… watching for the brushstrokes of God
I was reflecting recently with the youth on spiritual practices and how each time we draw near to God in prayer, worship experience, spiritual reading or writing, daily or weekly reflection add a little torn piece to a slowly emerging mosaic forming the image in which we are created.
How do you look for the image or pattern slowly emerging for you?
“So true prayer demands that we be more passive than active; it requires more silence than words, more adoration than study, more concentration than rushing about, more faith than reason. We must understand thoroughly that true prayer is a gift from heaven to earth…” ~ Carlo Carretto
How do you receive?
“both art and spirituality are about tending to the moments of life: listening deeply, holding space, encountering the sacred, and touching eternity.” ~ Christine Valters Painters
What art form helps you tend to life’s moments?
Broken, we kneel; humbled, we cry: help, Jesus! Raise us gently on high. Book of Common Prayer
This quieting is the letting go of structures, the letting go of techniques, the letting go of all the ways that we attempt to control the situation, all of the ways we try to manipulate God. That’s the type of quieting that needs to happen here: quieting my instinct to control things; quieting my desire for the familiar, my desire to always trod the familiar paths and not to risk the unknown. ~ Thomas Green, Experiencing God
How do you let go in prayer?
“Enable us to carry out from this place peace and strength that here we gain. Because we have talked with You here, may we be able to work more patiently for Your kingdom, bringing light upon the problems that perplex the world, dispelling the night of doubt and fear with Your sheltering love.” ~ from Meditations of the Heart
How do you carry peace?
With the Eyes of the Heart 