My prayer this morning for myself is to move my body and mind away from activities that, in the eyes of the Lord and in the presence of the Word, are too low-risk to afford any substantial benefit to me or to others around me.
There are so many of these invulnerable pursuits and many of them hover around our keyboards masquerading as objects of action. Hashtags, digital photo filters, offerings of cable news-mongering. Others are less obvious: guilt-talking at exercise class about the donut I ate for breakfast, disallowing myself a single drop of contentment until ALL my floors are cleaned, rushing to fill silence with noise.
What are the pursuits and activities in my daily life that push me further away from that sphere of vulnerability where Christ’s mercy hovers and holds. Sometimes it is my own tears, my own justifiable anger. Sometimes it is this guise of busy-ness. It’s perfectly okay to be a Martha (sometimes we have to be) but not when Christ is whispering to us to slow down in a moment that He created for us to worship, to meditate on His Word, to pray, to just allow nothingness.
Silence is a great distance-breaker and in silence we can actually move much closer to the thing we fear, the thing we need to forgive, the thing we need most to say. Silence is like a humming worker bee in the house of your soul–a soul-Martha–flittering and flushing out and making those preparations for us to experience deep contentment and belonging in the arms of God.
I am so thankful that today, I accepted the gift of time to ponder and pray without media distractions, without looking at the sink full of dishes, without hearing the bleep of text messages entering my phone space. Wherever it is we are trying to get as individuals, as people, as a nation, I have this feeling in my gut this morning that this might just be the way back.
The best reparation for violence (even 200-year-old violence) is assumption of an attitude of peace today. Not debating it. Not posting a meme. Not stirring up the pot and allowing our precious, God-given time to keep others from their own restorative moments. The place where we talk about systemic sin and consider acts of reparation needs to be a face-to-face place, where the bees have invaded and restored our abilities to absorb and manage and act with complexity and vulnerability.
God is not saying ignore racism or ignore immigration issues or ignore environmental concerns. God is not saying shut down all talk of “Who do you say that I am” in the marketplace. God is saying Facebook is not the place for these discussions. As a former journalist, I love the world of spin. I enjoy a good debate as much as anyone else. But God seems to be calling me to a truce of sorts, to a walking-away, to a sharing of my photographic moments as though the moments of my life are poems to be legitimately published so the self-publishing must cease.
If you haven’t been silent, really silent before God and if the hush of that hasn’t felt like spring water spilling over into a parched ground, I pray that for you today. It’s been a gift this morning.
My Writing Life 