Prayer conversation about loneliness for God

Last night You gave me the privilege of being on the edge of heaven and hell and healing for the women of our Journey group designed by Terry Wardle at church. As I made a quick run through Wal-Mart at 9 last night after group, I was shaking my head in amazement at Your powerful intervention. I approach each Tuesday night with fear and trembling and You always show up. These women are drawing near to You and You never pull away. You never disappoint. We leaders intercede and watch the Holy Spirit tunnel his way into their newly opened doors. We watch them begin to believe that You love them and redeem their memories that had lied to them that that they were alone and always would be.



So I got home last night exhausted from the ministry and with a bit of an ache of loneliness. Andrew, after putting the kids to sleep, was asleep on the couch and I joined him after putting the groceries in the fridge. I rubbed his back while watching a tv show, his snoring competing for vocal power with the singing contest. I helped him get to bed during a commercial.


After the show was over, still not tired after the adrenaline rush of that night’s ministry time, I surfed the channels. Eventually I found myself hovering over the religious channel which I rarely find satisfying and then it struck me. I realized what I was looking for and turned off the set. I wanted You, pure and unadulterated. No other counterfeit would do. I got my computer out which is how I often journal and simultaneously search scriptures these days and just as I was opening a new document, I heard a huge bang in the nursery upstairs. Then all three started crying. At this moment, I have a choice to make: Frustration or acceptance, anger or love. Sometimes it seems like spiritual warfare when there is immediate interruption of long awaited time with You. I chose love which is easy to do after a night away.


Madeline had fallen off her bed and I found her huddled in that sleep-waking state confused and moaning. I helped her back up on her pink sheets and she quickly cuddled with her blanket. I opened the window and enjoyed the breeze for a moment while whispering to her and running my fingers over her back. The eldest, up on the top bunk, situated himself with his bean-stuffed duck and went back to sleep.


But it was Baby in the adjoining room who kept yelling out for attention. I pushed Madeline’s legs aside, with a ”Good night my little Pearl” in order to care for the littlest one. As I walk through the room, I see Xavi standing up in his bed crying. “Do you need a little mommy time?” “Ya,” he says, with his head down and his eyes still closed. I pick him up in his jammies and blanket and bring him downstairs settling on the couch with this little one cuddled into my body. And then what happened next? The gift of the day. The full Presence of You, came powerfully into my loneliness and filled me with exactly what I had been looking for but was unable in myself to pursue. Waves of love and companionship, joy and rest covered me and I basked like a cat in Your powerful light. The gift that I found in that moment was that I was not able to read, to search the Scriptures or to learn anything which is often an avenue to You though sometimes becomes the idol as well. All I was able to do in that moment of cuddling that precious one who quickly fell asleep next to me, was to enjoy You. I was stuck in the gorgeousness of silence. I couldn’t ruin it by trying like Peter at the Transformation to figure out the “perfect” thing to say, even if I had wanted to, Your presence was too heavy, all-consuming. I had wanted all day to be with You but was unable in myself to accomplish it. I was helpless but came to the God for whom nothing is impossible.


This seems to be one of the answers to the Struggle for that daily, hourly companionship. The truth that I have a hard time living and believing is that You are here. You have promised that You will never leave me or forsake me. LeAnne Payne rightly says that we need to say that to ourselves over and over whether any type of feeling accompanies the truth or not. She wisely taught people that they needed to identify the truth that “You are here” all day long throughout all their ordinary activities.


In fact, I think I hinder You when I feel as if all the stars need to align in order to create the perfect welcome for Your Presence. It seems like all You want to hear is the call of desire, the acknowledgement of hunger and the pursuit. When I acknowledge that I am not enough, that I hunger and thirst for You, that alone seems to open me up to You. The New Living Translation says it this way: “God blesses those who are poor and realize their need for him, for the Kingdom of Heaven is theirs.” I need to create a void in order to be filled, to open my ears to listen in order to hear, to open my empty hands in order to receive a gift. One of the secrets of daily companionship is the need to create open spaces which are open only to You. While we are so busy trying to fill ourselves with You, You desire to come as gift, not at our demanding, but at our openness, at our need.

John Wesley's Radical Daily Prayer

John Wesley's Covenant Daily Prayer:

 I am no longer my own, but yours.


Put me to what you will, rank me with whom you will;


put me to doing, put me to suffering.


Let me be employed by you or laid aside by you,


enabled for you or brought low by you.


Let me be full, let me be empty.


Let me have all things, let me have nothing.


I freely and heartily yield all things


to your pleasure and disposal.


And now, O glorious and blessed God,


Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,


you are mine, and I am yours. So be it.


And the covenant which I have made on earth,


let it be ratified in heaven.


Amen.

St. John Chrysostom on what happens when we pray for our own needs

By prayer the soul is borne up to heaven and in a marvelous way embraces the Lord. This meeting is like that of an infant crying on its mother, and seeking the best of milk. The soul longs for its own needs and what it receives is better than anything to be seen in the world.Prayer is a precious way of communicating with God, it gladdens the soul and gives repose to its affections. You should not think of prayer as being a matter of words. It is a desire for God, an indescribable devotion, not of human origin, but the gift of God's grace. As Saint Paul says: we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words.St. John Chrysostom Sermon #6 on Prayer


Anyone who receives from the Lord the gift of this type of prayer possesses a richness that is not to be taken from him, a heavenly food filling up the soul. Once he has tasted this food, he is set alight by an eternal desire for the Lord, the fiercest of fires lighting up his soul.

To set about this prayer, paint the house of your soul with modesty and lowliness and make it splendid with the light of justice. Adorn it with the beaten gold of good works and, for walls and stones, embellish it assiduously with faith and generosity. Above all, place prayer on top of this house as its roof so that the complete building may be ready for the Lord. Thus he will be received in a splendid royal house and by grace his image will already be settled in your soul.

Building the Wall of our Family

Thursday Madeline and Caedmon and I carted a bunch of wooden blocks to the middle of the kitchen with a polly pocket house.  I got this idea from some brilliant blogger who I have forgotten now.  I'm sorry, virtual friend.

I was just going to give the kids the simple illustration that we all needed to build our part of the wall to make our house stronger.  Then, I got this idea to read the story of Nehemiah from our beautiful children's Bible.

You know those times when you feel as though the Lord is speaking directly to you through every word.  This was one of those times.  The passion, fasting, prayer and corporate confession of Nehemiah startled me.  He knew how to pray continually.  The opposition of the neighboring states mocking their work reminded me of those who don't believe that strong families are a possibility anymore. 

Then there was this powerfully inspiring image of those who were building on the wall had a sword in one hand, to fight off opposition.  All of a sudden I started understanding the importance of the mother, building and fighting: working with active love with all her heart (Nehemiah 4:6).

Not only did Maddie and Caed understand the power of working together,  ("Do you guys know that I don't like to clean?  How can we help each other do something that has to be done even though we don't enjoy it?") I think we all gained a better understanding of the necessity of the home.  Good walls create freedom.

More on this in the next few weeks. 

Fighting on the Winning Team

I just finished watching The Blind Side and was struck like everyone else in America by the courage of Michael Oher's white Mama. She was a Champion for her family, marching into the darkness packing heat (in a quilted Chanel purse, no doubt.)

A week ago I met the Blind Side character's African parallel. She entered the store front Kalamazoo Prayer Clinic after us, walked in and sat down purposefully. Without much small talk she went straight to prayer and started to fight for her son. After a few minutes in prayer, we gathered that her son was having a difficult time in school and the teachers were becoming a part of the problem. Her son was losing confidence in his gifts. She prayed down all his opposition the way Sandra Bullock as Leigh Anne Tuohy confronted the drug dealers of inner city Memphis.

She prayed with passion and directness and a week later I still remember this:

She prayed that Christ's blood would cover her son as a protection. Christ's blood, she said, would remind the evil one of his defeat at the cross and his final defeat at the second coming. (Revelations 12:11)

She prayed against those who would try to diminish her son against the will of God. "He is filled with the Holy Spirit and with fire. I pray anyone who touches him against the will of the Father would be burned, and their work turned to ashes."

She prayed in her great African Alto voice using his long African name (that I could never quite catch) that his character would match his name.

With fervor she did battle in that small back room of the prayer clinic until she was prayed out. Her smile afterward said that she knew her Redeemer had heard and was fighting for her. "And how can we pray for you," she asked us when the hard work had been done.

My prayer partner and I got into the car and looked at eachother with triumph, "That boy is going to be just fine," we said at the same time. How could he not be, we wondered aloud with a mama championing him and confident before the throne of heaven. (Hebrews 4:16 Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need. NIV)

I want to be her. I don't want to be caught playing the victim in self-pity or angry and cynical. I want to pray without ceasing.

I recently learned to have my husband's back, to pray for him early, as he walks out the front door, and late as he's falling asleep, my hand on his back. I've learned as another fierce mama I know advised me around Christmastime, to go to his Boss first if we are having a disagreement, then wait for the Holy Spirit to work in his heart or be open for the Counselor's work in mine.

I only hope to become like my own mama. Every morning in high school I would walk past my mama's prayer closet/office to the master bathroom to get ready for school. It was a round brick room which used to be a kiln in southern Ohio and was put back up in the same shape. I believe that many a spiritual plan of God's was fired in that space. As I tiptoed passed, she would be on her knees in her robe before her blue couch crying out to God. Often she would look up and say good morning, with tears in her eyes, the sun rising just outside the huge window beside her, putting her in a backlit profile.

These days I have her and my sister to pray with and there is no greater joy. We spend time enjoying God's presence in adoration, bust down walls with repentance between ourselves and the Lord, and then suit up (Ephesians 6:10-) and join the privilege of partnering with Him in prayer.

"The prayers of God's saints are the capital stock of heaven by which God carries on His great work on earth," says Paul Billheimer in Destined for the Throne. This quote scares the bijeebies out of me. Could it be true? It seems that many who have seen the biggest acts of God in history have lived and prayed as if it were so. (You have not because you ask not. James 4:2)

Sometimes I forget when I wake up to three kids bouncing on me at 6:30 in the morning that I need to approach the day fierce and focused. It requires

House Addiction

I have a confession to make. I love/hoard house magazines and every time I'm pregnant, HGTV literally streams into my living room. I read, watch, surf and crave inspiration to make this little yellow cottage into the perfect greenhouse for my growing shoots. (Can that really be how you spell the little green thingies poking out of the ground or do I have too many toy guns lying around?) Anyhow, I just don't believe this bologna about houses being spiritually and emotionally neutral places. "It is the people that are important," some say.

This does seem like the logical conclusion but my mystical self believes that there is something a bit more complicated going on under our roofs. I believe that our hunger for house magazines/blogs/etc. is more than just greed, but a hunger for the heart's true home. Call it a hunger for what Eden was, what heaven will be or what the Kingdom of God can become on earth, we desire more than just a neutral setting. We want COMMUNION, Order, Life, Feasting, Peace. As mothers we want our homes to be the ladder where the angels ascend and descend...a meeting place between heaven and earth, a place where our children can be taught by God (Isaiah 54:13). We want to feed our families with manna and create little Edens of beauty on our city lots. Lets be intercessors, covering our families and praying that the Kingdom would come on earth right here in our hearts, and then into our homes and then radiate out from there.