Psalm 23:2 “He leads me beside quiet waters, he restores my soul.”
In the business of life, I try to have a weekly day of prayer, skipping food to make time for being in God’s presence. The crazy thing is, because my identity is so tied up in ‘doing’, I often get to the end of that day and think it wasn’t a ‘productive’ day, as if that time spent with God was somehow wasted. Can you relate? How many of us do a quick devotional out of duty so we can then just get on with our day? Listen to the piercing words of Henri Nouwen:
“To live a life that is not dominated by the desire to be relevant but is instead safely anchored in the knowledge of God’s first love, we have to be mystics. A mystic is a person whose identity is deeply rooted in God’s first love. If there is any focus that the Christian leader of the future will need, it is the discipline of dwelling in the presence of the One who keeps asking us, ‘Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me?’ It is the discipline of contemplative prayer. Through contemplative prayer we can stop ourselves from being pulled from one urgent issue to another and from becoming strangers to our own and God’s heart. Contemplative prayer keeps us home, rooted and safe, even when we are on the road, moving from place to place, and often surrounded by sounds of
violence and war. Contemplative prayer deepens in us the knowledge that we are already free, that we have already found a place to dwell, that we already belong to God, even though everyone and everything around us keeps suggesting the opposite.”
If those words don’t rock your soul, you’ve read them too fast. Try again. It took me until the third reading to breathe more deeply and process the incredible reality that I am already free, home, rooted, and safe, without any of my ‘doing’…
Lord, I choose to slow down, breathe deeply, and listen to you today. Amen!
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