listening, monday

Monday, January 26

Come to Stillness: Take a few minutes to allow your mind and heart to be still before God.

          

Opening Prayer: Speak, O Lord, as we come to You, to receive the food of Your holy word.  Take Your truth, plant it deep in us; shape and fashion us in Your likeness, that the light of Christ might be seen today, in our acts of love and our deeds of faith.  Speak, O Lord, and fulfill in us all your purposes, for Your glory. (Speak O Lord by Stuart Townend, Keith Getty)

Scripture Reading for the Day: 1 Kings 19:1-13

Reading for Reflection:

 

Our relationship with God would be greatly improved if we saw prayer as listening to God rather than talking to him.  Think of those boring people who talk endlessly to others (or rather, at others).  All their words show that they are distanced from others rather than close to them.  Could this also be the reason why our prayers lack insight into the character of God?  Openness to God, submissiveness to God, listening to his “still, small voice,” may give us far more insight than the constant chatter which we are used to calling prayer. (The Transforming Power of Prayer by James Houston)

Reflection and Listening: silent and written

Prayer: for the church, for others, for myself    

                     

Closing Prayer: You must adapt your word to my smallness, so that it can enter into the tiny dwelling of my finiteness—the only dwelling in which I can live—without destroying it.  Then I shall be able to understand; such a word I can take in without that agonizing bewilderment of mind and that cold fear clutching my heart.  If you would speak such an “abbreviated” word, which would not say everything but only something simple which I could grasp, then I could breathe freely again.

     O Infinite God, you have actually willed to speak such a word to me!  You have restrained the ocean of your infinity from flooding in over the poor little wall which protects my tiny life’s acre from your vastness.  Not the waters of your great sea, but only the dew of your gentleness is to spread itself over my poor little plot of earth.  You have come to me in a human word.  For you, the Infinite, are the God of our Lord Jesus Christ. (Encounters with Silence by Karl Rahner)