MCC St. Louis - Check Us Out!
Get your own, Free Homepage Rev. Dale Chavis
If I were to ask you what
your greatest resources are I would imagine the answers to be;
Your partner, friends,
family or Your Job, Your House, Your Investments, Your Summer Home in the Alps.
As all these resources are
important to have, I want to suggest that we also think of one of the greatest
Spiritual resources we have and that is the Resource and Gift of
PRAYER
Prayer is a conversation
with God and in that conversation are four major points to
consider.
We
Speak
God
Listens
God
Speaks
We
Listen
We
Speak:
We can trigger communication with God
wherever, whenever and however our souls have need.
Elsewhere in the world we must approach
the powers according to their rules and readiness.
Only when they are willing to listen are
we permitted to speak. However, with God our word alone makes readiness and a
way. We are not summoned. We GO!
And the merciful blessing is
that any language works.
We don’t have to have the
perfect grammar or big fancy words to speak to GOD, in fact Jesus warned his
Disciples about heaping up empty phrases as the Gentiles, because they thought
they would be heard for their many words. Jesus says, “Don’t be like them, for the Creator
knows what you need before you ask.”
Jesus, help Me! A child’s
completely spontaneous outburst, the cry that sends her need and her whole soul
to God, that is PRAYER.
The Mother who sees her son
coming home after the snares and perils of some youthful risk,
who in a sudden rush of
relief breathes, “Thank You Jesus!” She is PRAYING.
As a child my parents taught
me the prayer of Abba, Father and I recited it every night before bed.
It was the words of this
prayer that taught me I could talk to God whenever I wanted or
needed.
I found myself at the age of fourteen
praying this prayer very intently while a patient at Duke Medical Center just
before surgery.
God! help me through this,
give me this day my daily bread, and that daily bread was assurance that things
would turn out well. That whatever happened during and after that God was there
with me,
I also prayed God let your Will Be done,
this is certainly in Your Hands and I pray that you will take care of
me.
This was the beginning of a long journey
to learning how to live this prayer with meaning.
As a Hospital Chaplain, I
sat with the parents of a sixteen-year-old boy who had been struck by a car and
killed. Both Mom and Dad cried out God give us your strength to get through
this.
GOD LISTENS:
Let us understand above all
that the power of prayer is not in us, that we speak. It is in GOD who
listens.
It is God’s hearing that causes a true
connection between GOD and US. God’s love is the power that receives our voice.
God’s near and windy Spirit gathers the prayer from its source and bears it to
God’s self.
This is God’s promise. It is nothing that
we ourselves accomplish.
When the Child cried out, “Jesus help
me!” her cries were heard and God responded.
The Mother was grateful to God for
responding to her fear by bringing her son safely back to
her.
As I waited for surgery, God assured me
that everything was going to be all right.
In the cries of the parents whose son
died from the accident was assured that somewhere and somehow God was listening
to their cries.
There are times we wonder if
God is listening. We may think that God has forsaken us.
It is as if we have made loud groans in
the night, undirected, the plain utterance of Spiritual Pain.
But Straightway, the light
goes on in the hallway! Whether we see it or not, whether we hear it or not, God
LISTENS. God comes and attends us.
We cannot sigh, but that God
hears it!
What we utter God hears. What God hears
becomes, through grace and compassion, a prayer.
“Behold, I have graven you
on the palms of my hands.”
This is how intimate we are
with the Creator: Where God is, there we are.
We are tattooed onto the hands that hold
the world.
Then a second time we are tattooed by the
points of the nails into the hands of Jesus who died in order to open the door
between God and us.
God’s listening need not
wait for our groans at all. God’s listening in fact is the very context of all
prayer.
God’s listening precedes our praying, so
that we pray into a divine and merciful awareness already waiting, already
knowing the thing we are about to say.
God certainly knows what we
need before we ever ask. God’s knowing is the authenticity, the force, the joy,
the goodness and the reality of our communication.
However, there is a
difference between want and need.
Although God knows our needs before we
ask, God wants us to communicate that need, to create a dialogue whereby we come
to God asking for help, we show our dependence on a loving and all giving
creator.
God
Speaks:
Prayerful communication is
that God now speaks to us.
God SPEAKS to us; this is
not the same as giving us what we want, which God may or may not
do.
In love God responds. God talks back to
us, answers and makes God’s self, God’s being and intentions real to
us---
so that we may meet and
recognize the one who listens when we call; so that we may know the object of
our loving.
Unless we wait for God to
speak, we merely use God,
reducing God to a candy
machine whose only purpose is to respond when we punch its
buttons,
satisfying the hungers we have voiced to
God.
God is alive and God participates in the
conversation.
God is yearning to be heard as well as to
hear,
to console, to solve, and
resolve not only our problems but our very selves.
to satisfy not only the petty hungers we
can name, but the deeper hungers that only a Holy God can identify.
How does God speak to us?
God speaks to us through many languages and many
forms.
God speaks to us through the
elements of creation, a glorious sunrise
and a magnificent sunset, the beauty of a flower garden, the songs of the
birds. God’s word was spoken through Jesus the Christ, whom acted the glory and
love of God among us. Immanuel: the suffering, death and resurrection of
Jesus---that was the creating and re-creating Word loudly shouted within the
world.
God speaks to us through
Scripture which records the actions of Jesus.
God speaks through the
people, both those who are faithful and those who are not.
God speaks through the
Church, Metropolitan Community Church of Greater St. Louis, in which the Holy
Spirit breathes truth. God can be very verbal in the mouths of others.
God speaks to us through
details of the human experience, the daily events of our
lives.
God speaks and works through each our
lives. God is here. We become God’s instruments for each other.
We
Listen:
God has empowered our word
by listening to it, we manifest in God and depend upon God’s word by listening
to it.
How much love God lavishes
on each particular heart when God murmurs words intended for that heart
alone!
How much love the lonely heart misses
when it will not hear the personal word.
Since God will not always
shout for our attention, listening cannot be an accident.
Listening must be our own conscientious
action,
a thing we do,
a thing we choose to
do,
a thing we can learn to do better and
better.
The Lakota Indians have said
to their children: Wachin Ksapa yo! It means to “be
attentive.”
We must have an attitude of constant
awareness, for God may suddenly speak in any form of
creation.
If we are attuned to the marvelous
complexity of the world,
even the tiny steps of the ant can sound
like drumbeats because they have become heavy with meaning.
For Creation, when it
obediently does what the Creator commanded, both praises God and reflects the
Will of God.
Church I say, Imitate
Christ!
Recognize how much love must be motive
and preparation for your highest praying, love for those whom God has placed in
your care;
recognize how much love of others is a
surrender of personal wish and will,
a genuine opening of your
soul’s ear to hear the Lord. This is the second important
preparation;
the first most important preparation is:
To Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all
your mind. This love is the complete emptying of oneself.
It listens with the heart, soul and mind.
Listening is manifest not
just in knowing that you have heard some information from God and now you know
more than you did.
Listening is also manifested in doing,
how we act, how we behave, for this type of listening is obedience.
Whole Prayer grows into the
wholeness of DIVINE Relationship.
As we continue to Listen for
God’s word to us,
I invite you to listen to the words of
Psalm 139 in a prayerful manner:
Yahweh, investigate my life;
get all the facts first hand.
I’m an open book to you;
Even from a distance, you
know what I am thinking.
You know when I leave and
when I get back;
I’m never out of your
sight.
You know everything I’m
going to say before I start the first sentence.
I look behind me and you are
there,
Then I look ahead of me and
you are there, too---
Your reassuring Presence,
coming and going.
This is too much, too
wonderful-------
I can’t take it all
in!
Is there any place I can go
to avoid your Spirit?
To be out of your
sight?
If I climb to the sky, you
are there!
If I go underground, you are there!
If I flew on Morning’s wings
To the far western horizon,
You would find me in a
minute-------
You are already there waiting!
Then I said to myself, God
even sees me in the dark!
At night I’m immersed in the light!
It’s a fact: darkness isn’t
dark to you;
Night and day, darkness and light, they are all the same to
you.
Oh yes, you shaped me first
inside, then out;
You formed me in my mother’s womb.
I thank you, High God-----
You are breathtaking!
Body and Soul, I am marvelously made!
I worship in adoration------ what a creation!
You know me inside
out,
You know every bone in my body;
You know exactly how I was
made, bit-by-bit,
How I was sculpted from nothing into something.
Like an open book, you
watched me grow from conception to birth;
All the stages of my life were spread out before
you,
The days of my life all
prepared
Before I had even lived one
day.
Your thoughts----how rare,
how beautiful!
God I’ll never comprehend them!
I couldn’t even begin to
count them--------
Any more than I could count the sand of the sea.
Oh, let me rise in the
morning and live always with you!
And please God; do away with
the wickedness for good!
Investigate my Life, O
God,
Find out everything about me;
Cross-examine and test
me,
Get a clear picture of what
I’m about;
See for yourself whether
I’ve done anything wrong------
Then guide me on the road to
eternal Life!
Get your own, Free Homepage