Good morning…
Yesterday’s post continued to bleed into my day. Our final words became my constant prayer. “Lord, please heighten our sensitiveness to you. May we see, hear, taste, touch, and smell your magic all around us.”
Right away a loyal reader from Florida wrote. “Good morning Sue,” she texted. “I have always stopped daily to notice something in nature, like a bonus going about my day, but during this difficult season with my parents’ health issues I have found it to be essential medicine. I love both of these quotes.”
- “We have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.”
- “If people sat outside and looked at the stars each night, I bet they would live a lot differently.” – Bill Watterson
“Amen!” she concluded. “Amen!” I agreed. Next I opened the following email.
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DAILY MEDITATION | APRIL 27, 2022 – Open Yourself to God by Henri Nouwen
To pray means to open your hands before God. It means slowly relaxing the tension that squeezes your hands together and accepting your existence with an increasing readiness, not as a possession to defend, but as a gift to receive. Above all, prayer is a way of life that allows you to find stillness in the midst of the world where you open your hands to God’s promises and find hope for yourself, your neighbor, and your world. In prayer, you encounter God not only in the small voice and the soft breeze, but also in the midst of the turmoil of the world, in the distress and joy of your neighbor, and in the loneliness of your own heart.
Prayer leads you to see new paths and to hear new melodies in the air. Prayer is the breath of your life that gives you freedom to go and to stay where you wish, to find the many signs that point out the way to a new land. Praying is not simply some necessary compartment in the daily schedule of a Christian or a source of support in a time of need, nor is it restricted to Sunday mornings or mealtimes. Praying is living. It is eating and drinking, acting and resting, teaching and learning, playing and working. Praying pervades every aspect of our lives. It is the unceasing recognition that God is wherever we are, always inviting us to come closer and to celebrate the divine gift of being alive.
In the end, a life of prayer is a life with open hands—a life where we need not be ashamed of our weaknesses but realize that it is more perfect for us to be led by the Other than to try to hold everything in our own hands.
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Prayer quietly bleeds into every aspect of our lives, leading us to marvel at the stars, to see new pathways, to hear new melodies in the air, to eat and drink, to act and rest, to teach and learn, to play and work differently. Prayer pervades all of us.
So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out (Romans 12:1-2a, MSG).
Day by day, we live our “Amen!”
…Sue…
