digging down deep.

I realize it has been awhile since I posted something deeper than cool dance/rap segments from JF and JT, something about the Muppets, a road trip, or a dog dying. My life is not as surface as it appears...

At the beginning of the summer I went to Uncommon Ground to watch a good friend's show. I was able to reconnect with an old friend that I hadn't seen in nearly a year, and I was able to meet someone new. Since I have been working my job for almost a year now, God has truly been stretching my capacity to understand his goodness in small ways. How can I think God to be good when I am sitting next to a child who endures seizures at least 15 times a day? How can I think God to be good when I am trying to communicate with a child who has not spoken a word in his life? Yet, I do believe God to be good. He is the embodiment of goodness.

This "someone new", now almost two months ago referred me to an author that she thought might help me to process what I experience daily with my students. Henri J.M. Nouwen. Since that conversation I have come to really love HJMN. I just finished a book he wrote concerning the desert father's philosophy on prayer, silence, and solitude; three things recently pointed out to me by God that I truly lack. It is not natural for me to be still. It is hard for me to be silent. And even though I do love being away from people, I do not often enough seek God in my solitude. I have been greatly challenged by what I read; to consider how I might seek the Lord's help in changing these things and seek to move closer to Jesus with the Spirit's guidance.

What follows is a segment from each section that the Lord has used to bring me near.

Solitude: solitude molds self-righteous people into gentle, caring, forgiving persons who are so deeply convinced of their own great sinfulness and so fully aware of God's even greater mercy that their life itself becomes ministry.

Silence: Too often our words are superfluous, inauthentic, and shallow. It is a good discipline to wonder in each new situation if people wouldn't be better served by our silence than by our words. But having acknowledged this, a more important message from the desert is that silence is above all a quality of the heart that can stay with us even in our conversation with others.

Prayer: Solitude and silence can never be separated from the call to unceasing prayer. If solitude were primarily an escape from a busy job, and silence primarily an escape from a noisy milieu, they could easily become very self-centered forms of asceticism. But solitude and silence are for prayer...The literal translation of the words "pray always" is "come to rest"...it is a rest in God in the midst of very intense daily struggle...Prayer is standing in the presence of God with the mind in the heart; that is, at that point of our being where there is no divisions or distinctions and where we are totally one. There God's Spirit dwells and there the great encounter takes place. There heart speaks to heart, because there we stand before the face of the Lord, all-seeing, within us....We have to realize that here the word heart is used in its full biblical meaning...the word heart in the Jewish-Christian tradition refers to the source of all physical, emotional, intellectual, volitional, and moral energies...the prayer of the heart is indeed the way to the purity of heart that gives us eyes to see the reality of our existence. This purity of heart allows us to see more clearly, not only our own needy, distorted, and anxious self but also the caring face of our compassionate God.

When we have been remodeled into living witnesses of Christ through solitude, silence, and prayer, we will no longer have to worry about whether we are saying the right thing or making the right gesture, because then Christ will make his presence known even when we are not aware of it.

~selections from The Way of the Heart: Henri J.M. Nouwen

I am very excited about the next book I am reading by Nouwen... it is called Adam: God's Beloved. It is a memoir that Nouwen wrote toward the end of his life concerning a severely disabled man he became good friends with during the last part of his life.