{"id":18686,"date":"2020-03-25T09:26:49","date_gmt":"2020-03-25T13:26:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=18686"},"modified":"2020-03-25T09:26:49","modified_gmt":"2020-03-25T13:26:49","slug":"praying-in-crisis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=18686","title":{"rendered":"Praying In Crisis"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>The Path of Descent<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Praying in\nCrisis &nbsp;<\/strong><br>\nWednesday, March 25, 2020<\/p>\n\n\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/tIZitK6_IMQ\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n\n\n<p><em>CAC faculty member Brian McLaren is\nan author and contemplative activist. He spent over twenty years as the pastor\nof a church where he lived, worked, and prayed with people in good times and\nbad. Responding to crises is not theoretical for him, but a deeply felt and\nlived experience which comes through so clearly in these words. I hope you will\nfeel encouraged to take this practice to your own time of prayer in the days,\nweeks, and months ahead. &nbsp;<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>When we call out for help, we are bound more powerfully\nto God through our needs and weakness, our unfulfilled hopes and dreams, and\nour anxieties and problems than we ever could have been through our joys,\nsuccesses, and strengths alone. . . . &nbsp;[1]&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Anxieties can gray the whole sky like cloud cover or\ndescend on our whole horizon like fog. When we rename our anxieties, in a sense\nwe distill them into requests. What covered the whole sky can now be contained\nin a couple of buckets. So when we\u2019re suffering from anxiety, we can begin by\nsimply holding the word <em>help<\/em>\nbefore God, letting that one word bring focus to the chaos of our racing\nthoughts. Once we feel that our mind has dropped out of the frantic zone and\ninto a spirit of connection with God, we can let the general word <em>help<\/em> go and in its place hold\nmore specific words that name what we need, thereby condensing the cloud of\nvague anxiety into a bucket of substantial request. So we might hold the word <em>guidance <\/em>before God. Or <em>patience.<\/em> Or courage. Or <em>resilience.<\/em> Or <em>boundaries, mercy, compassion,\ndetermination, healing, calm, freedom, wisdom, or peace.<\/em> . . .\n[2]&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Along with our anxieties and hurts, we also bring our\ndisappointments to God. If anxieties focus on what <em>might happen<\/em>, and hurts focus on what <em>has happened<\/em>, disappointments\nfocus on what <em>has not happened<\/em>.\nAgain, as the saying goes, revealing your feeling is the beginning of healing,\nso simply acknowledging or naming our disappointment to God is an important\nmove. This is especially important because many of us, if we don\u2019t bring our\ndisappointment to God, will blame our disappointment on God, thus alienating\nourselves from our best hope of comfort and strength. . . . &nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Whether we\u2019re dealing with anxieties, wounds,\ndisappointments, or other needs or struggles, there is enormous power in\nsimple, strong words\u2014the words by which we name our pain and then translate it\ninto a request to God. <em>Help<\/em>\nis the door into this vital practice of petition, through which we expand\nbeyond our own capacities and resources to God\u2019s. . . .&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Through this\npractice of expansion and petition, we discover something priceless: the sacred\nconnection can grow stronger through, not in spite of, our anxieties, wounds,\ndisappointments, struggles, and needs. The Compassionate One is our gracious\nfriend, and we don\u2019t have to earn anything, deserve anything, achieve anything,\nor merit anything to bring our needs to God. We can just come as we are.\n[3]&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Path of Descent Praying in Crisis &nbsp; Wednesday, March 25, 2020 CAC faculty member Brian McLaren is an author and contemplative activist. He spent over twenty years as the pastor of a church where he lived, worked, and prayed with people in good times and bad. Responding to crises is not theoretical for him, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18686"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18686"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18686\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18687,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18686\/revisions\/18687"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18686"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18686"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18686"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}