God did feed me today. It was a smattering of this with a side of that. It was all good stuff (of course it was good, would He give me anything that was not good) and it all tied together, but trying to journal it tonight has me deleting, re-writing and deleting again. I don't want this blog to be about me or my journey. I just want to share some of the great stuff that God is nurturing me with these days. To make a long day much shorter, suffice it to say that prayer was a common theme in what I was fed today.
It started this morning discussing prayer with a friend and not being where I want to be in my prayer life and carried on through the day with prayer being addressed at different times and in varying arenas.
1 Thessalonians 5:12 - 22 says, "But we request of you, brethren, that you appreciate those who diligently labor among you, and have charge over you in the Lord and give you instruction, and that you esteem them very highly in love because of their work. Live in peace with one another. We urge you, brethren, admonish the unruly, encourage the fainthearted, help the weak, be patient with everyone. See that no one repays another with evil for evil, but always seek after that which is good for one another and for all people. Rejoice always; pray without ceasing; in everything give thanks; for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus. Do not quench the Spirit; do not despise prophetic utterances. But examine everything carefully; hold fast to that which is good; abstain from every form of evil." Verse 17, "pray without ceasing" tucked away in there with all those instructions for Christian conduct.
Pray without ceasing ... that's a tall order. For all that can be said about praying without ceasing, I think what God set between my teeth today was this. What you practice, you retain. I used to be fluent in a German dialect. I thought in it as freely as I now think in English and was comfortably conversant in it. In the past twenty plus years I have had very little occasion to use that language. As a result of it laying dormant for so many years, this language is now, largely, lost to me. I find that instead of thinking in German, I now think in English and then struggle to translate it when I have occasion to speak it. Prayer is like that. I know that my prayer life is not what I wish it were because I stopped talking. The Father never stopped listening ... I stopped talking. Now I'm in the process of relearning how to speak to my Father.
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