Surrender
Yesterday, I offered to pray for anyone with a specific request and asked that you use the email 20rosepoet20@gmail.com to send your concern. I understand that some people had a problem trying to click on that link, so please cut and paste the address to whatever email platform you use. If you did not get a reply from me, I did not receive your prayer request. Many regrets, so please try again.
In this dark season as we awaken to the Light, because it is always present in some way, the Old Testament Jewish prophet Isaiah is a prominent guide. How can we not relate to these verses from Isaiah 64 addressed to the Creator:
“O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence–as when fire kindles brushwood and the fire causes water to boil– to make your name known to your adversaries, so that the nations might tremble at your presence!” (1-2).
Here, in this time of ongoing pandemic and unsettled transfer of leadership, with hungry people laid off from jobs and parents doing double-duty as mothers/fathers and teachers, with vaccinations tempting us but not yet guaranteed, with hearts empty, don’t we long for God to come down and make the mountains quake! Come down now!
But if God asked us what we wanted God to do, right now, this instant, what would our answer be? Fix everything? Is that really the job description of the Creator/Spirit/Universe, to “fix” what we ourselves caused or made more problematic? I don’t think so. Instead of asking God to come down and make things right so that we can live more comfortably and securely and have our own needs met, perhaps we are invited at this time to ask God to come down and enter our hearts. Before we can envision where God is at work in our world, perhaps we might ask ourselves where God is at work in us.
This fallow season is an opportunity for us to surrender to what is (not admit defeat, but surrender to that which is bigger than us)—to give up our personal agendas, our “wants,” our prejudices, biases, and self-righteousness, all of our “other” gods—and to allow God to claim the central place in our hearts. We are being beckoned to let the fire that kindles brushwood and causes water to boil be set aflame in us.
I often listen to this song by Luke Parker as a way to pray for my own surrender: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCx6kUkYHxM. May it speak to you and bless you.
Spirit Reflections 