I was carrying 3X5 cards. I usually pack these cheap little things wherever I go. When God speaks to me I pull one out and write it down. I also carried a piece of paper with the text I'm going to preach on this Sunday - Galatians 5:13-26. And, just in case, I brought my old copy of Thomas Merton's Thoughts in Solitude.
Temperature: 30 degrees.
Snow - gently falling, in big flakes.
Wind: 0-5.
A lot of the time I race through life, so it's important to build in slowness. Walking through this life, I notice things more. Yesterday I had moments of joy and wonder towards God's creation. I found myself saying, many times, "Wow!" And, "Thank you God."
I felt gratitude towards God at just being alive and able to notice anything at all. I do not take this for granted.
This world I live in is filled with devastating beauty and just flat-out devastation. God's creation, if attended to, is stunning to me, and people are being emotionally tasered by the Enemy all around me. In the midst of this I must stay, I need to be, God-connected lest I give in to the dark perspective.
The Psalmist wrote:
Nursing infants gurgle choruses about you;
toddlers shout the songs
That drown out enemy talk,
and silence atheist babble.
3-4 I look up at your macro-skies, dark and enormous,
your handmade sky-jewelry,
Moon and stars mounted in their settings.
Then I look at my micro-self and wonder,
Why do you bother with us?
Why take a second look our way?
(Psalm 8:2-4, The Message)
I take time to attend to God's macro-skies. I have built it in. I grew up in the age of no cell phones, so I can exist for lengthy moments without one. Sometimes, at night when it's dark and the sky is clear, I step outside, even in winter, and look upward. The outward look at God's artisanship is therapy for my cluttered soul. I see my micro-self, and feel God's hand on it.
I stopped at a coffee shop, sat near a window, and pulled Thomas Merton out of my pocket. Merton has to be slow-walked through, accompanied by many pauses. I open it and see I first read it in 1988. I don't get far when I read:
"When men are merely submerged in a mass of impersonal human beings pushed around by automatic forces, they lose their true humanity, their integrity, their ability to love, their capacity for self-determination. When society is made up of men who know no interior solitude it can no longer be held together by love: and consequently it is held together by a violent and abusive authority. But when men are violently deprived of the solitude and freedom which are their due, the society in which they live becomes putrid, it festers with servility, resentment and hate." (xii)
Yikes! That was enough for me. I finished my coffee and walked out, towards home, marinating in Thomas Merton.
Merton wrote those words in 1958. Were he alive today he'd see that things have gotten worse, and that solitude before God is mostly gone from the face of the earth, even in the Church. People don't walk any more, just them and God. Even walking has become another form of disconnected multi-tasking. Life, for many, is but a never-ending sequence of "accomplishing something" instead of a being-accomplished (being-fashioned/formed) by God.
God speaks to me: "Your mission is to bring My people into that secret, quiet place where I dwell. To do this you must dwell there yourself."
My walk has brought me home. I am ready for all God has for me this day.
