What Is Your Simple Prayer?

I’ve started a daily readings process with a good friend of mine. Every morning, we receive a scripture reading (the same each day for a week), and at the end of each e-mail is a simple reflection question for the day.

After spending the week with a passage that reflects on the nature of true prayer, today’s question asked:

What is your simple prayer today?

I’ve been noticing how my simple prayer keeps changing throughout the day so far.

My first simple prayer, upon waking up this morning, was, “Meet me.” I had a hard time getting going in my day and didn’t have much strength or energy to get into the day, but the thought of being met by Jesus at my desk was a great comfort. 

Then, as I sat at my desk for a while, reading and thinking, I kept bumping up against a new prayer:

“I’m low.” 

It was a prayer of request for him to hear the truth of my experience right now.

I’ve continued to live in a season of aloneness with my life’s work, and it’s been quite acute and painful, even though Jesus has been showing me some of his purposes that he’s working through it all. Also, my schedule has changed quite a bit in the last couple weeks, and I haven’t found my center of gravity with the new adjustments. It’s left me feeling pretty discombobulated and perplexed. And then, of course, you already know about the conversations I’ve been having with myself and with God about my body this week. That is all so new and still so mystifying to me.

So, I’m low. So many changes and unanswered questions leaving me low. And my strong desire was for Jesus to know that, for him to see it. 

And now that he’s seen it, my simple prayer is that he would be with me in it. 

It’s doesn’t feel quite comfortable to sit with the lowness, the unanswered questions, the unfinished feeling of so much right now. But, taking my cue from yesterday’s post, there’s no energy around the idea of gearing up and making it all come together with some strength I simply do not have.

The invitation, instead, is to let Jesus be with me in the brokenness. To experience his presence and companionship right here. To let him know me in this low place. To let him listen to me. To let myself listen to him. To sit here together in the truth of it and see what the experience of relationship with him in this place might bring.

Right now, and probably for the rest of today, my prayer is simply, “Be with me.”

What is your simple prayer today?

He Loves You

Yesterday we talked about the connection between loneliness and belovedness. Today I want to invite you deeper into a truth I’m sure you’ve heard many times before: 

God loves you. 

I don’t know about you, but that truth didn’t mean anything to me for a really long time. Two-thirds of my life, in fact, was lived without any meaningful experience of that phrase. I heard it, I believed that I believed it, but in reality, it just bounced right off me. 

I’ve learned that the experience of God’s love is essentially connected to the experience of ourselves.

What I mean is, if we aren’t in touch with ourselves, we can’t experience love. Because the part of us that experiences love — the real us, the deep-down us — isn’t there. It’s out to lunch. It’s on vacation. It’s in the avoidance spiral. It’s completely disconnected. Turned off. Shut down.

Being in touch with the truth of ourselves is essential to our experience of God. I would say it’s the essential first step to connecting in a real way to God at all.

Have you experienced God’s love for you in a real and true way? Do you want to?

Pulse Check: What Do You Need?

Needs and wants are funny things, especially when it comes to examining the heart.

I’ve noticed so many times over the last couple years that I’m surprised by my wants and needs — that what I think I want and need isn’t what I really want or need at all, once I really quiet myself to listen.

Has this ever happened to you?

My spiritual director, Elaine, is great at helping me clarify my needs and wants — and not just the difference between them but also what is real and what is superficial assumption. There have been several times in the last few years, for instance, that I’ve come into a session with her upset or confused or fidgety about something. We talk for a while about all the conflict of thoughts and emotions I’m carrying, and then she’ll often ask one of two questions: 

What do you need in this place? 

Or: 

If you could ask God for anything in this place, what would it be?

These are such amazing questions. I’ve found they so often crystallize the difference between what I think I want or need and what I really want or need.

So often when I’m struggling with something, I think that I want God to fix it — to take it away, restore peace and serenity, and just overall to clean things up. But when I really get quiet and listen to my heart’s voice in that place, often the real need or desire is different from that. My heart instead says things like: 

• I want to know God is here. 
• I want to know he hears my heart. 
• I want to remember how to trust him.
• I just want to see his eyes looking at me.

It’s been interesting for me to notice that I don’t necessarily want or need God to fix everything, but rather that I simply want to know he is there, that he sees me, that he’s not going anywhere. 

That kind of distinction just blows my mind. 

For today’s Pulse Check, I’d like to invite you to consider your own wants and needs.

Consider what’s right on the surface — if you had to answer in a quick heartbeat right now, what would you say you want or need in this very moment?

Then take a moment to go deeper. Allow yourself to ask the question again, with more intentionality: What do I really need right here in this place? 

What's in Your Heart?

I’ve been curious about you today, wondering how you would answer the question: 

What’s in your heart? 

At one time in my life, understanding myself was foremost in my heart. I spent a number of years in self-examination and discovery, starting to piece together the jigsaw of my heart — who I am, why that is, why I’ve done and thought and felt the things I have. 

At another time in my life, understanding God was my greatest preoccupation. I wanted to understand Jesus, to understand grace, to understand how God views me and wants me to relate to him. 

Some people have in their heart some great and particular mission. I think of people called to serve a specific group of people, to start a nonprofit or some company, to live their life in some specific way — perhaps as a ballerina or gymnast or runner or actor. Their calling occupies their hearts and informs their days. 

What about you? 

What is in your heart right now?

Where Are Your Moments of Stillness?

Do you have moments of stillness in your life? 

Last night at church, we talked about solitude and silence. My small group shared how unconventional it is to seek solitude and silence. Life can be so noisy! And there is always something more to do that keeps us from just being still and unproductive with even a few moments of our time.

Then, when we do get alone with ourselves and God for a moment, the noise of our mind often becomes quite loud. 

But as the teacher of our study shared, the swirly and shaken-up sense that we have upon first being still will settle, like silt in a jar full of river water. The sediment settles, and the water becomes clear.

What would a moment of stillness that leads to eventual clarity be like for you? 

It Doesn't Have to Look a Certain Way

One thing I am continually struck by in the vocational work of formation that I do is that life with Christ does not look one particular way for everyone. 

Each person is unique. Each person’s story is unique. The way each of us were formed by God to be is unique. The way each of us were formed by our own particular lives is unique. 

Jesus wants to walk with you in your own particular life. 

He wants to be with you as you are.

If you are an extrovert, he wants to connect to your extroversion. If you are musical, he wants to connect to that musicality in you. If you are quiet and introverted, he wants to know you in that quiet, introverted way that you are. 

You don’t have to be someone else.

You don’t have to be other than he already made you to be. 

This is exciting for someone like me, whose life’s work is to walk alongside others and pay attention with them to their lives and the presence and movement of God in their particular life.

Every conversation is different. It is absolutely glorious and beautiful and amazing. I love to see how God is speaking and forming each person in unique and utterly creative ways.

What are the particulars of your one particular life? How can you invite Jesus into those particularities today?

What Has He Revealed to You?

Oh, I’ll guard with my life what you’ve revealed to me,

   guard it now, guard it ever.

— Psalm 119:44 

One of the best parts, for me, about talking with people about their life with God is learning how he is revealing himself to them right now. 

It could be an image that shows up and represents the current invitation of God in their life. It could be a passage of Scripture that keeps resounding over and over, inviting them deeper and deeper into what it speaks of their own life and heart. It could be a circumstance of life that teaches them a truth they can’t shake.

Together, we go deeper into those images and invitations and realizations. I get to witness what they have to teach each person. I get to be with a beautiful soul as they hit upon revelation, as they are pressed into wordlessness at the deeply personal invitation of God, at the intimate way he knows them. 

We savor. There is no hurry here.

Here, there is room for revelation to sink into the depths of one’s heart. Here, there is room for encounter with God and for response to be what it truly is. 

There really is nothing quite like it, for me.

It’s the most holy work I can imagine, and I am continually ecstatic, grateful, and humbled at the privilege of getting to do it over and over again.

That opportunity to notice where God is and to savor its truth and flavor is such a gift, I think, because it implants the learnings deep inside of us. 

Those revelations become true of our lives and journeys. They become road markers that tell us what is true of us. They become touchstones. They stay with us. 

It’s like what Psalm 119 says: we guard with our lives what he has revealed to us, guard it now, guard it ever.

What has God revealed to you? It it something you’re guarding with your life, now and ever? Why or why not?

Our Most Vulnerable Places, with Love

I’ve been encountering the vulnerability of courageous, beautiful hearts lately, and such visions make my own heart seize up at the tenderness of it, make my own heart melt, make my breath stop short, make tears slide down my face. 

Words written from a deep-down place that feels like prayer, yet shared in the public spaces of a book’s pages, inviting us to see what that deep-down prayer is like for her. Her true heart. Courage.

Lyrics laced together from a deep-down place of truth meshed with hope and pain and sadness and longing, strung along notes that surprise us with a voice that arrests us. A different voice than any we’ve heard. A songstress giving us her own true heart. Courage. 

Images pieced together and collaged, laid over with words that speak the tender longing of a lonely, sad, but hopeful heart. Her courageous prayer.

Poetical words pieced together on page, confessing and yearning, hoping and fearing, all at once. Her true heart, full of so much beauty.

It isn’t easy to get to those deep-down places.

Such revelations require safety. Warmth. Invitation. Love. 

They require courage — courage that learns to muster when surrounded in warmth, invitation, safety, love.

In these places, our true glory dwells.

These are the places God lives. This is where he wants to meet us. It is where he wants to lead us. It is where we really live. 

Do you know your deep-down honest voice? Can you hear what it is saying now?

"Blissfully Unaware": A Valuable Spiritual Practice

When I wake up in the morning and choose to say yes to Lady Wisdom’s invitation to start my day, then checking my phone for e-mail is not the first thing I do. Getting up to date on Facebook’s news feed is not the second thing I do. Reading my Twitter timeline is not the third thing I do. Scrolling through my Instagram feed is not the fourth thing I do. 

When I say yes to wisdom’s invitation in the morning, I check my phone for the time, and that is it.

Then I stretch out and feel the softness of the pillow against my face. I revel in the coziness of the flannel sheets and heavy blankets keeping me warm. If Kirk is still in bed beside me, I turn to him and enjoy a few moments of conversation and connection. 

Then I make a french press pot of coffee and take the piping hot tumbler to my desk. I open my worn blue Message version of the Bible to the psalms, then flip to the other sections of the Scriptures that I’m steadily making my way through at the moment. I give Diva attention as she sits and begs for affection at my feet or jumps onto my lap or stands beside my Bible on the desk. I look out the window at the day unfolding before me — the wind waving through the moss hanging from the trees, the color of the sky, the squirrels running around on our driveway and our lawn.

On those days I say yes to wisdom’s invitation, I’m present to the morning, to the quiet, to my own heart, and to God in ways decidedly different than the mornings I launch straight into the clamor of technology. 

These are the days I feel centered. I feel rooted. I feel focused on the most important things. 

But when I connect to technology first, the day — and even my body — have a completely different feel.

I shake my leg at my desk and impulsively grab my phone to check for updates every few minutes. It’s hard for me to get quiet inside. Pulling my Bible in front of me and settling into its pages doesn’t hold much appeal. 

The day garners a frenetic energy, and I lose momentum on the most important things. I have a hard time being present to Kirk, much less anyone else. I feel lost and confused and unsure which way is up or which direction I should go next. 

It’s hard to remember sometimes, in those few seconds after waking, that ignorance really is bliss when it comes to starting my day. But hopefully, as I continue to notice the decidedly different feel the two different starts to my day offer me, I will choose more and more to be blissfully unaware from the start. 

Can you relate to this at all?

Choosing Grace Today

Kirk and I returned home late last night from a conference in Nashville we decided would be our birthday gift to each other this year. (Our birthdays are a day apart from each other in January.)

It was a very refreshing, invigorating time full of laughter, reflection, and great conversation. Also, we got to experience some bona fide winter weather, since it doesn’t really exist at all in Florida where we live.

But as I sat at my desk this morning and reflected on the gift of being back home and able to do my most favorite thing in the world — sit in the quiet with a mug of hot coffee beside me, Diva lingering nearby, and the Scriptures open on the table of my desk — I noticed a crowd of thoughts rushing into the forefront of my awareness that had been kept at bay all weekend. 

You didn’t eat well this weekend.

You didn’t hear your alarm go off for the road trip, which is why we left 3 hours later than planned.

You don’t belong in a crowd.

You didn’t interact with other people at the conference much. 

And on and on it goes. All kinds of accusing thoughts, seeking to diminish me and make me feel like a failure.

I didn’t eat well. It’s true. Road food is not good for the body, and restaurant eating all weekend wasn’t either. My body feels sluggish and deprived of the fruit and water and simple meals I’ve gotten used to feeding it, and now I must begin the uphill climb to retrain my body what to expect. 

I didn’t hear my alarm go off. It’s true. And that first hour and a half after waking up on the day we left for the trip was stressful for us both. We thought we might miss the first night of the conference because we got such a late start out. But it turned out okay. We learned Tennessee is in a different time zone than Florida, so we gained an unexpected hour on the road. There wasn’t any traffic in Gainesville or Atlanta or any other place we thought we’d find it. We made it to the hotel with enough time to get settled in and refresh. And we were more rested while driving than we would have been otherwise. 

I don’t belong in a crowd. It’s true. I’m an introvert and prefer one-on-one connections to crowds of two-hundred-plus. But we weren’t there for the crowd. We were there to learn and share with each other what we’d taken in. And that happened in abundance. The weekend offered us what we hoped it would — and more. 

I didn’t interact with others much. It’s true. Several networking opportunities presented themselves, and while the crowd busily mingled and chatted, I more often took the safe route of talking to Kirk or just one or two others already seated around me. There were people I hoped to meet, but such meetings never happened. But that’s okay. The people I did meet were nice. I enjoyed those quiet conversations. And my introverted self needed to not get pushed into an extrovert’s world. 

I guess what I’m saying is this. 

Accusation takes advantage of hitting us at every turn. It tells us what we’re doing wrong or how we’re not doing enough. It points its finger at every nook and cranny and every tiny crevice of our lives. It never, ever, ever lets up on us.

But grace abounds in each situation, too. Grace shows up to carry us through. 

I’d rather choose grace over accusation. I’m noticing grace’s invitation and choosing it today instead.

How about you?

The True Self, the False Self, and the Reality of Self

Sometimes I get tripped up when thinking about the true self and false self. Does that ever happen to you? 

It can happen like this. 

I’m aware of my true, created life in God, and when I’m living life from that place, everything within and around me becomes timeless. Everything holds a glow of beauty and perfection because God-in-everything becomes so evident in that place. Purity of heart, mind, body, and spirit abounds. 

Living in that place, I experience rest and hope and joy. I can breathe, and I can say with full conviction it is well with my soul.

But I don’t live from that posture of my true self all of my living, breathing moments. 

There’s also the false self.

This is the scrappy, stingy, worried, anxious, competitive, blaming, conniving self. It’s a distracted, consuming self. In its more tempered moments, it’s simply a shell of a real self. 

I don’t live all my living, breathing moments from this place, either. 

They’re both there.

I’m continually invited or compelled toward one or the other by forces outside myself and by habits built up within myself. On any given day, I’m an admixture of my true self and false self.

That admixture creates the reality of self. 

The reality of self is who I am in this very moment, living on this very earth, walking in this very moment deeper into my formation. 

Will I be formed more fully into my true self?

Will I be de-formed by my false self?

These are the living, breathing questions faced by the reality of self each day.

And this place of still forming — of reflecting on the reality of our formation in still moments and of acknowledging that we are forming, still, each day that we live — is one place those questions meet with our appraisal.

What Is It About That Rest?

Earlier this week, I suggested that our true selves bring rest into our being. Even while moving around in the world or going out and about our days, being connected to and living out of our true selves brings an invigoration and joy and peace that doesn’t include exhaustion. 

I invited you to look around your life for the places you find such rest. Where is your true self cropping up in your life?

One of the readers here, Leanne, shared the following response: 

It’s really hard to find that true rest. I like that you identify the false self being what exhausts us, but where I seem to find true rest is in fleeting moments (like this morning while I was watering the newly transplanted rose and just looking around), or when I’m on retreat at a monastery. Maybe I need to just look around more.

I love the contrast of these two moments Leanne shared with us about her places of true rest: a fleeting moment of watering a transplanted rose and the more sustained experience of going on retreat to an out-of-the-way place like a monastery. 

This comment made me want to push the conversation a little deeper with all of you. Let’s look at those places we experience rest and actually consider them.

What is it about those moments and experiences of rest that bring a connection to your true self? Why does that particular kind of moment or experience bring life and ease and even joy to your life, do you think?

Where Does Your Self Rest?

I’m inclined to think that when we live in our true selves, we experience true rest. 

For instance, when I’m connected to my true self — living out of and aware of the self that is uniquely me — my entire being fills with rest and calm, even if I’m busy washing the dishes in the sink or picking up the mail at the post office or driving in heavy traffic. 

There is something about the true self that both enlivens and calms us, at one and the same time. 

This is a different kind of rest than the rest we gain through sleep. It is a kind of rest — a consonance of being, I suppose you could say — that we find in our living, waking hours. 

Conversely, I find that the false self exhausts us.

There’s so much self-management, self-monitoring, and worry found there. The false self exists in a constant state of self-preservation and self-promotion. We fear we will cease to matter or cease to exist if we let up our preserving and promoting. 

But the true self lives in a state of rest. A state of harmony and peace.

Here, there is no worry. Here, there is no fear of death.

Where do you find the rest of your true self in your life right now? How easy or hard is it for you to access that rest and that true self inside you? What do you need to access it more faithfully?

Are You a Thinker or a Feeler, and Other Helpful Considerations

Yesterday we began a small series on the topic of discernment. Through each of the daily posts this week, we are going to consider how we practice the art of discernment in our lives and what we can learn about our process of discernment to help us in future moments of decision in our lives. 

In yesterday’s post, I asked you to look back upon your life to see if there has been a pattern or process to your decision-making. Today, I’m going to take that a step deeper and ask you to consider aspects of your personhood and how those have historically played into your decision-making process — or how they might help you in the future. 

If you are familiar with the Myers-Briggs personality type indicator, you know that it carries four categories of indication for each person’s make-up. 

• Introvert or Extrovert
• Senser or Intuitive
• Thinker or Feeler
• Perceiver or Judger

There are loads of resources that you can find to explain each of these type indicators and to help you determine which indicators are your dominant preference. But today, I want to consider how these personality type indicators can become helpful to our process of discernment. 

Let’s take, for example, the difference between a thinker and a feeler.

For someone who is a thinker, charting out a pro-and-con list for a particular decision-point can prove immensely clarifying and helpful. A thinker will also be helped along in their decision by conducting research or appealing to those with knowledge and/or experience related to the decision-point they are considering.

Someone who is a feeler, on the other hand, might find themselves better served by noticing the emotive affect a particular decision casts upon them when they hold it inside themselves. They may also be helped by paying attention to the physical responses of their bodies when weighing one decision over another. 

By way of another example, consider introversion and extroversion.

These categories speak to how each of us gains or loses energy. An introvert becomes weary from too much external stimulation and becomes energized and filled up through “down times” of solitude — times that allow them to think, reflect, and rest in the quiet. An extrovert finds that solitary, quiet activity a bit draining, however, and becomes much more energized when around other people.

Which type are you, and how might that truth of yourself shed light on the best decision you are seeking to make? Has your personality preference type served you to discern a decision you needed to make in the past? 

How Do You Discern?

I was at a retreat this past weekend with the community of people from whom I received my spiritual direction training over the last three years. Each November, they host an instructional retreat weekend, and this weekend’s theme was the topic of discernment. 

How do you discern the movement and invitation of God in your life? 

This was the question at the heart of the retreat weekend, and I thought I would use some of the reflections I gained from the weekend as the basis of this week’s postings. 

To open the conversation on discernment this week, then, I’d like to invite you to consider your usual path for discerning the way forward at critical decision-points in your life. 

How do you go about making decisions in your life? How do you know which path you ought to take? What has been your typical process? Do you have a typical process?

Letting the Truth Be the Truth

I shared recently that I’ve been experiencing emotions that are quite new and powerful to me. They rise up, quite unexpected, and honestly unsettle me.

I’m not used to feeling my heart on my sleeve. I’m the kind of person who takes in an experience and ponders it slowly, deciding how I feel about it and how I want to respond. I’m slow to feel, you might say, always wanting my feelings to match what seems most fitting or right or true to a situation. 

As much as I have often thought that approach to my emotions is the equivalent of wisdom, I’m learning these days, as I experience my emotions much more in the moment, that it keeps me from really knowing myself. This slow to feel approach has served as a shield of sorts — a shield that keeps me from knowing my heart, my emotions, my true response to situations, and even, in some ways, the depths of my own depravity.

That’s not always helpful. 

And so God has been giving me the gift of my emotions lately, even as they don’t feel much like a gift at all. When the emotions are hard, or when they cause me to sin against another in my heart, I wish this gift wasn’t being given to me at all. 

And yet I can read the psalms and be reminded that this is, in fact, a good thing: 

Count yourself lucky — 

God holds nothing against you

and you’re holding nothing back from him.

When I kept it all inside,

my bones turned to powder,

my words became daylong groans.

The pressure never let up;

all the juices of my life dried up.

Then I let it all out;

I said, “I’ll make a clean breast of my failures to God.”

Suddenly the pressure was gone —

my guilt dissolved,

my sin disappeared.

— Psalm 32:2-5

Those images of bones turning to powder, of pressure never letting up, and of the juices of one’s life completely drying up … they’re pretty vivid, aren’t they? We get this sense of what happens when we hold everything in and don’t let it out. Our bones dissolve to powder from the pressure of holding those feelings down and down and down. Just like a covered pot of steaming food will eventually dry up if it’s left covered too long, so will the juices of our own lives dry up when we hold inside the truth of the emotions we feel. 

So I’m doing as the psalmist says today and counting myself lucky. I’m lucky because the truth of my emotions can’t go unnoticed right now, and so I bring that truth to God. And in the places where those emotions cause me to sin, I confess it and am set free. 

Take Me as I Am

I was at the contemplative eucharist service at our church last night, and the Iona chant we’ve been singing recently is a simple verse that begins with the words, “Take, O take me as I am.” 

I couldn’t help but notice how appropriate those words are for me to sing right now. Lately I’ve been struggling with powerful emotions I’m not used to feeling. They rise to the surface in sudden moments, and words flit through my mind or stumble out of my mouth that seem so unlike the person I’ve known myself to be. 

In some ways, I see these emotions as quite helpful. They’re helping me know my heart in a deeper way than I’ve known it before. I’m becoming aware of things that matter to me, and of ways I’m being invited to change and form and grow and interact with the world around me in different ways than I have before.

But in other ways, the power of these emotions scares me. I’m not so sure they’re wholly good. Maybe they are, and maybe they aren’t. Maybe they’re both. (That’s probably the case.) But the part that doesn’t feel the holiness of these emotions is the part that drives me to my knees before God, begging for mercy and wisdom. 

I’m so aware of my frailty and fallenness. 

And so this simple chant, asking God to take me as I am, provides great comfort. It reminds me that God does take me as I am, that God does meet me in this place, that God does love and accept me right here, even as the formation process of these emotions in me is yet unfinished. 

I’m so thankful for that grace. 

What is it like for you to invite God to take you as you are, right in this very moment? 

What Is It Like to Consider Going Home?

I’ve just begun reading a new book by Ian Morgan Cron called Jesus, My Father, the CIA, and Me. It is “a memoir of sorts” by the author and begins with an epigraph by Wendell Berry that says, “When going back makes sense, you are going ahead.” The first chapter begins with a quote by Robert Lax that says, “Sometimes we go on a search for something and do not know what we are looking for until we come again to our beginning.” 

Pretty powerful quotes, aren’t they? 

I’m pleased to share that the rest of the book is quite powerful, too — at least, what I’ve read of it so far. It is the author’s attempt to wade through the “harrowing straits of memory” in order to make peace with his history and sail more freely into his future. 

Right up front, the author says this about doing this kind of excavation of our histories:

“Home is where we start, and whether we like it or not, our life is a race against time to come to terms with what it was or wasn’t.”

What do you think of this idea? 

Speaking from my own experience, I find it to be true. Pretty much the entirety of my adult life, from age 19 to the place I stand now at 32, has been an exercise in going back to my beginnings to make sense of them and find healing, peace, and wholeness. 

I wrote on my personal blog last night that the first big chunk of years devoted to this excavation brought pain, anger, regret, and grief. I did not find peace for many years, but I knew, all along, that peace would be found on the other side somehow. In my experience, God had clearly invited me to visit that excavation site and hunker down for quite some time.

The excavation is still happening, really, and probably will be underway the rest of my life. But the biggest chunks of history discovered and explored in those earliest of days are now, thankfully, in the polishing phase. That is something for which I regularly give thanks.

Going home takes work. It’s hard. It hurts. But I can’t imagine a more worthwhile endeavor, especially when the invitation is offered and then lived out in the presence of Jesus. 

What is going home like for you? Does the notion appeal to you? Scare you? Turn you off? Have you ever visited the excavation site of your history with Jesus as an excavation partner in the process? 

The Experience of Silence

I’ve shared here before that Kirk and I have been attending a contemplative eucharist service on Sunday nights over the last few months. It’s such a refreshing place to gather in silence with other pilgrims and be present to God.

It’s a very simple service: there are some prayers we all say together, as well as a reading of the Gospel and a simple song. The rector blesses the bread and wine and invites us all to partake in the eucharist.

But other than that, there are extended periods of silence. Between each segment of the service, there is silence. Before the service begins, we gather in the silence. And when the service ends, we are asked to depart in silence. 

I wonder: do you find silence easy or difficult?

It’s so rare to find bits of quiet in daily life, isn’t it? Even when we’re alone, it’s easy not to experience silence with all the ways we can stay connected to information and conversations online. 

When I find a moment of quiet, I experience it as a blessed relief.

However, I know that for others, silence can be disconcerting and somewhat unsettling. The silence is so … silent. 

What about you? How is it for you to experience silence? Is silence something you value in any way?

What Brings You Joy and Life?

We’ve been spending time in some difficult places lately, haven’t we — getting to know the cavernous workings of our hearts, discussing wounds, and talking about the darkened hallways we sometimes find for safety and protection.

Today, I want to talk about life.

Joy.

Places of beauty and enjoyment in our lives. 

Do you have any places like that? 

When you examine your life, where are the places you lose track of time, fully enjoy and savor the moment, or find yourself in touch with what matters most to you? 

For me, it happens in these moments: 

• When I write
• When I see sunlight bouncing on water
• When I share a meaningful conversation with Kirk
• When I stare at Diva
• When someone makes me laugh
• When taking photos on my iPhone
• When planning ideas for the Look at Jesus course
• When thinking about nonviolence and how the heart learns to love
• When perusing my Instagram feed at the end of each day

What about you? What moments and activities make you feel most alive and grateful and in tune with life and the present moment?