In Your Desperate Circumstances Pray (PrayerLife)

Our sidewalk, 1/5/14, 11 PM

While she was imprisoned in Auschwitz Etty Hillesum, a young Jewish girl, prayed. She wrote of "an uninterrupted dialogue with God." Hillesum writes:

 “Sometimes when I stand in some corner of the camp, my feet planted on Your earth, my eyes raised towards Your Heaven, tears sometimes run down my face, tears of deep emotion and gratitude.” She knew the horror. “And I want to be there right in the thick of what people call horror and still be able to say: life is beautiful. Yes, I lie here in a corner, parched and dizzy and feverish and unable to do a thing. Yet I am also with the jasmine and the piece of sky beyond my window.” (In Philip Yancey, Prayer, Kindle Locations 936-940)

Hillesum concluded: “For once you have begun to walk with God, you need only keep on walking with God and all of life becomes one long stroll — a marvelous feeling.” (In Ib.)

In that morally barren place Etty Hillesum had God-encounters and epiphanies. From this I conclude there is no place, no environment, where God will not be found in the act of praying.

In your desperate circumstances pray.