the soil of your soul, day 3

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

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. (JLB)

Psalm for the Week: Psalm 65

Scripture for the Day: Mark 4:30-32

Reading for Reflection:

     Living things need an appropriate climate in order to grow and bear fruit.  If they are to develop to completion, they require an environment that allows their potential to be realized.  The seed will not grow unless there is soil that can feed it, light to draw it forth, warmth to nurture and moisture that unlocks its vitality.  Time is also required for its growth to unfold.

     Meditation is the attempt to provide the soul with the proper environment in which to grow and become.  In the lives of people like St. Francis or St. Catherine of Genoa one gets a glimpse of what the soul is able to become.  Often this is seen as the result of heroic action lying beyond the possibility of ordinary people.  The flowering of the human soul, however, is more a matter of the proper spiritual environment than of particular gifts or disposition or heroism.  How seldom we wonder at the growth of the great redwood from a tiny seed dropped at random on the littered floor of the forest.  From one seed is grown enough wood to frame several hundred houses.  The human soul has seed potential like this if it has the right environment.  Remember that only in a few mountain valleys were the conditions right for the Sequoia gigantean, the mighty redwood, to grow.

     For both the seed and the soul, these things all take time.  In both cases there is need for patience.  Most of us know enough not to poke at the seed to see if it is sprouting, or to try to hurry it along with too much water or fertilizer or cultivation.  The same respect must be shown for the soul as its growth starts to take place.  Growth can seldom be forced in nature.  Whether it is producing a tree or a human personality, nature unfolds its growth slowly, silently. (The Other Side of Silence by Morton T. Kelsey)

Reflection and Listening: silent and written

Prayer: for the church, for others, for myself

Song for the Week: You Have Redeemed My Soul

You have redeemed my soul from the pit of emptiness

You have redeemed my soul from death (Repeat)

I was a hungry child, a dried up river.

I was a burned out forest

And no one could do anything for me

But you put food in my body, water in my dry bed
And to my blackened branches
You brought springtime green and a new life
And nothing is impossible for you

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. (JLB)