Written daily for my colleagues, to encourage a reflective space during the work day, these reflections and prayers will also be posted here from time to time.
“The beginning of a flourishing, sustainable, and overflowing spiritual life is having a devotional time and place. We create a sacred place where we can come to rest and worship. Create your own sacred space where you can be restored in your morning devotions.”
Bob Holmes, A Daily Contemplation
“YOU cannot put a fire out; A thing that can ignite can go itself, without a fan upon the slowest night. You cannot fold a flood and put it in a drawer, because the winds would find it out, and tell your cedar floor.”
Emily Dickinson
“I felt in need of a great pilgrimage, so I sat still for three days.”
Hafiz
MY PRAYER today is for renewal. That we would remember that we find our true sustenance in him. A friend recently noted how many of us operate in the belief that we can just keep giving, keep functioning without refueling. He compared it to plumbing pipes, where more water is flowing out than flowing in. If that is true with our physical, emotional and mental selves, then it is even more true of our spiritual self, which fans the flames of all our purpose and endeavor. Emily Dickinson’s poem above makes me think of how starved I get of God when I keep on going without him, but fortunately the flame of his spirit within never fully goes out. Instead I start to recognise the signs of my in-attention to him, when everything gets too hard and forced. Oswald Chambers refers below to the ‘oneness of our life with Christ’. In oneness with Christ it is us and him, no-one else gets a look-in. In the end what we do is for him, we do it with him, and we do it because of him. In the words of Luke 10:42, “There is only one thing worth being concerned about. Mary has discovered it, and it will not be taken away from her.”
Living Tree Poetry 