thursday, 3.12.09...
9.45 p.m.
greetings!
tomorrow is FRIDAY -- awesome!
and, not a moment too soon...
tonight at our home church gathering at roma's in ybor city, leah led a great thought on "who we are when all our masks are stripped away..."
i had been thinking about this all day because of nouwen's lenten reflection that i had read this a.m. at breakfast...
from SHOW ME THE WAY: "it is not so difficult to see that, in our particular world, we all have a strong desire to accomplish something...practically all of us think about ourselves in terms of our contribution to life. and when we have become old, much of our feelings of happiness or sadness depends on our evaluation of the part we played in giving shape to our world and its history...we fall into the trap of our culture by wrongly thinking we are worthwhile because we have successes..."
how do we recover from "the erroneous conviction that our life is one large scoreboard where someone is listing the points to measure our worth" thereby "selling our soul to the many grade-givers"???
nouwen's answer: "it is in solitude that we become free to live IN the world without being OF it. a life without a lonely place, that is, a life without a quiet center, easily becomes destructive...in solitude we can listen to the voice of him who spoke to us before we could speak a word, who healed us before we could make any gesture to help, who set us free long before we could free others, and who loved us long before we could give love to anyone. it is in this solitude that we discover that being is more important than having, and that we are worth more than the result of our efforts. in solitude we discover that our life is not a possession to be defended, but a gift to be shared...in solitude we become aware that our worth is NOT the same as our usefulness."
do we have a "lonely place"?
a "quiet center"?
do we have an oasis of solitude where we can listen to Jesus???
during lent 2009, i am seeking to daily set aside 15 minutes for this opportunity...
maybe 15 minutes a day really can transform our lives...
shalom...
guy
HAPPY FRIDAY!!!
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Guy, thanks so much for taking the time and energy to blog during Lent. Your remarks are very meaningful.
ReplyDeleteThe encouragement to find a quiet place is appreciated. Practicing solitude and silence have been beneficial to me. In these times, I have discovered what Nouwen and you are saying—in quietness we can hear God talking with us. I didn’t realize how many other—temporal, transitory—voices I was listening to when the Person who mattered the most—the One who is eternal and faithful—wanted to fellowship with me. Simply sitting with Him is edifying.
In Seeing Is Believing, Gregory Boyd writes about recognizing ourselves as the sanctuary of God, which we are, and imagining Jesus dwelling with us. Boyd writes that we should find a place in our being where we can sense Jesus present and there meet with him. (This is a principle Boyd gleans from our spiritual mothers and fathers.) He further writes that he imagines being with Jesus in a special part of a forest where he grew up in Michigan. In this imagining, he comes to fellowship deeply with Jesus. And from this fellowshipping with Christ, Boyd envisions the deepening of the relationship with Christ, which leads to him dialoguing with the Holy Spirit experientially so that he is brought into Christlikeness.