mmm breakfast
this getting up late, actually eating breakfast, working from home in the morning thing is KILLER. i'm gonna enjoy this immensely. it's much easier than 71 North at 8:15.
read something cool last night, from The Way Of The Heart by Henry Nouwen. the book's about solitude, silence, and prayer, practiced by monks in the desert. not normally my kind of thing, because honestly desert monk action strikes me as kinda silly. but this statement about prayer resounded with me.
"For many of us, prayer means nothing more than speaking with God. And since it usually seems to be a quite one-sided affair, prayer simply means talking to God. This idea is enough to create great frustrations. If I present a problem, I expect a solution; if I formlate a question, I expect an answer; if I ask for guidance, I expect a response. And when it seems, increasingly, that I am talking into the dark, it is not so strange that I soon begin to suspect that my dialogue with God is in fact a monologue. Then I may begin to ask myself: To whom am I really speaking, God or myself?"
prayer is a strange thing. i feel i've gotten accustomed to just talking naturally with God, as if i was talking to a friend in the room. but i think in the back of my mind the one-sidedness has always hounded me, and i realize how much i long to just hear one word from God, one sure thing that i know came from Him and not from me, to know that my Lord found me worthy to say something to me. but last night reading this it struck me once again that God speaks in the silence, He doesn't yell over the roar. and i've tried to, i guess, compensate for that and remove all audible stuff around me, but i then always am confronted with the loudness in my head - music doesn't EVER stop, my racing thoughts, my worries... i simply cannot make my mind shut up, and it's immensely frustrating. a few saturdays ago i tried for like LITERALLY 30 minutes and it didn't ever work. Nouwen, in this book, talks about inner silence that cultivates aloneness with God, that we carry with us. i skimmed through that chapter, thinking it floaty and useless, but now i think i'm gonna go back and read it and try to pay more attention.
seriously think for a sec - when was the last time your mind was truly quiet? is it really possible?
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