you take no notice of the markers I have placed, you will trip over them before you see them and lie face down in the dust, hot and confused, wondering at your own ignorance of the obvious.
Time is the Good Shepherd’s sheepdog, a Border Collie who will herd and guide you, if you know how to respond to her presence, and recognize as she does, the sound of my voice and the pitch of my whistle. Be wise therefore and learn the ways of edges and guidelines, of drooping eyelids and weary backs, of aching heads and sore knees, of overworked hands. For all these are shepherdings into rest, and my fold awaits you always, a place of replenishment and safety, love and restoration.
Visit often and let the grass grow green and lush for your readiness, and your jaws rest from the grind.
Selah
Prayer
BUSYNESS MUST ALWAYS MAKE WAY FOR PRAYER and not the other way around. We cannot shoehorn prayer into our day as if it were another thing to cross off the list. For prayer is not something you do, it is something beautiful that happens in your heart, a fluttering burst of coloured wings soaring up to their maker when they hear his voice in the stillness. A flock of songbirds returning to their mother, who is calling them up to higher branches.
Prayer is always a homecoming, a place where desires find their true voice and character and are not what you thought they were. Where desperations are met with tear-brimming eyes full of compassion and mercy.
Prayer is a reaching up and out, a wondering, not-knowing, questioning, angry demand for demonstration sometimes, met with loving hands closing around your tantrumming fist. A wailing and a gnashing of teeth, hell brought before heaven’s throne, looking for answers and finding them.
For no one goes away from my table hungry. Did I not speak? Did I not answer you? Was the air crackling with the un-saidness of my words? Does this silence all around your pain let the naysayers creep in, telling you to ‘curse God and die’, be done with it, admit the non-existence of I AM, or the not-caring of love itself, the lies told by the truth of the Word? This is folly, and child’s talk, the babbling of fools in the marketplace, of gossips at the city gate.
How can the one who created ears not hear? Or the one who gave you sight, not see everything? Nothing is hidden from me. Your words and longings, your heart cries, your situations of need, arise before me tenfold. I know all. The softest unspoken whisper of disappointment rises alongside the loudest birth-pain groaning.
I will respond. I AM response. Relationship is what I do.
Do not be dismayed. For who are you to know when legions of angels have been dispatched on your behalf, or a journey set in motion, or a healing balm called for?
I alone have all the answers, and in me you must place your confidence and your trust. Your hearts are mine and I care prodigiously, painfully for each one. Life is not a game. I take serious things seriously.
But know this. I will not answer your whining or your selfish disdain of others, your foolish prattling and your skin-deep wants. For I know you better than you know yourself and I will give you only good gifts.
I sense what you need, even before you part your lips to speak, but I like to hear your voice and I want to spend time with you. So, chatter if you will, but speak to me also heart to heart and spirit to Spirit and make friends with the holy silence of listening and being still.
For it is in awareness that I am to be found, smiling kindly on all things, with the fullness of compassion and tenderness only a constantly breaking heart can give.
Selah
Stillness
STILLNESS IS NOT AN ENFORCED POSITION. I make no one go there solely of my volition or against theirs. Like silence, and the listening that makes it come alive, stillness is a place of discovery. It teaches who I am and you are not. It enables you to notice. There is glory and goodness all around, in every atom, every whisper of the wind, every creature’s song.
Here in the paying attention of doing nothing is where you will find me, if you find me anywhere. Not in your heart or soul, not in a voyage of self-discovery or enlightenment, but by casting out the grandiose and sitting in stillness. Here everything worthwhile is louder, brighter, more evident.
Giving up your masks and your illusion of control, admitting you live in a universe beyond your feeble understanding, this is the place to begin to know me. For which of you could manufacture one sparrow’s wing? Or the perfect spiral of a snail’s shell, grown over time to be trampled on gleefully by the unthinking? Could you make one stalk, one blade of grass, in all its intricacy? Can you create life and greening? Or is it I who do this?
Sitting in the silent running of stillness this question is not difficult to answer. For here you must face the truth of your inadequacies, and the yearning in your heart for something, someone, greater than yourself. Instead of wanting to know, you will want there to be someone who knows. Instead of desiring control, you will want someone greater, someone kinder, someone magnificent to be in control. You will see how much further beyond you everything is—further than you ever imagined. Further than they ever taught you in school or in church. For it is one thing to think you can cast mountains into the sea (whoever did this, and might you lower yourself to metaphor?), but quite another to remove specks from eyes.
In the stillness you will see how much the smallness of things matters, how much I care for each one. Life is an expression of being—my being, my wisdom, my glory—and in the stillness you will start to peek round corners at yourself and see your tiny part in it all. You will not balk at your own smallness, for such it is. You will learn only to acknowledge it before me. This is what saved Job, this insight, this perception of God and his creation. Once you begin to acknowledge, to accept what I am capable of, what I have done, what I am doing, what I might choose to do, and with what forethought, care, and precision, with what wisdom and love, with what truth, beauty, and reckless abandon, encased in beautiful order I do it, then you will trust me and begin to know me and seek me out.
And it is here we begin, in almost totally losing sight of yourself, one tree in a plethora of forested worlds, looking beyond to the Source of Life.
Selah
Spirit
