father love

Opening Prayer: O Thou who art the only-begotten Son, teach us, we beseech Thee, to pray, “Our Father.”  We thank Thee, Lord, for these Living Blessed Words which Thou hast given us.  We thank Thee for the millions who in them have learnt to know and worship the father, and for what they have been to us.  Lord, it is as if we needed days and weeks in Thy school of prayer with each separate petition; so deep and full are they.  But we look to Thee to lead us deeper into their meaning: do it, we pray Thee, for Thy Name’s sake; Thy name is Son of the Father.  (With Christ in the School of Prayer by Andrew Murray)

Scripture: Luke 11:1-13

Journal: What happens within you when you think of God as your Father?  How does your time in prayer help you to see him in that way?  How does seeing God as your Father affect your prayer life?

Reflection: It is interesting that Jesus begins and ends this little instructional session on prayer with the image of God as our Father.  Obviously he is trying to help mold and shape both our thinking and our practice.  In fact, one always affects the other.  What we truly believe about God will always determine our practice; and our practice, in turn, will always impact what we genuinely believe to be true about God.  It is a continual loop.

     Therefore, Jesus is trying to firmly establish the idea of the Fatherhood and the Father-love of God deep in our hearts, minds, and souls.  Because this one image determines, to a large degree, how we see and relate to God.  He calls on fathers to consider how they feel about their own children and to use that as a frame of reference for how God truly feels about all of us.

     The way you feel about your own children—your deep love and affection for them, what you truly desire for them, and how you care for them—is only just beginning to scratch the surface of how your Heavenly Father, your Abba, feels about you.  Your desire for them to be joyful and free and prosperous and happy and free from shame is just the beginning of what I desire for you.  I am your Abba.  I love you immensely.  I care about every little thing that happens to you, every little detail of your life.  Live in my love.  Prayer is one of the main ways you can do that.  When you pray to me as Abba it helps you come to see me as your loving Father.  A Father who longs for you to be whole and peaceful and true to who you really are, who you were created to be.  A Father who longs to see you being fruitful and giving and loving the way I am.  A Father who longs for you to know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that you are deeply, unconditionally, and eternally loved.  I love you.  You are my beloved and with you I am well-pleased.

Prayer

Closing Prayer: Lord Jesus, reveal to us the Father.  Let His name, His infinite Father-love, the love with which He loved Thee, according to Thy prayer, be in us.  Then shall we say aright, “Our Father!”  Then shall we apprehend Thy teaching and the first spontaneous breathing of our heart will be: “Our Father, Thy Name, Thy Kingdom, Thy Will.”  And we shall bring our own needs and our sins and our temptations to Him in the confidence that the love of such a Father cares for all.  Blessed Lord, we are Thy scholars, we trust Thee; do teach us to pray, “Our Father.”  Amen. (With Christ in the School of Prayer by Andrew Murray)

weeds and wheat

Opening Prayer: Father, allow the soil of my soul to be a place that is fertile and receptive to all that you desire to plant within me.  Tend it carefully and nurture all that has sprung up in me that is of you; that I may be a garden of your delight. Through Jesus.  Amen.

Scripture: Matthew 13:24-30

Journal: What is the state of your life and soul these days?  Where is there wheat?  Where are there weeds?  How does this story speak to your life today?

Reflection: I don’t know about you, but I’m often tempted, when I read a parable like this, to take the easy way out.  I am tempted to separate and divide and differentiate myself from others, creating a comfortable space for me to exist in the story.  In this case, I quickly tell myself that I am the wheat and they (whoever they may be) are the weeds and thus I am able to comfortably dismiss the story at that.  But the parables of Jesus do not leave me that option.  They are true on so many different levels that they invite me to look at the story from many different angles until I find the angle by which God wants to speak to me that day.

     The truth is that I cannot conveniently separate myself from them because the fact of the matter is that I am always a mixture of both.  I am always a messy combination of weeds and wheat.  Both are always growing side by side within me, not just around me.  I am not given the option of merely being a spectator in the story, but am called to be a participant.  I am asked to consider where the wheat is in my life.  What is good and beautiful that is growing within me these days?  And I am also asked to consider where the weeds are.  What is not so beautiful, but hinders and chokes out the life and the fruit God wants to grow in me?  And what am I supposed to do with that?

     I am not given an out in the story.  I am given an invitation to come further in.  To consider the tension of living life with both wheat and weeds growing within me, and how he wants to meet me in the middle of that.  And what he wants to do within me as a result of that.  He wants me to consider the life that he wants for me (and in me) and how best to nurture and grow that life in my soul.  He wants me to consider what his hopes and dreams for me are, and not settle for anything short of that.

Prayer

Closing Prayer: Grow your good grace in me, O God.  Make me receptive to the ways that you water and tend this garden of my heart.  Prune me where I need pruning, nurture me where I need nurturing, weed me where I need weeding, and care for me tenderly where I need your tender care.  I love you, O Gardner of my soul.  In the tenderness of Jesus.  Amen.

contemplation

Opening Prayer: One thing have I asked of the Lord, that will I seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and to inquire in his temple. For he will hide me in his shelter in the day of trouble; he will conceal me under the cover of his tent; he will lift me high upon a rock. ~Psalm 27:4-5

Scripture: Psalm 27:1-8

Journal: How often do you simply sit in God’s presence and gaze upon him, and he upon you?  Try that today.  Sense the love and the healing and the connection that comes from simply being with him.  Try this for a period of time each day and see what it begins to do in you.

Reflection: Unlike meditation, an active and reflective kind of prayer, contemplation is a more passive and receptive way to pray in which silent presence exposes the final poverty of a “figuring things out” approach to prayer.  Contemplation is seeing, beholding, being in the presence of something that eludes our ability to capture it in concepts or language.  In the Christian tradition, contemplative prayer involves not only seeing but also, and even more to the point, being seen by God.

     All relationships, including our relationship with God, are born and sustained in acts of mutual regard, seeing another and being seen by another.  How we are seen determines the emotional ground of our interactions.  If shame forms the emotional atmosphere of our being seen by God, others, and self, corrosive self-hatred can be the only outcome.  But ground our relationships—our experiences of seeing and being seen by God, self, and others—in compassionate grace, and appropriate self-love has a chance of taking hold, growing, prospering.

     Grace empowers contemplation with compassion, and only in that reassuring place do we dare to take tentative steps in the direction of seeing ourselves as God see us.  Healing happens only when we trust enough to be “exposed” in the presence of another and find ourselves embraced rather than condemned to lonely self-derision.

     What happens in God’s compassionate presence is that without our knowing how or when, God’s loving care slowly heals our vision, rearranges our memories, and takes our story into the heart of the revolutionary story of the death and resurrection of Jesus.  God’s compassionate presence, if given a chance, keeps extending the depth and breadth of its silent, healing touch until one day, quite miraculously, we notice that our need to demonize ourselves has ever so slightly loosened its grip on our soul.  This is the slow work of grace. (The Grace of Mattering: Safety from Shame by Joe McHugh, Weavings, Volume XXXI, Number 4, Aug/Sept/Oct 2016)

Prayer

Closing Prayer: You have said, “Seek my face.” My heart says to you, “Your face, Lord, do I seek.” Hide not your face from me. ~Psalm 27:8-9

shame

Opening Prayer: Gracious Father, it’s nearly impossible for me to imagine there was a day when the emotion of shame did not exist. In their innocence, our first parents were absolutely free of any need to turn away from your gaze, or from the gaze of one another. There was no need to fear, cover up, hide, pose, pretend, get defensive, feel guilty, make excuses, blame the other, want to disappear, do penance, numb out, medicate, or try any other broken attempt to deal with the disintegrating effects of shame.  It is only in you, Lord Jesus, that we now find hope to deal with both our guilt and our shame. ~Scotty Smith

Scripture: Romans 5:1-5

Journal: Where in your life are you still a prisoner to shame?  What does freedom from shame look like?  How does that happen? Will you move toward freedom form shame today?

Reflection: When shame has the chance to burrow its way into a soul’s most sensitive yet unprotected places, that person finds it hard to be seen up close by anyone, including God, without a fretful impulse to turn away, to avert the eyes, to flee from the vulnerable familiarity love invites.  Shame’s victims believe everybody sees them the way they see themselves: as unredeemable, undeserving of being taken seriously, certainly unworthy of being loved, fiercely wary and painfully incapable of even taking a chance on love themselves.  Shame is the contaminated ground in which the seeds of emotional self-destruction take deep root.

     People who travel with shame as their companion fear exposure more than anything else.  The mere possibility of having one’s defectiveness abruptly seen by another evokes a panic so pervasive and terrifying that it can’t even be acknowledged, much less faced, disarmed, and finally embraced in sustained moments of God’s extravagant, compassionate grace.

     Such individuals are driven to live in hiding, out of sight—from God, from others, from self.  Alienation like this converts shame from feeling into a way of life in which people become their shame.  In the process, a person falls into line behind Adam and Eve, waiting nervously for the inevitable expulsion from Eden’s garden, a cold-blooded excommunication from life.

     Shame is the spirit that works overtime to stop God’s love in its tracks, turning the possibility of love into an unattainable dream that’s finally and sadly abandoned.  It also keeps people from honoring and enjoying the instinctive desire to be desired, to be seen as worthwhile, to experience oneself as God's beloved.  And shame fills individuals with resentment and rage against those who seem to find love, significance, and personal safety with so little apparent effort.

     Shame and I were longtime companions, and hard experience has taught me that silent contemplation alone emboldens one’s soul to reach out in hope to the Cross, our one sure path to safe, nurturing, holy ground.  Contemplation shows us that God is nothing like us: although we may turn away from God, others, and self in shame, God never turns away from us.  In fact, contemplation’s silent glance turns out to be the fertile ground in which God’s redeeming love takes root.  In this safe place we start to see by being seen as worthwhile, by knowing that we matter.

     Slowly learning to trust enough to be seen by God as lovable—to be held in God’s healing gaze—is what can finally lure us out of hiding, out of the shadows and into the warming light of God’s creative love.  It’s almost like being led back to Eden and discovering that God never wanted us to leave in the first place.  We were expelled because we learned, or perhaps better, were taught to believe the lies that instilled shame.  In contemplation’s soul-sculpting silence we learn to trust the healing truth of our worth and lovableness. (The Grace of Mattering: Safety from Shame by Joe McHugh, Weavings, Volume XXXI, Number 4, Aug/Sept/Oct 2016)

Prayer

Closing Prayer: Jesus, we cry out for freedom today—freedom in our ongoing struggles with shame, both the shame we feel and the shame we give. Though our guilt has been completely taken care of by your work on the cross, Jesus, we still feel varying degrees of shame, and we act out in a variety of destructive ways. We need grace upon grace—a deeper healing, a greater liberation.

story

Opening Prayer: O Jesus, speak to me during this time about the story you are telling, the story I was made for.  Open my eyes, Lord, to the ways that story is being told—and lived—in the events and circumstances of this day.  Show me how all that happens to me this day echoes your larger Story if only I will keep my heart focused on you.  In your name I pray.  Amen.

Scripture: Matthew 13:10-17

Journal: What is your story with God these days?  How has God used story in your life recently to capture your heart in a new and fresh way?  How might you tell that story in a way that allows others to take part in it?

Reflection: He replied, “You’ve been given insight into God’s kingdom. You know how it works. Not everybody has this gift, this insight; it hasn’t been given to them. Whenever someone has a ready heart for this, the insights and understandings flow freely. But if there is no readiness, any trace of receptivity soon disappears. That’s why I tell stories: to create readiness, to nudge the people toward receptive insight. In their present state they can stare till doomsday and not see it, listen till they’re blue in the face and not get it. I don’t want Isaiah’s forecast repeated all over again . . . (The Message)

     The power of story is an amazing thing.  Jesus knew this all too well, that’s why he spoke in parables.  He knew that stories have a way of opening us up to truth that we cannot see, hear, or understand otherwise.  They have the ability to slip past our defenses and penetrate our hearts; even when our hearts are calloused, or our ears are weak, or our eyes are dull.  Stories create new ways of seeing and being.  That’s why songs and books and art and poetry have the ability to speak to us in ways that other things do not.  They put us in touch with the larger, or deeper, story that is going on within and around us.  They help us stay in touch with our own story with God, and the story of what God is doing in our lives and in our world.

Prayer

Closing Prayer: Write your blessed name, O Lord, upon my heart, there to remain, so indelibly engraved that no prosperity, no adversity, shall ever move me from your love. ~Thomas a Kempis

soil

Opening Prayer: Father, allow the soil of my soul to be a place that is fertile and receptive to all that you desire to plant in my heart.  Tend it carefully and nurture all that has sprung up in me that is of you; that I may be a garden of your delight. Through Jesus.  Amen.

Scripture: Matthew 13:1-9

Journal: Walk the field of your soul today, what do you see?  Where do you notice each type of soil within you?  Where do you notice each type of soil around you?  How can you make the soil more receptive to the seed?

Reflection: A more fitting name for this parable might be The Parable of the Soil rather than The Parable of the Sower.  After all, the soil is the only thing that doesn’t remain constant.  The seed is always going to be the seed.  And the sower sows regardless of the circumstances.  Yet it is the state of the soil that varies.  Which makes you wonder how one might go about changing hard, or rocky, or thorny soil into good soil—if that’s even possible.  How do you work the soil of a field, or a soul, in order to transform it into a place that is receptive to the seed?  How do you transform it into a place where fruitfulness is a real possibility?

     A good farmer (which I’m not) would know how.  A good farmer might see this parable for its possibilities.  And maybe that is just what Jesus was counting on.  A farmer would begin to consider how to make the soil as receptive as possible.  He or she knows that hard soil can be plowed and rocky soil can be tilled and thorny soil can be weeded.  A good farmer also knows that soil can be enriched by adding compost and manure in order to make it a better home for the seed to grow and produce fruit.

     Maybe those are the same questions we should be asking of the soul.  What is the state of my soul?  Where are each of these soils my reality?  And how do I nurture the soil of my soul—as well as the souls of those around me—in order to make it as receptive to what God wants to grow in me as possible?  He who has ears, let him hear.

Prayer

Closing Prayer: Thank you, O Lord, that you are always at work in the soil of my soul whether I can see it or not.  Give me wisdom and discernment to know how to give your seed the most fertile soil possible for it to grow.  And then let me trust you to do the rest.  Grow your life in me.  Through Jesus.  Amen.

training for godliness

Opening Prayer: From the desire for life to be easy and comfortable, O Lord, deliver me.  From the temptation to live on the surface of things, O Lord, defend me.  From the tendency to be lackadaisical and complacent in my life with you, O Lord, protect me.  Give me a yearning, O Lord, for a deeper, richer, and fuller life with you.  And then give me the courage and the strength to move in that direction.  Amen.

Scripture: 1 Timothy 4:6-10

Journal: How are you training yourself for the purpose of godliness?  What spiritual disciplines are producing good space in your life with God?  What else might be beneficial?

Reflection: A spiritual discipline is the concentrated effort to create some inner and outer space in our lives, where obedience can be practiced.  Through a spiritual discipline we prevent the world from filling our lives to such an extent that there is no place left to listen.  A spiritual discipline sets us free to pray or, to say it better, allows the Spirit of God to pray in us. (Making All Things New by Henri J. M. Nouwen)

Prayer

Closing Prayer: O Eternal God!  You are a deep sea, into which the deeper I enter the more I find, and the more I find the more I seek. ~Catherine of Sienna