How’s your French? Well while you’re working on the translation, I can tell you that our good friend and colleague Marcel came out with this phrase at the end of a prayer time with our team recently. We’d kind of run out of things to pray, but we’re learning not to feel awkward about that, and to enjoy the silence. It’s hard to learn to pray together with others, and even harder to handle silence. But increasingly it seems that it is in these moments that God speaks. We have been trying not to come to prayer with a preconceived list of subjects, and it’s very tempting to slip back into that. It feels “safe” somehow when you have someone to “lead” a meeting - then you only need to sweat when it’s “your turn” to lead. The rest of the time you can just follow along. But this way, we are much more conscious of wanting the Holy Spirit to lead us - which he most often seems to do through the people present, although he may also choose to do so in more direct ways. This is much more scary: what if He doesn’t turn up? What if nothing happens? What if we just end up in awkward silence and the meeting drags? Two thoughts: firstly He is worth the risk; secondly even in empty silence there is value, if nothing else than to give momentary escape from the many and varied things that vie for our attention, to focus on the One who most deserves it.
The exasperating thing about prayer is that the more you learn about it, the more you realise how far you are from doing it well. And paradoxically, without that realisation we will never progress in prayer.
“The sun is always higher than the mountains” was the word that concluded our prayer time, which had started with some discussion about some fairly major challenges facing us. I don’t think it requires any explanation.
A drop of colour may change things,
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