character
Waiting For God
I have to write about this because it just seems to keep coming up in one way or another in my daily readings. Patience is a virtue that I have had to work hard on acquiring. Left to my own devices I’m a “I want what I want, when I want it” type of gal. (Partners well with that “fly by the seat of my pants” personality that I have!) I love immediate results – yesterday!!
So when I opened my copy of the Daily Word yesterday and saw the topic was “patience” a small inner part of me groaned. That seems to be my first response to anything that smacks of a personal lesson that I need to learn, or relearn, or reinforce! Fortunately that response is usually short-lived and I am willing to dive in and look at the lesson. I am grateful today that I am willing to be teachable.
The title immediately under the topic read: “I patiently await answered prayer.” And I recognized instantly that I needed to go back in my other meditation books because I knew that I had received this message several times over the last couple of weeks. Someone was definitely trying to get my attention!!
In the posting that I wrote yesterday, Return To My Spiritual Sanctuary, I quoted from the book The Power of Prayer by E.M. Bounds, (July 8). Over a period of three or four days in the same book I found the following messages: “Persistent prayer has patience to wait and strength to continue.” (July 4) And, “Even if God does not answer our prayers right away, we must keep on praying.” (July 6)
Imagine my dismay when I turned the page on July 10 and found the title, “Delays and Denials” and read, “We need to give thought to the mysterious fact of prayer – the certainty that there will be delays and denials. We must prepare for and permit these delays and denials.” So does this mean that I have to wait for God to answer my prayer in His time? He’s not going to respond to my requests immediately? I am going to have to wait!!
I returned to yet another of my daily books, Moments of Peace in the Presence of God published by Bethany House, where I remembered a title from about ten days ago. And there it was: “Waiting For God’s Timing”. I took the time to reread this and I would like to share some of it with you.
“ ‘Truly my soul silently waits for God; From Him comes my salvation.’ Psalm 62:1
No amount of worrying can make things happen, let alone make them happen the way you want. Still, your human nature, bent on trying, rises to the challenge. What’s the remedy for this all-too-common malady? Oswald Chambers in his classic My Utmost For His Highest, wrote, ‘When God brings a time of waiting, and appears to be unresponsive, don’t fill it with busyness, just wait ….. If you have the slightest doubt, then he is not guiding.’
The story of Abraham and Sarah illustrates the futility of trying to make a divine promise come about in your own timing. Tired of waiting for a son, Sarah took matters into her own hands. The result was disastrous. God’s timetable always delivers an Isaac when the time is right.”
This reflection finished with the following prayer:
Slow me down, God, when I am in a hurry and you are not.
Help me to walk with you, not ahead of you.
Teach me to plant the seed and leave the harvest to you.
Amen
What a concept. I need to make this prayer part of my daily prayers. I need to remember to walk with God and not try to walk ahead of Him. Imagine that, trying to guide God! Only someone with the underlying egotistical traits of character that I have would attempt to do that. So for the foreseeable future my lesson needs to be one of patience laced with generous dollops of humility.
Self Nurturing: Reading and Writing
I may not have written much in the last couple of months, but words have still been the centre of my life. They were not running off my fingertips through the computer but they were certainly filling my heart, soul, and mind. In the absence of writing I have been doing a lot of reading.
It’s as though words in some way, shape, or form have to be in my life. I love seeing them printed or written across the page. It fascinates me to think about what the words hold. It could be information about an object, a machine say, or it could be the description of a place.
Words have the power to fire our imagination. They can transport us to some magical landscape where we can "escape” for a few hours as we read. They can describe a character so that we think we can see them, smell them, hear them as they speak. The author Morris West (In The Shoes Of The Fisherman) has an incredible gift for this last talent, and this was what drew me to read all of his books.
In the latter part of 2009 I was introduced to the author Robert B. Parker. His style of writing attracted me immediately. He wrote a couple of series of books with different central characters; the Spenser novels, the Jesse Stone novels, and the Sunny Randall novels. They are all of the detective genre.
He used a short sharp yet easy flowing style of writing, especially when it came to conversations between people. Some of his sentences are just two words long! Yet everything is perfect in the moment. And he uses a form of dry, wry wit that appeals to my English sense of humour.
Over a period of about three months I think I read everything he wrote. Back in January 2010 I was devouring his last three or four books from the library shelf when I heard the news of his death. I remember my immediate thought was “Oh no, what will I read now!” as if he were the only writer producing books.
But he had very quickly become “my Robert B. Parker (RBP)”. He had entered my heart and my soul through his generously-shared talent. I thought of him as a friend who set out to entertain me with each of his books. The only positive thing that I can say about his passing is that he died at his typewriter doing what he loved most.
So having completed all his books I then had to find someone else. I love detective/spy books so I stayed in that genre. Checking along the shelves in the library I remember thinking, “I need to find a prolific author; someone who has as many books on the shelf as “my RBP”. And so Sue Grafton found her way into my book bag.
Her A,B,C books based on the character Kinsey Millhone are great. Her style is different yet just as interesting as RBP. Kinsey is a little off-beat, a little off-centre, and as a woman detective is just finding her way around the profession. I guess what attracts me to her is that there is a part of her that is organized and yet there is another great chunk of her that is delightfully, quirkily “fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants”.
Her well-preserved and still very attractive octogenarian neighbour Henry and his other “just as old if not older” siblings add some unique interest to the story. But the spice is added, literally, by Rosie, of Hungarian origins, who runs a small restaurant/grill/bar down the road from Kinsey’s home. I can almost hear her speaking in her broken accent and can imagine the expressions on her face and in her voice the way Sue Grafton describes her.
So here I am having read the latest, U Is For Umbrella, and wondering who will be the next author that my eyes fall upon, that my nose smells out. One thing is for sure, I will not be without words in some way or another. They feed my soul and my mind. I will not go hungry!