#obedience | itsawonderfilledlife

Posts Tagged ‘#obedience’

Why Do We Pray?

Posted in WONDER, tagged #obedience, Faith, GOD, Jesus, Prayer on May 27, 2024| 2 Comments »

Is there anything more boring than repetition? There is no feeling, no emotion, no uniqueness, no life in the parroting of what has always been done. In things of the church, in the life of the Christ follower, this redundancy can seem to be almost deadly.

although …

As a girl, my church had, for so many years, a call to worship hymn … every Sunday. If I heard Thou Art Worthy once, I heard it hundreds of times! As kids we mocked it, ignored it and allowed out eyes to roll sarcastically in our heads.

Yet now, forty odd years later, when that song is sung, tears fall from my eyes and my knees wiggle to bend, for the repetition as a teen caused an inner chamber of my heart to hold those words more closely than might have appeared at the time. Those words were written on my heart by the same repetitive, boring means that I mocked.

I love the story of Joan Chittister, who, as a Benedictine nun, was introducing a new group of nuns to the community. She asked them,

“why do we pray?”

The women responded similarly to how you or I might …

we pray to grow close to God
we pray to confess our sings
we pray to share our burdens
we pray to ask God to answer our prayers

After awhile, a nun dares to ask the question that they all have poised on the lips,

“why do we pray?”

To which Chittister responds,

“we pray because the bells ring.”

“Bell” by Serhii Korniievskyi

To be obedient to the bell, to the ritual of praying (just) because the bell rings, is to ensure that we do pray, that we are obedient beyond desire … for desire can be fleeting, for we can be fickle. To be obedient to the bell is to ensure that whatever mood, whatever circumstance,

we pray.

Perhaps it is time to set a new reminder on my phone.

“To pray only when it suits us is to want God on our terms. To pray only when it is convenient is to make the God-life a very low priority in a list of better opportunities. To pray only when it feels good is to court total emptiness when we most need to be filled. The hard fact is that nobody finds time for prayer.”
– Joan Chittister

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Forgiveness 101a

Posted in GOD, WONDER, tagged #doitthenfeelit, #forgiveness101a, #noapologyneeded, #obedience, #resetbutton, Forgiveness on November 20, 2018| 1 Comment »

Over the past three weeks I have been researching the topic of forgiveness, since writing about it in my post A Lesson in Forgiveness, where I wrote of how I felt God was stalking me with the topic of forgiveness.

Then, Sunday afternoon, as I was driving down the highway, as the sun was shining bright in the clear blue sky, the words of Ann Voskamp whispered into my thoughts,

“gratitude always precedes the miracle”

Her understanding being that we do not wait until the miracle happens to be thankful, but we are thankful first and the miracle follows. The question then is, what is the miracle?

the ‘thing’ we hoped and prayed for?

or the change in our hearts and minds?

So what does this have to do with forgiveness?

Good question.

When my children were young they were known to say or do something that hurt, offended or frustrated their sibling. When this would occur, I would instruct that they must apologize to their sibling. This was not always met with agreement, on their part, yet I insisted on this. Then the offended sibling was instructed to offer forgiveness.

I remember hearing a mom say that she thought that such insistence on this practise of going through the motions was pointless, for they were simply saying words that were expected of them.

Her words made me ponder … did I simply insist on this ritual because it was what I had grown up hearing and doing? was there a greater purpose behind the practise?

The more I pondered, the more resolute I became in my belief that this behavioural modification did, indeed, have good and long lasting positive impact.

I observed that, once the apologies were said and forgiveness given, play continued … unhindered by the offences of the past. The forced apologies and pardons acted as a reset button, providing opportunity to start over.

Though this is an example from childhood, perhaps it has something to teach us in adulthood (and it is so much easier to instruct the young than for us to be instructed in our adulthood).

Perhaps our offerings of forgiveness
do not need to be felt to do do their good work.
Perhaps they are,
quite simply,
an investment in the future
… our future.

As I drove down the highway, last Sunday. As the sun was shining bright in the clear blue sky. As I was, once again, able to sing praises from my soul (not just from my lips. I understood the value in having offered forgiveness to those who have never offered apology. I understood that. like Ann Voskamp’s quote about thanksgiving preceding the miracle,

forgiveness of the will
precedes
forgiveness in the heart

What I had done out of rote practise, with little expectation, other than compliance, obedience, birthed delightful freedom, like a reset button had been pressed, in my own soul.

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