February 13, 2020
Spiritual reading is a regular, essential part of the life of prayer, and particularly is it the support of adoring prayer. It is important to increase our sense of God’s richness and wonder by reading what his great lovers have said about him.
January 11, 2020
Let the first act on waking be to place yourself, your heart, mind, faculties, your whole being, in God’s hands. Ask Him to take entire possession of you, to be the Guide of your soul, your Life, your Wisdom, your Strength. He wills that we seek him in all our needs, that we may both know Him truly, and draw closer and closer to Him; and in prayer we gain an invisible force which will triumph over seemingly hopeless difficulties.
December 28, 2019
We are at this moment as close to God as we really choose to be. True, there are times when we would like to know a deeper intimacy, but when it comes to the point, we are not prepared to pay the price involved.
Learning to hear when there is no crisis is good practice for when we are under fire and need urgent help.
Wendy Backlund
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Believe that when you come into the presence of God you can have all you came for. You can take it away, and you can use it, for all the power of God is at your disposal in response to your faith.
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God is our true Friend, who always gives us the counsel and comfort we need. Our danger lies in resisting Him; so it is essential that we acquire the habit of hearkening to His voice, or keeping silence within, and listening so as to lose nothing of what He says to us. We know well enough how to keep outward silence, and to hush our spoken words, but we know little of interior silence. It consists in hushing our idle, restless, wandering imagination, in quieting the promptings of our worldly minds, and in suppressing the crowd of unprofitable thoughts which excite and disturb the soul.
God speaks to us through our desires, then as we lay them at His feet, He helps us sort them out and quiets our hearts to accept what He has already prepared.
The Great Shepherd makes his servant to lie down there. There are times when men say they are too busy to stop; when they think they are doing God service by going on. Now and then God makes such a one to lie down. He has been driving through the pastures so fast that he has not known their greenness, nor apprehended their sweet savor; and God does not mean that he shall lose all that, and so He makes him lie down. Many a man has had to thank God for some such enforced season of rest, in which he first learned the sweetness of meditation on the Word, and of lying still in God’s hands and waiting God’s pleasure.
Life can get hard, and it’s easy to get mired in feelings of insecurity, fear, doubt, anger and confusion. If we keep trying to preserve what only God can renew, we will continue to struggle. And then we won’t be able to give anything to the lost and dying world that surrounds us. But if we go to the source Himself, if we fill ourselves daily with His living Word and refreshing presence, guess what happens? Whatever we are struggling against begins to fade away and is replaced by God’s love, joy, peace and hope.
Our religious activities should be ordered in such a way as to have plenty of time for the cultivation of the fruits of solitude and silence.