Good morning…
With full time work, a new puppy, and our first grandbaby on the way, I wonder, “How can I do it all?” As a daughter to aging parents miles away, friends strewn all over the world, and only twenty-four hours in each day, I ask God, “How can I do it all?” With a middle-of-the-night blogging ministry, a world on fire with deep seated needs, and a desire to “go where the love is,” as Henri Nouwen recommends, I wrestle with “How can I do it all?”
A guiding possibility comes from a story we read aloud yesterday in our study of Sue Monk Kidd’s God’s Joyful Surprise. On page 206, we read these words.
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In a religious bookstore in Indiana one day I began to talk with Samuel, a wise, spiritual man who manages the store. As our conversation spread from books to the spiritual life, I asked, “What does it mean to pray without ceasing? It sounds like such an impossible undertaking. Do you think the command is just a hyperbole, an exaggeration to make a point?”
“When you pray always, you don’t pray exclusively. You pray simultaneously,” he said, gazing at me with dark smiling eyes. “It is to pray when I catalog these books and eat lunch and make change. It is to keep up prayer beneath the surface, lifting my heart to God during all my daily activities.”
As I watched Samuel shelving books, smiling and talking with those who entered the store, I could see prayer in his face. I could see that to pray without ceasing is an attitude of prayer. It is not moving one’s lips, muttering prayers around the clock, or stopping everything else to pray formal prayers. It is praying “simultaneously.”
If we define prayer strictly as our talking to God, it will be difficult to come up with a way to pray always while we are concentrating on baby formulas or chemical formulas or driving home in rush hour traffic. Thomas Kelly, however, defined prayer as living concurrently in the level of the world and in the level of God’s presence.
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How can I do it all? Puppy mom and soon-to-be grandmother. Caring daughter and loving friend. Daily blogger and Women’s Ministry Director. An ordinary person committed to “going where the love is.”
I wonder if you wonder similar things.
Accomplishing our daily tasks with a prayerful attitude and attentiveness to God’s ever-presence, might we learn to live and pray simultaneously? We are invited to keep up prayer beneath the surface of things, lifting our heart to God during our daily activities. Living concurrently in the level of the world and in the level of God’s presence, the Spirit will equip us with what we need, when we need it. Moment by moment. Day after day.
As Sue writes on page 190, “God works in us while we rest in him.”
“You reveal the path of life to me; in Your presence is abundant joy; in Your right hand are eternal pleasures” (Psalm 16:11, HCSB).
…Sue…
