This morning’s post in the series Lord Teach Us to Pray is written by Steve Wickham, author of “Grow In GOD” ebook, is a Registered Safety Practitioner (BSc, FSIA, RSP [Australia]), a writer, and an active online Christian minister (GradDipBib&Min). His social media links: Facebook:http://www.facebook.com/steve.j.wickham & http://www.facebook.com/stevewickhamauthor and Twitter: http://twitter.com/sjwickhamauthor . View the original post here
This post seemed particularly applicable this morning because Tom is in hospital. Nothing serious but I would appreciate your prayers.
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I have just read this prayer poignant prayer written by Lane Arnold and forwarded to me by one of my facebook friends. My heart aches for her and the many others who have lost homes and possessions in these devastating fires that have swept through parts of Colorado forcing at least 32,000 to evacuate their homes.
The Colorado Springs fires may have burned our house but nothing can burn our home. For You, Lord Jesus, Your Presence, Your heart, Your kingdom are our forever home.
A couple of days ago Lane posted this on her blog and its words have resonated with me this morning.
My mind runs as fast as a wildfire. What’ll I pack if we have to evacuate? What’s important to have with me as the fire potentially threatens to hop ridges, careen across canyons, and whirl on the winds?
I look across the room into those sparkling blue eyes of my husband and my son’s thoughtful brown ones. Here are my two greatest tangible values in this home. I can walk away with these two and I will have lost nothing of great value. It’s that simple. My beloveds, here and afar, are my greatest tangible value beyond God Himself…..
What leap out are memories. My heart that’s been pounding full force grows calm, full of prayerful gratitude as I go. Smiles, laughter, even tears come. A snapshot on my desk of my three little ones, singing to me in their yellow slickers one long-ago rainy Georgia afternoon. Photographs my daughter gave me one Christmas from the travels we did together in Australia. The wooden cross in the kitchen from a women I’d mentored. A silly line drawing on the bookshelf, created thirty years ago, which one son found and recently framed for Mother’s Day. A woodcut and poem another son wrapped up for my birthday. The place my husband and I gather and pray each morning for our children and grandchildren. . A tiny angel ornament from a friend who’d been in Haiti. A watercolor from a prayer partner. The collage of childhood photos from my children’s life that greets me each morning upon my dresser. A bookcase full of journals, notes from almost sixty years worth of living. The photo of my husband and I at our high school prom and another one of our wedding in 2008. Love notes from our courtship. A few of these join the stash of things I’ll take with me.
Friends, families, community, memories. These are the important things that all of us miss the most when they are gone. It is a shame that often it takes a crisis like this for us to realize it. Nothing else apart from God really matters.
So as you pray for those who have lost homes and possessions this morning ask yourself What would you grab if the fires come your way? and may our hearts well up with gratitude for the friends and family and community within which God has placed us.
Ever wondered where I find all those interesting articles I post? Here are a couple of places I monitor regularly.
One of Tom’s and my favourtie magazines is YES Magazine and I wanted to share it with you.
The YES website has posted some great articles in the last few weeks on community. Here are my favourites
Ten Ways to Love Where You Live by Ross Chapin
How to build community here and now—because neighborhoods are more than houses in proximity. Read the article here
Cheaper Together. How neighbours Invest in Community by by Miriam Axel-Lute, John Emmeus Davis, Harold Simon.
Cooperative financing and community land trusts keep rents affordable and homeownership within reach. Read here
Inhabitat: Design will save the world is another great site with very innovative housing and environmental designs like this one: PHOTOS: Get a Sneak Peek of HWKN’s Giant Blue Smog-Eating Wendy Sculpture Before It Opens Next Week | Inhabitat – Sustainable Design Innovation, Eco Architecture, Green Building
And Grist Magazine is always worth a visit. For example I loved this article Have Sledgehammer will farm
I also love to check out the latest at ECHO, ; Plant with Purpose and A Rocha
Obviously this is only a very short list of possible sites to visit for environmental issues. I would love to put together a more comprehensive list. So what are your favourite sites to visit?
So what are your favourite websites on environmental issues, green living and community?
Tom and I are back home after several wonderful days at the Wild Goose Festival in North Carolina. It was hot, humid and dusty but in spite of that we had a wonderful time. Tom was in fine form talking about intentional community and moving beyond the Western dream and I had fun speaking on reimagining how we pray.
More than anything we enjoyed meeting old friends and making new ones. Had lots of good discussions, shared lots about the Mustard Seed Village and Cascadia and just thoroughly enjoyed a relaxed but provokative festival.
I also loved the grievance wall and the opportunity for people to share their frustrations with life & faith
What I didn’t enjoy – having to check for ticks every day and came home covered in itchy bites.
You can check out my complete festival album on facebook. enjoy
Still to come for the summer – Creative World Festival in Mission B.C. and Wild Goose West
This week’s round up of prayers is written from North Carolina where I am attending the Wild Goose Festival.
Teach us to pray O Lord,
Draw us closer to you, to your world , to each other.
Teach us to pray, O Lord,
With compassion and love and forgiveness.
Teach us to pray, O Lord,
Until all that we are and all that we do,
Becomes a gift of prayer to you.Teach us to pray O Lord,
Draw us closer to you, to your world , to each other.
Teach us to pray, O Lord,
With compassion and love and forgiveness.
Teach us to pray, O Lord,
Until all that we are and all that we do,
Becomes a gift of prayer to you.
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The glory of God’s presence surrounds me
The wonder of Christ’s love holds me close
The comfort of the Spirit makes me strong
God you who are the three in one, the one in three
Be with me forever.
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Lord God almighty,
You are a shield of love,
You are a rock of protection,
You are a God of unfailing love.
I trust in you with all my heart,
My future is in your hands.
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Here is a beautiful prayer written my my friend Gerard Kelly for his twitter feed @twitturgies.
Rumours of your kingdom God rise around me. The soil itself stirs. The winds bring whispers of you. My heart too cries welcome
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God protect and bless us,
From enemies seen and unseen.
Be like a pillar of fire before us,
Be like a cloud of glory around us,
Be like a rock of safety beneath us,
Keep us Lord in the shadow of you wings.
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let us rejoice and sing,
For the wonder of God’s love.
For the joy of Christ’s salvation.
For the glory of the Spirit’s presence.
Let us give thanks and praise,
For we are surrounded by a shield of love.
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This is the second post in the series Lord Teach Us To Pray. It was originally posted in 2009 as part of a series on What is a Spiritual Practice, but is is so good that I wanted to reblog it as part of this series on prayer.
Gerard Kelly and his wife Chrissie founded and co-lead The Bless Network, a growing family of talented and passionate young leaders working for the transformation of Europe. Bless uses short-term mission placements on mainland Europe as a learning tools, empower young adults to grow through ‘missional formation’: encountering the God of mission and finding purpose in the mission of God. The Kelly’s live in France, where bless are developing an intentional community and missional base on a former cider farm in Normandy.
Gerard prays on twitter at twitter.com/twitturgies. Gerard and Chrissie have co-authored ‘Intimate with the Ultimate’, a popular guide to the life of prayer published by Authentic in 2009. Gerard has published around 10 other titles, including ‘Twitturgies’ which is a collection of some of his Twitter prayers.
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As reported in London’s Independent and around the world, Ireland’s top Catholic Cardinal Sean Bray has urged his flock to use Twitter as a means of prayer. In a speech in honour of the late Father Patrick Peyton, the Priest famous for coining the phrase “the family that prays together stays together,” Cardinal Bray insists that a new movement of prayer can arise using new technology and social networks.
Publicity-seeking hype, or a genuine call to prayer? Can social networks genuinely become part of spiritual discipline in the 21st Century?
My own experiment with prayer on Twitter would suggest that they well might. At the end of February this year, I was reflecting on what value Twitter might have in my own life. It was just days after the Amsterdam air incident, when a Turkish jet crash-landed in a field a few kilometers from my home. Many people from our church community were involved in the rescue efforts and in treating the victims as they were rushed to local hospitals. And many others were astounded by the speed at which Twitter users were able to inform others of the crash. This was a week in which Twitter, in more ways than one, got everybody talking. And it got me thinking. Two things happened to me as a result. The first was a prayer that rose in my heart: “This day, Lord, be born in me. This day teach. This day heal. This day win, in death, surprising prizes. This day rise, this day rise in me.”
The second was a word: Twitturgies. Why not use Twitter as a means of prayer, all the time accepting the constraints of communication in less than 140 characters? In essence I simply took the Twitter question “What are you doing?” and translated it as “What are you praying?” taking the prayers I was praying in any case and crafting them into personal liturgies.
Two hundred and twenty-four Twitturgies later, the result has been an unexpected change in my own life of prayer. Others have expressed appreciation for the prayers they have received on Twitter, but the real benefits have been in my own spirituality. By allowing my commitment to Twitturgies to force upon me the regular question, “What are you praying?” the practice of writing Twitturgies has blown a fresh breeze through my prayers.
There are three key ways in which this has really helped me: Firstly, it has empowered me to pray frequent, short prayers, peppering my day with snatched moments of prayer, rather than waiting for the rare occasions when I can spend focused hours praying. I still seek out those times when I can, but I am praying more overall by adding these shorter prayers. I don’t update Twitturgies at fixed times, but they are often early-morning or late-evening “tweets,” with whatever opportunities I can find in between to use my computer or phone to pray.
Secondly, the forced constraint of 140 characters brings incredible focus to my prayers. On many occasions I have been surprised by the clarity that emerges. Twitturgies are shared with others, so they have to be interesting, accessible, and easy to understand—criteria that should be perhaps applied to prayer more often. Twitter posts are the new Haiku, and as the Japanese have known for centuries, the constraints of form do not stifle creativity: they give it depth. The challenge of expressing heartfelt prayers in such short sentences has been a new discipline in itself.
Lastly, the practice has made me newly conscious of my own prayers and longings. My aim is that Twitturgies be authentic—that is, that they genuinely reflect something I am praying about. They are prayers, not poems as such. I have to ask myself, “What do I want to say to God right at this moment?” “What is on my heart today?” The questions become part of the discipline. The result of this is that I am both a reader and a writer of Twitturgies; the construction of these prayers speaks to my heart also. And because they are short and sharp, they capture very succinctly what is going on in my soul at a given moment. I archive all the prayers so they are also a kind of spiritual journal. I can look back over a day, or a series of days, and see a pattern in the prayers that have emerged. “Reading” this pattern against the events of that day or days helps me to reflect on my own spiritual journey more deeply.
Twitter has become, for me, a vital part of my prayer life. Because it is intended to be a mobile medium (I write as often from my phone as from my laptop), it is a go-anywhere prayerbook. I have prayed “twitturgically” in between appointments, walking home from the office, during a coffee break, in a worship service, and in the last moments before sleep. Perhaps Twitter can become a kind of technological breath-prayer, a “pray without ceasing” application for any of us.
This morning’s post is the first in the series Lord Teach Us To Pray. It is written by Roy Goble the owner of the family real estate investment firm Goble Properties. He is also the President of PathLight International, which serves at-risk youth by providing educational opportunities that integrate faith and learning. Roy is a Trustee of Westmont College, Chair of the Board for The SOLD Project, and is founder of several non-profit organizations. He and his wife D’Aun live in Pleasanton, California. You can read more about Roy at www.junkyardwisdom.com where this post first appeared and follow him on twitter at @roygoble.
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Many years ago, when I was far younger than today, I was interviewing a person for an important leadership position at a ministry. He was about my age and I asked him to describe his prayer life. He answered, “My life is a prayer.”
That’s all he said. I sat there waiting for him to elaborate. He didn’t.
Curious, I asked the typical follow-up questions. How do you do that? What does it look like? Are there exercises to follow? How can you attain such intimacy with God at such a young age? I wanted an answer that helped me understand how it was even possible. But he basically shrugged and said, “It just is. I can’t really explain it.”
Frankly, the answer made me nervous about this candidate. A conversation with wiser friends calmed me as they explained how different faith traditions view prayer in different ways. Eventually we hired him and he worked for many years with the organization.
But I still think about his response. Or more accurately, I think about living a life in such a way that it is pure prayer. How is it that every thought, action, and breath reflects such a spiritual richness?
A simple poem by Fr Gilbert Shaw sets up the question:
Prayer
is the turning of our whole mind,
our whole being,
towards God.
I want that, of course. It sounds wonderful. But how do you get it? The idea of a life that is prayer sounds great but seems impossible. A part of the mosaic within my brain understands that there is no definitive methodology, but my linear side is completely frustrated by that.
This is very Western of me, I’m told. And I agree that it is. But that doesn’t answer my question. Besides, the Western faith tradition has a long history of mystics and poets who found great joy in struggling with the incomprehensible idea of living a life of prayer. Brother Lawrence and his pots and pans comes to mind. Learning from those who walked down this path before me has been helpful … to a point.
Shaw also writes:
The purpose of living is not to learn to make prayer,
but to become prayer; to live in and for God
according to the divine call, wholly surrendered to
the Spirit’s activity in the soul for the glory of God.
That’s somewhat more helpful because it equates the idea with something we become. It’s an action. But what action? I keep coming back to the desire for something tangible. It all seems like hard mental work to figure this stuff out, and I would rather just not think about it.
But then that’s the point where I stop and smile. I have learned that we need to be thinking about it. God likes it when we wrestle with such things.
Over time I have come to understand that this struggle to understand is exactly what God wants. My life is prayer only when it is a life of longing for God. The mental sweat that comes from striving to grow spiritually is part of connecting with God’s heart. And God considers it pure joy to meet us in that place.
Or said another way, what we find to be work may well be what God finds to be praise.
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