“Prayer is the Christian life, reduced to its essence.”
~Hank Hanegraaff
Lord, though my hands may toil, the real, abiding work of this day is prayer. Could there be anymore yield to a day than remaining in Your Presence?
“Communion with Christ, the continual conversation of the heart, wherever you are, this is what makes the heart love.”
Love can only be what communion is — a pouring out, a breaking open and a passing around, a sacrifice.
And if love is what makes itself into a roof around a heart to absorbs all the storms, love is the only real dwelling place, and communion with another is all we have to offer and it’s all we have to crawl up under. When I don’t live love, others live homeless. When I don’t love like Christ, I evict souls.
Christ is love embodied and no matter where we are, He and His body are Home.
What else would God have?
… The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love.
~Galatians 5:6
[reposted from http://www.aholyexperience.com/]
a beautiful piece written by a mind that loves our Lord and seeks to walk humbly with Him day by day… http://www.aholyexperience.com/
remembering this… as I’m out in our fields yesterday & today, helping with wheat harvest 2011
My mama said she heard voices.
Said she had heard voices all the years since the dark and the unwanted shadows moving across the walls, across her and the innocence.
Strange, me, her daughter, uttering prayers to hear and after her trying to shut out the voices all her running life.
A friend sends me words, says she’s been sitting outside just listening to things… bees droning over flowers…. the wind in the trees… birds up high. She’s setting her brain in a quiet place away from the link and click and whirl of the world wide web that catches everything trying to soar, and she’s just letting her “brain rewire itself to something slower, more contemplative.”
She wonders if a contemplative life suffers if we have a cyberspace life? She writes the words and I read them again and again, trying to read His answer. Is it possible for the inner ear to hear when the outer ear’s pressed up to the internet? I don’t know…
I can hear the running of water at the other end of the house. Someone’s stirring a cup of something. A chair scrapes across the floor and a child laughs. I try to listen for the Voice in these things.
I need to take meals to the men harvesting in the field.
I stop at the grocery for fresh fruit, for peaches at 99 cents a pound. The lady at the next stand, she’s picking out red cherries. “These look like black cherries to me, not red.” She’s muttering. I’m checking the firmness of peaches. She looks over at me.
“I like them hardly red. A bit sour.” I smile, nod. And she looks down at Shalom leaning close.
“But look at you! Aren’t you just sweet? So beautiful! Beautiful!” Shalom hugs my leg tight. I am struck by that. Being told by a stranger that you are beautiful. I can’t imagine.
When Shalom and I near the checkout, I ask her, “What does it feel like to hear that, Shalom?” I can’t imagine. Sometimes there is the Farmer’s whisper at the edge of an ear and sleep.
Shalom shrugs, “She just liked my curls.”
It’s at checkout #4 that I think I hear. I am trying to hear today. It’s only the way the interior reverberates with the quietness. There are so many voices but this is His: “I never tell you that you are beautiful?”
The red cherry lady draws her cart behind ours. I lay peaches out on the conveyor. A red-haired man sweeps by, arms full of watermelon and he nods to the red cherry lady, “Hey! Good to see you, Grace.” I look up. Her name is Grace?
The stranger who names us beautiful is Grace.
Yes, Lord, I think you have told me about Your beautiful love for the sin ugly —- only a few thousand, countless times. Am I listening?
I bag bananas. Shalom smiles at Grace. I think again of the prophet Jeremiah, telling the people to listen to the Lord, to repent and listen or the wounded wrath of God would fall upon them — listen for their life. I think of this while carrying peaches out.
Listen for your life — by listening to your life. Listen for your life — by listening to your life.
I am trying. Grace is laughing with Shalom — yes, I hear this, and I feel whole… peace.
They’ll be waiting for me in the wheat fields.
I drive and I think this: That it’s an unearthly wonder that we can pray, walk into the throne room of the universe and speak to very God. It’s even more startling that the cosmic King comes into the common and actually speaks intimately to the commoners.
The whole of creation is an amphitheater, the voices of the created and the Creator ringing off everything that is.
Then there was that brave woman who tells me about her life, “I’m listening, I’m listening. But what if No One is speaking?”
I think of my nieces who couldn’t hear. How they had tubes inserted, a myringotomy. To allow air into the middle ear, drain the ear of muffling fluid. To keep the air pressure inside the ear equal to that outside the eardrum. To allow the eardrum to vibrate with sounds again.
Is that what we do when we can’t hear?
A tube of waiting still.
A straw of silence.
A channel of Scripture.
Create an air pocket around the soul — a space that just waits, and maybe without answers.
So that the invisible world tunes to the visible world and the heart vibrates with Him and I wonder if this is how we hear that Some One is speaking?
What is He saying when our next door Mennonite neighbour can’t find her two-year old boy at 9 o’clock in the morning and she looks and the other five children look out in the barn and down in the basement and her farming husband looks out in the shed and at 9:30 they find his body crumpled lifeless under equipment?
What is He saying when a mother has to kneel down and pick up her dead child in her arms?
My throat hurts. I grip the steering wheel tighter.
Maybe the answer is in the finger pried open?
Maybe it’s only the linguists who accept mystery and question marks and believe all the cryptic letters mean love — maybe they are the only ones who decipher the messages of God.
I drive to the wheat fields behind a ‘59 baby blue Chrysler with a license plate that reads “Dble Kick.” I wonder what me being in this place in the universe to read this message means?
I can see the reflection of the driver in his mirror, his black shades. His hair’s in a ponytail under a black leather hat. He waves his tattooed arm hard and I think he’s brushing me back and I press the brakes down.
It’s flies. He’s only brushing away flies from his dashboard.
Sometimes what we hear isn’t what’s being said.
I sit at the end of the field watching the combine.
Watching the heads bow low before the knife.
I watch the humility of wheat.
Shalom runs with Kai up to the top of the old shed, up into the abandoned chicken coop.
Their heads pop out the end through the door’s long gone window. They’ve found a perch.
“We can see the whole field from up here!” Kai’s grinning. Shalom waves down to Opa Voskamp.
He calls, “Hello!”
She waves. “I can hear you!”
She leans out the window.
I watch the Farmer and his father bend over the wheat running from wagons.
I’m listening and He always speaks in the alphabet of Scripture:
“He taught them many things by parables, and in his teaching said: “Listen! A farmer went out to sow his seed…
Still other seed fell on good soil. It came up, grew and produced a crop, multiplying thirty, sixty, or even a hundred times.”
Then Jesus said, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.“
At the end of a wheat field, I think how the parable of the sower is framed by two urgent instructions:
Listen!
Hear!
That in the parable of the sower, “both the verbs listen and hear are in the imperative mode.
They are no invitations or declarations.
They are commands and no other parable in this Gospel is framed at both ends with an order to listen.”
~ Kernaghan, A Commentary on Mark
The wagons are filling. The kernels run, this river of life…
We listen to Christ when we come to salvation, but for a life to yield anything, it needs to keep listening to Him, listening.
Word listening. World listening.
I can hear the the Farmer and his father talking.
When I lay on Shalom’s bed that night, the wheat of 2010 all gathered into bins, I pray with her.
I pray, thank God for clear skies over the harvest and a Farmer and a Father and children working together.
I pray, thank Him for men who provide for families and for kids who wave from windows and for Grace who says we’re beautiful.
I pray, thank Him for wheat bowed down and I thank Him that it is only humility that brings us low enough to really hear what’s pulsing under the world.
I pray thank Him for my Mama who came to the field too, just as the combine came down for the last swaths, came to this, her land that we only rent, loan, and I thank Him that the voices from the past are being silenced with the God-grace of now. Amen. I whisper Amen to that.
Amen, says Shalom.
She and I lay close together in the dark, our arms around each other, Him all around us.
I stroke back her curls, lay there thinking that sometimes I don’t know what I am doing with my days, my messy life — what I am doing here.
And then God’s Word: Stay here. Hear.
Shalom pulls close to me after prayers, lays her head down on my chest.
And she barely whispers it in the dark… in the shadows…
“I can hear your heart.”
::
Isn’t that beautiful? Spirit seeking?
The Kind of God You Need When Life is a bit Rocky….
where we are these days….
Our shadows stretch us long across this field, us bent low, rock pickers combing earth.
Spring’s swooping song.
Song I know and that those before knew, what those now coming are coming to know.
The ground moans after winter’s weight, working stones to the surface, and we, all of us, young or worn, come again with spring, pluck this sod, play this song. Fingers pry around hard edges, dislodge rock from soil beds, then haul limestone and granite to trailer.
I watch us, silhouettes on dirt. Scan, swoop, carry.
We are outlined clay.
Peel off the degrees, strip the careers, tear back the status symbols, this is who we all are, without exceptions.
We are dirt.
And in a moment I am twelve again, heavy with rocks, racing my brother in this same field, arms cradling rocks bigger I hope than his, to trailer heaped. Grandpa, near deaf, slows tractor, clutches, waits, but doesn’t idle back the throttle.
Tractor engine screams for us to hurry, press harder.
We did. We do.
And now time’s raced on, returning Grandpa, returning him to the dirt whence we’ve all come, never to know these kids who walk this same soil, this same field, leaving footprints here too. But here in twilight, we somehow meet, dust bending to touch dust.
“The earth is what we all have in common,” writes Wendell Berry.
In common with those in the past. In common with those in the future. In common with those now, all of us walking and living off this dirt beneath our feet.
“You picked this field, Mom?” Our 13 year-old future man pants the words, his arms too full, his face red with work.
“Every year. This ground’s been picked and picked and picked.” I toss two more rocks onto the trailer’s rising mount and think of the years of harvests before late autumn rains, the shift of clouds and winds, and white flakes falling, years of warmth returning, and us with it, to work up soil and pick these rocks, rocks, rocks.
“Is there a volcano or something underneath this field, just bubbling them up? Where do all these stones keep coming from?” His brother, sweaty, grimy, weary, hollers from the other side of the trailer. He’s kneeling down, both hands gripped to a stubborn one, thin muscles quaking it back and forth.
I laugh, motion him out of the way, kick at the embedded granite. “When I was your age, my brother, sister and I, we used to fill trailer load after trailer load with rocks and these crazy dreams of some spray we’d invent to just ZAP! Disintegrate stones!”
Farmer Husband, wearing this mask of dirt, teeth smiling white, heaves a big one up to the trailer’s edge, rolls it in.
“You too? I thought only my brothers and I had those kind of wild ideas.” I look into those eyes ringed in dirt, and he into mine, and I remember him young, us farm kids, like these kids, us all dreaming the same dreams.
Our oldest reaches up behind the tractor seat for the thermos and some cold wet for us all standing here for a moment. “Guess nobody can figure out a spray or anything better than just this, eh?”
He grins, a racoon of grime, then glugs that water down.
“Nope. This is really the only way. Bend down, pick it up, carry it off.” Farmer Husband takes his turn at thermos spout. He swipes away water dripping from chin with dusty, untiring arm.
“Just one rock at a time.”
I smile at the patch of skin he’s washed clean.
Just one rock at a time. Generations of us dirt-ones, bending low, picking up sin-boulders, wrestling and wrenching out, praying for Him to come do what we can’t do with our rocky lives. Season after season, generation after generation, dirt dealing with dirt and all its stones.
All of us, we’re the same, working with Jesus on our soul fields.
We’re all just picking rocks.
Picking rocks with the God Who does what we all only wildly dream of:
Working with Him who rolls the stones away.
Lord I long for a contemplative mind, a mind awake and seeking to hear, and to listen. Savior, give me ears to hear and a heart, the mind to be a doer of Your Word.
con·tem·plate
[kon-tuh
m-pleyt, -tem-]
Show IPA verb, -plat·ed, -plat·ing.
verb (used with object)
1. to look at or view with continued attention; observe or study thoughtfully: to contemplate the stars.
2. to consider thoroughly; think fully or deeply about: to contemplate a difficult problem.
3. to have as a purpose; intend.
4. to have in view as a future event: to contemplate buying a new car.
verb (used without object)
5. to think studiously; meditate; consider deliberately.
contemplate (ˈkɒntɛmˌpleɪt, -təm-)
— vb
1. to think about intently and at length; consider calmly
2. ( intr ) to think intently and at length, esp for spiritual reasons; meditate
3. to look at thoughtfully; observe pensively
4. to have in mind as a possibility: to contemplate changing jobs
con·tem·pla·tion
[kon-tuh
m-pley-shuh
n, -tem-] noun
1. the act of contemplating; thoughtful observation.
2. full or deep consideration; reflection: religious contemplation.
3. purpose or intention.
4. prospect or expectation.
contemplation (ˌkɒntɛmˈpleɪʃən, -təm-) — n
1. thoughtful or long consideration or observation
2. Compare meditation spiritual meditation esp (in Christian religious practice) concentration of the mind and soul upon God
3. purpose or intention
Main Entry: contemplate
Part of Speech: verb
Definition: gaze at
Synonyms: audit, behold, consider, examine, eye, inspect, notice, observe, peer, penetrate, peruse, pierce, pore over, probe, pry, regard, scan, scrutinize, see, stare at, study, survey, view, witness
Antonyms: disregard, look away, scorn
Main Entry: contemplate
Part of Speech: verb
Definition: think about seriously; plan
Synonyms: aim, aspire to, brood over, chew over, consider, cool out, deliberate, design, envisage, excogitate, expect, foresee, intend, kick around, mean, meditate on, mind, mull over, muse over, observe, percolate, perpend, ponder, propose, purpose, reflect upon, ruminate, size up, speculate, study, take in, think of, weigh
Antonyms: discard, disregard, forget, neglect, scorn, slight
