Читать книгу Recital of Love - Keren Dibbens-Wyatt - Страница 16

Prayer

BUSYNESS MUST ALWAYS MAKE WAY FOR PRAYER and not the other way around. We cannot shoehorn prayer into our day as if it were another thing to cross off the list. For prayer is not something you do, it is something beautiful that happens in your heart, a fluttering burst of coloured wings soaring up to their maker when they hear his voice in the stillness. A flock of songbirds returning to their mother, who is calling them up to higher branches.

Prayer is always a homecoming, a place where desires find their true voice and character and are not what you thought they were. Where desperations are met with tear-brimming eyes full of compassion and mercy.

Prayer is a reaching up and out, a wondering, not-knowing, questioning, angry demand for demonstration sometimes, met with loving hands closing around your tantrumming fist. A wailing and a gnashing of teeth, hell brought before heaven’s throne, looking for answers and finding them.

For no one goes away from my table hungry. Did I not speak? Did I not answer you? Was the air crackling with the un-saidness of my words? Does this silence all around your pain let the naysayers creep in, telling you to ‘curse God and die’, be done with it, admit the non-existence of I AM, or the not-caring of love itself, the lies told by the truth of the Word? This is folly, and child’s talk, the babbling of fools in the marketplace, of gossips at the city gate.

How can the one who created ears not hear? Or the one who gave you sight, not see everything? Nothing is hidden from me. Your words and longings, your heart cries, your situations of need, arise before me tenfold. I know all. The softest unspoken whisper of disappointment rises alongside the loudest birth-pain groaning.

I will respond. I AM response. Relationship is what I do.

Do not be dismayed. For who are you to know when legions of angels have been dispatched on your behalf, or a journey set in motion, or a healing balm called for?

I alone have all the answers, and in me you must place your confidence and your trust. Your hearts are mine and I care prodigiously, painfully for each one. Life is not a game. I take serious things seriously.

But know this. I will not answer your whining or your selfish disdain of others, your foolish prattling and your skin-deep wants. For I know you better than you know yourself and I will give you only good gifts.

I sense what you need, even before you part your lips to speak, but I like to hear your voice and I want to spend time with you. So, chatter if you will, but speak to me also heart to heart and spirit to Spirit and make friends with the holy silence of listening and being still.

For it is in awareness that I am to be found, smiling kindly on all things, with the fullness of compassion and tenderness only a constantly breaking heart can give.

Selah