creative instinct was popping out not in the usual way but in an unpremeditated attack of domesticity. I had wanted to make something from nothing, from scratch, something that would nourish people.

Ann was fascinated. She knelt on the chair, her face powdered with self-rising flour, and watched my every move. When we got to the part where you put in the yeast and cover the dough so that it will rise, I put a blue-checkered dishcloth over the bowl the way my mother used to and set it aside.

Ann wrinkled her brow. “Aren’t you going to finish?” she asked.

“We have to wait for it to rise,” I told her. I explained how the yeast causes the dough to expand.

“Well, how long do we have to wait?” shed asked.

I looked at the recipe. “An hour.”

“A whole hour?” She grimaced and plopped down in her chair to wait it out. Now and then her impatience overflowed and she lifted the cloth to peek at the dough. “It’s not doing anything,” she announced.

“You can’t see it, but the yeast is working. I promise.”

I don’t think she believed me. She finally wondered off to play.

Toward the end of the hour, though, she returned to peer into the bowl. Her face lit up. “Look, Mama, it’s yeasting!” she proclaimed.

Yeasting. Yeasting. Isn’t that the invisible mystery inside our waiting which produces the bread of life?

To create newness you have to cover the soul and let grace rise. You must come to the place where there’s nothing to do but brood, as God brooded over the deep, and pray and be still and trust that the holiness that ferments the galaxies is working in you too. Only wait.

And somehow the transformation you knew would never come, that impossible plumping of fresh life and revelation, does come. It manifests itself in unseen slowness. So it would happen to me and so it will happen to all who set out to knead their pain and wounds, their hopes and hungers, into bread. Waiting is the yeasting of the human soul.

    Wait for the LORD; be strong,
    and let your heart take courage;
    yea, wait for the LORD! (Psalm 27:14, RSV)
Filed Under: Faith Growth, Quotes, Time

The Monk (Waiting, Part 1)

March 13, 2006 By Leave a Comment

The following is an story from Sue Monk Kidd’s When the Heart Waits: Spiritual Direction for Life’s Sacred Questions:

Winter lumbered toward spring. … Wait, God seemed to whisper. But another voice rose up in me and around me, a sensible, collective voice insisting that waiting was a huge procrastination, an anachronism, a nice idea, maybe, but something misplaced in the fast-paced, demanding world of today.

Besides, I didn’t want to wait. Waiting seemed the rawest kind of agony. I wanted God to simply whisk away the masks I had spent most of my life fashioning, to hoist up from my repressed well the lost and neglected parts of myself, to solve my problems, heal my wounds, and alleviate the inexplicable sense of discontent and pain I was feeling. And mind you, I wanted all of this now, immediately, or at the very least soon.

It was at this point that I traveled to St. Meinrad Archabbey for a retreat. One day after morning prayers, I walked to the edge of the pond and sat on the grass. I listened to the wind sigh over the water and tried to be still, to simply be there and wait in the moment. But almost instantly my inner chaos rose up. The need to keep moving, to act, to solve everything overpowered me. I got to my feet.

As I returned to the guest quarters, I noticed a monk, ski cap pulled over his ears, sitting perfectly still beneath a tree. There was such reverence in his silhouette, such tranquil sturdiness, that I paused to watch. He was the picture of waiting.

Later I sought him out. “I saw you today sitting beneath the tree — just sitting there so still. How is it that you can wait so patiently in the moment? I can’t seem to get used to the idea of doing nothing.”

He broke into a wonderful grin. “Well, there’s the problem right there, young lady. You’ve bought into the cultural myth that when you’re waiting you’re doing nothing.”

Then he took his hands and placed them on my shoulders, peered straight into my eyes and said, “I hope you’ll hear what I’m about to tell you. I hope you’ll hear it all the way down to your toes. When you’re waiting, you’re not doing nothing. You’re doing the most important something there is. You’re allowing your soul to grow up. If you can’t be still and wait, you can’t become what God created you to be.”

Somehow I knew in my soul that his words were God’s words.

…[God] enters into the experience of those who wait.

But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. (Romans 8:25, NRSV)

Filed Under: Discernment, Faith Growth, Quotes, Spiritual Practices, Time Tagged With: , , , ,
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