Good morning…
I have been awake in the dark for hours now. Praying. Journaling. Pondering on a blank page, “LORD, what do You want to say through me today?” Sitting still in this question, jotting one dead-end idea after another, I have watched a multitude of minutes tick off our wall clock.
“This is where so many holy people break down,” Thomas Merton writes. “As soon as they reach the point where they can no longer see the way and guide themselves by their own light, they refuse to go any further…It is in this darkness that they find true liberty. It is in this abandonment that we are made strong. This is the night that empties us.”
Those who know your name trust in you, for you, O Lord, do not abandon those who search for you (Psalm 9:10, NLT).
“Here the approach becomes more mysterious,” Sue Monk Kidd writes in When The Heart Waits. “…having done all we can, we allow God to work directly on the more secret and deeply ingrained attachments we have to self. We allow God to release us through the experiences, the encounters, and the events that come to us.” (106)
As the morning light dawns on an emptying night, I whisper, “God, release me into the experiences, the encounters, and the events You pick for me today.” As I abandon myself more deeply, in very this moment a subscriber sends me a poem, a poem by Hafiz called “Just Sit Right Here Now” from Love Poems From God.
Just sit there right now.
Don’t do a thing. Just rest.
For your
separation from God
is the hardest work in this world.
Let me bring you trays of food and something
that you like to
drink.
You can use my soft words
as a cushion
for your
head.
Thank you, God, for handing me a pillow of plush words, as I rest here, now, in oneness with You.
More and more people are seeing this: they enter the mystery, abandoning themselves to God (Psalm 40:3, MSG).
…Sue…
