What our Spirit Needs Waking and Sleeping

      I always avoided anything written about prayer. I loved reading, and would read about all the topics my favourite authors put out…except I would always skip the books on prayer.     
Then I read (in a Brennan Manning book, of course) that it is important to get our prayer life to a place of need.

  

     God instantly made that become a desire for me; getting to the place where I felt the need to rest with God.  I realized that was the thing missing in my walk.  I needed my time with Him and needed prayer with Him to feel fulfilled and to feel some sort of connection and peace that I could never get in the busy, noisy, and crazy world that we all inhabit. 

     Now, that is truly what those moments bring me. Those moments are quiet places of rest, where I can catch my breath and unload my burdens, my fears, and myself and expect in return grace, compassion, and love. It is in those moments I can find my identity consumed in truth and not the regular lies that are fed to our spirits throughout the day.

     In a moment where that becomes a need for me, where I know to calm myself and get my spirit to a place where I will find contentment, I sometimes close my eyes and picture myself on a forest floor. No one in this world exists outside of me and the Divine. I am just staring up through the trees and feel surrounded with a peace beyond description.  I feel safe here.

I think Jean Vanier described this time of stillness best when he said:

    “We need time to listen to the inner voice of hope calling us back to the essentials of love, essentials that we may have forgotten because of busyness and selfishness. To pray, then, is more about listening than about talking. To pray is to be centred in love; it is to let what is deepest within us come to the surface. For me, it is all that and more. Prayer is also meeting with the One who loves me, who reveals to me my secret value, who empowers me to give life, and who loves us all and calls us forth to greater love and compassion. Prayer is resting in the quiet, gentle presence of God.”

    My humanity avoided that connection that my spirit so desperately needed until I heard someone say that it truly is a need. I hope hearing the same can do that for you as well. Insecurity vanishes, fears fade away, and peace is restored as you walk through your day after you’ve fed your spirit with some time of quiet prayer. When I don’t fill that need I feel my identity sink back into the lies that hold me in a place of insecurity and fear.

If I could replace my mind with anyone’s I think it would be C.S. Lewis.
I will leave you with his thoughts on prayer

“I pray because I can't help myself. I pray because I'm helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time- waking and sleeping. It doesn't change God- it changes me.”