Biblical Solitude Is Not Solitude

"On several occasions we find Jesus retreating from the crowd simply to be alone. But the evidence suggests that he was doing more than simply seeking a little peace and quiet. Instead we find him withdrawing from the business of his ministry to be alone with God. This is the classic definition of solitude - not being alone, but withdrawing from the everyday stuff of life to be alone with the father."

- Dr Leslie Hardin. The Spirituality of Jesus Solitude, quiet

Sometimes Silence!

Contrasting the KJV style and language prayers of his grandfather, with that of his early youth and camp workers views on prayer. The two extremes. 

"As I matured, I realised that not everything in the depths of my heart and mind should be expressed in the presence of the the Almighty."

-  Leslie Hardin. The Spirituality of Jesus

Talked About - But Rarely Undertaken?

"Prayer often seems like a deep mystery.

Judging by the number of books that have appeared in Christian history on

the subject of prayer, it is apparently easier explained than practiced."

- Les Hardin. The Spirituality of Jesus

We Join The Stream Of Prayer.

Entering a constant flowing stream. It's nothing we've started, its only a stream we enter or not, we join or not.

We Are Joining Prayer

"We never begin to pray, we always enter into prayer that has already begun before us and without us, the prayer of the church. We may pray alone, but we are never alone when we pray."

Kim Fabricius

We Want the Fast Road To Growth God.

“Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something
unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability—
and that it may take a very long time."

- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Inebriate My Heart

"Oh! that Thou wouldest enter into my heart, and inebriate it, that I may forget my ills, and embrace Thee, my sole good!"

The Prayer Tuning Fork

"The word is "resonance." 

Prayer is actually setting out a tuning fork. All you can really do in the spiritual life is get tuned to receive the always present message. Once you are tuned, you will receive, and it has nothing to do with worthiness or the group you belong to..... "

- Richard Rohr. The Naked Now 

"I simply began to pray for forgiveness, thinking the cherries might line up and the light atop the machine would flash, spilling shiny tokens of good fate. What I was doing was more in line with superstition than spirituality. But it worked. .... I liked this God very much because you hardly had to talk to it and it never talked back."

- Donald Millar. Blue Like Jazz

My Doggy and Kitty Jesus Relationship

"Christianity is a relationship religion. The core relationship is a relationship with Christ. Everything depends on the administration and management of that relationship. However, some of us are more careful about maintaining and managing relationships with our pets than our relationships with Jesus, God-made flesh."

- Leonard Sweet. AquaChurch 2.0

Happy to Pray?

Negro Spiritual 

"I went down in de valley to pray,
My soul got happy an’ I stayed all day."

Satan Was There When I Went To Pray

A Negro Spiritual (What is the proper term now?)

------------------

I went down de hillside to make a one prayer,

An’ when I get dere ole satan wus dere,

O what you think he said to me?

Said, “Off frum here you better be.”

Old satan tole me to my face,

“I’ll git you when a you leave this place;”

O brother dat scere me to my heart,

I was ’feared to walk a when it wus dark.

I started home but I did pray,

An’ I met ole satan on de way;

Ole satan made a one grab at me,

But he missed my soul an’ I went free.

I tell you brother you better not laugh,

Ole satan’ll run you down his path,

If he runs you lak he run me,

You’ll be glad to fall upon yo’ knee.

The Revival The Church Doesn't See

"That turned out to be true for me. In my days of waiting for something incredible that would infuse our congregation with a fresh dose of passion and power, I only grew increasingly frustrated. Our endless prayer meetings seemed to make no difference. I begged him and he seemed silent. It wasn’t until years later that I discovered he hadn’t been silent after all. He’d been nudging me down a road I couldn’t see because I was so focused on him doing what I thought best. But I only discovered that after I found myself excluded from the congregation I had helped to plant, due to a contest of power I didn’t have the heart to engage. Though I was offered numerous pastoral jobs elsewhere, I was not interested. I figured I would find my way back into another congregation at some point, but I wasn’t in a hurry to do so. I wanted to decompress. During that time, my wife and I began to discover that the renewal we had hoped for was already happening beyond the walls of our traditional congregation. We saw God at work in people around us, and began to taste of the worldwide phenomenon of people who were all spontaneously and simultaneously moving beyond the traditional congregational to learn to live in the Father’s affection and freely share it with others. It captured our hearts and allowed us to embrace a depth of community with others that wasn’t distracted by structures and programs. It’s made me wonder that we don’t see it encased in a building or a conference anywhere because the moment it is, it begins to wither under human control. Honestly, I couldn’t have seen it as long as I was focused on the religious system we had built and prayed so hard for God to revitalize. I know that’s threatening to those who think the only place God can move is in a sanctioned institution, but that is only because they haven’t looked elsewhere. I was shocked by the people I met outside those structures who were passionate about following Jesus, loving others, and sharing his life with the world around them. I often tell people who are so condemning of people outside that they have no idea what they would see of God’s reality if they set aside all their institutional engagements for two years. It takes some time for the fog to clear, but many discover that God was at work in many ways they just couldn’t see when they were focused on the endless activities, political wrangling, and corporate needs of an institution. Even people leaving may be part of the very revival those who condemn them are praying for. Some have tagged them the “Dones,” but what many of them are craving is a simpler, more authentic faith that becomes part of the fabric of their daily lives. It’s the routine and obligations of an institution that lull many to spiritual slumber. The reason I no longer pray for revival is because I’m already living in the reality I hoped it would bring. The reason I don’t seek a new church model is because I discovered that it wasn’t important. God moves among people, not systems, and while he can move in and around any system we devise, it is not his priority to revive systems, but to renew people."

- Wayne Jacobsen. Beyond Sundays 

When God Seems NOT Near

"Mother Teresa once wrote to the Rev. Michael van der Peet:

"Jesus has a very special love for you. As for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear.""

Tony Kriz. Aloof 

My Christ Fold You?

The God of life with guarding hold you;

the loving Christ with guarding fold you;

the Holy Spirit, guarding, mould you;

each night of life to aid, enfold you;

each day and night of life uphold you.

- The Patrick Compline 

Stop Seeking Answers From God?

"Spiritual lust causes me to demand an answer from God, instead of seeking God himself who gives the answer....

Whenever we insist that God should give us an answer to prayer we are off track. The purpose of prayer is that we get a hold of God, not of the answer."

- Oswald Chambers. My Utmost For His Highest

Strong Prayer

"Be with the weak to make them strong and with the strong to make them gentle. Cheer the lonely with thy company and the distracted with thu solitude."

- John Baillie. A Diary Of Private Prayer.

Prayer is Incarnation

" Prayer is a moment of incarnation - God with us. God involved in the details of my life."

- Paul E. Miller, A Praying Life: Connecting with God in a Distracting World

Church Is The Easy Thing

"For some reason, it is easier to attend church services than quite simply to reverence the real - "the practice of the presence of God," as some have called it. Making this commitment doesn't demand a lot of dogmatic wrangling or managerial support, just vigilance, desire, and willingness to begin again and again.

- Richard Rohr. Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer 

No Tangible Experiences of God

"... I compared the Camino to a Prayer Labyrinth and the Santiago Cathedral as the center of the Labyrinth. The journey to the center is a process of dying, of letting go, of repenting, of releasing lost dreams, of laying down past rejections, failures and hurts. Sitting here in a cafe in Santiago, that sentiment feels more true now then when I wrote it, closer to the beginning of the Way.

So many of my friends (and maybe me too) are losing the ability to trust God. They are losing faith because God doesn’t show up. God is not fulfilling the promises of so many pastors and worship songs.

I have to keep reminding myself that Mother Teresa struggled to believe and said that God had never spoken to her. I need to remember that the vast majority of Bible characters did not get their hopes fulfilled or have tangible spiritual experiences.

I am in good company.

Instead of God living up to my expectations, I am going to meditate these next days on what it might look like to lean into God’s expectations.

- Tony Kriz (Blog May 29, 2018)

An Empty Left & Right

"If we are not tasting the fullness of the now we will play the game of power to fill the emptiness. If we're playing the domination game, we can be as trapped on the left as on the right. Our greatest disillusionment with so much of even contemporary Progressive thinking is that it is still playing the power game."

- Richard Rohr. Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer.