wilderness, monday

Monday, March 10

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

Opening Prayer: Lord I so want to make all of me ready and attentive and available to you.  Please help me to clarify and purify my intentions.  I have so many contradictory desires.  I get preoccupied with things that don’t really matter or last.

     I know that if I give you my heart whatever I do will follow my new heart.  In all that I am today, all that I try to do, all my encounters, reflections, even the frustrations and failings and especially in this time of prayer, in all of this, may I place my life in your hands.  Lord I am yours, make of me what you will.

~Ignatius of Loyola

Scripture Reading for the Day: Exodus 3:1-14

Reading for Reflection:

     It is always on the backside of the desert that we come to the mountain of God—on the backside of the desert of self, at the end of our own dreams and ambitions and plans.

     Moody said that when Moses first undertook to deliver Israel he looked this way and that way (Ex. 2:12), but when he came back from Horeb he looked only one way, God’s way.  But before he saw God’s way he had to come back to the backside of the desert.

     And poor Moses had made quite a come-down from the courts of Egypt to the desert of Midian.  He carried in his hand only a shepherd’s rod, fit symbol of his humiliation.  God demanded that he cast even that to the ground (Ex. 4:3).  And when he took it up again it became henceforth the “rod of God” (4:20)!

     If God has brought you to the backside of the desert, if you are reduced, as it were, to a shepherd’s rod, cast even that gladly at His feet and He will restore it to you the rod of God—and with it you shall work wonders in His Name so long as you “endure as seeing Him Who is invisible.” (Consider Him by Vance Havner)

Reflection and Listening: silent and written

Prayer: for the church, for others, for myself

Closing Prayer:

O Pilgrim God,

     You once led a people, dear to your heart, through the desert land of their exodus journey.  Now I invite you on a pilgrim journey through the scenic and wilderness lands of my heart.  Stop at the lovely shrines along the way.  Enable me to see the beauty of many sacred places in my life.  Together let us pray before the shrine that is me, created in your image.  Show me my goodness and strength on the path that leads through the temple of my being.  Pause also at the places where I am lost, deluded, and imprisoned in my own shallowness!  Anoint those places with a glance of love.  Transform all within me that yearns for renewal.  Refresh what is stale.  Open what is closed.  Rekindle what has grown too dim to give light.  O pilgrim God, journey with me to the promised land of my own being.  Amen. (Abide by Macrina Wiederkehr)