The Lord spoke to me today. It’s been a long time and I had almost resigned myself to the silence and the distance that I had felt. The past two years have been very taxing personally, and I just had gotten to where I no longer understood my place; but I have shot up some little prayers, and as always in these cases, I believe that I have been in the prayers of others. And in the way that I know it is God…He spoke.
The way I know is that it is almost always a deeply quiet and unelaborated…sort of a knowing… of a very simple message. Usually that short message creates a new wellspring of thoughts that come up from it’s touch. Because it is almost palpable, spiritually.
The message for me was to remember my calling. That simple. Yet, it spoke so much to me and renewed my hope and yet at the same time had an edge of discipline to it.
All of us have a calling, and gifts to go along with that. Some of us know our callings, some are just discovering them, some are yet to be discovered, but we all have our place and purpose.
Mine have always seemed to relate to and around prayer, but that is something that has gone to the back burner of my life. The type of prayer that is.. I don’t know what to call it, vocational prayer? Something much more deliberate than my now usual shooting something up to God on the fly, or the occasional more quiet time. Intercession type prayer, that’s the right phrase. Where it isn’t all about me, or my concerns.
I love gardening, I love blogging, there are lots of things important to me, but they are not my calling. They are not what I am best fitted for, but then that has been a part of my problem. I sort of lost sight what I was best fitted for, or why.
I have lots I could say on prayer, perhaps I will in little bits along the way -except for one thing. That one thing is that much has already been said and written about prayer, it is the doing of it that is the most needed. And the most neglected. That is something that had most discouraged me. Prayer in churches, and in the last couple years I moved around in my church life, so this is not just one church….. prayer in churches seems to have become the labor of a small little core group. Often less than five percent or so of the attending congregation. It was not always so, and I don’t know how it got to that.
It is one of those coincidences of God that I got my message on a day when I have read about the renewed move to call Christians to become more participant in the political scene. I intuit within that this means some of the surprising turn my views online have taken, I am moving much more to a moderate stance ( relatively), than I had found myself previously, are going to escalate. I will find myself seeking a new balance in my relationships to my fellow Christians. I don’t really look forward to that, if you want to know the truth.
I feel contrarian, but it isn’t really contrarian, it is moderation. In a world gone wild I have always found that prayer provides a powerful inner ballast, an iron spine, if you want to call it that.
I thank God that He gave me a message timely for my soul.
He has never failed me, or left me to my own poor devices. For that I am extremely grateful…because my need for Him is so very great.