{"id":20453,"date":"2021-09-03T09:39:13","date_gmt":"2021-09-03T13:39:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=20453"},"modified":"2021-09-03T09:43:09","modified_gmt":"2021-09-03T13:43:09","slug":"simple-trust-in-gods-presence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=20453","title":{"rendered":"Simple Trust in God&#8217;s Presence"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/wms76AfllVE\" title=\"YouTube video player\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen=\"\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n\n\n<p>\u201cPrayer is talking to God\u201d:\nwith these words nearly all of us receive our first religious instruction.\nCertainly I did. As a child, I learned the usual first prayers and graces (\u201cNow\nI lay me down to sleep\u201d and \u201cGod is great, God is good. . .\u201d), followed, a bit\nlater, by the Lord\u2019s Prayer and the Twenty-Third Psalm. I was also encouraged\nto speak to God in my own words and instructed that the appropriate topics for\nthis conversation were to give thanks for the blessings of the day and to ask\nfor assistance with particular needs and concerns.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But for all this, I was also\none of the relatively rare few who also had it patterned into me that prayer\nwas <em>listening<\/em> to God. Not even listening for messages, exactly, like the\nchild Samuel in my favorite Old Testament story [1 Samuel 3:3\u201310], but just\nbeing there, quietly gathered in God\u2019s presence. This learning came not from my\nformal Sunday School training, but through the good fortune of spending my\nfirst six school years in a Quaker school, where weekly silent \u201cmeeting for\nworship\u201d was as an invariable part of the rhythm of life as schoolwork or\nrecess. I can still remember trooping together, class by class, into the\ncavernous two-story meetinghouse and taking our places on the long, narrow\nbenches once occupied by elders of yore. Occasionally, there would be a\nscriptural verse or thought offered, but for long stretches there was simply\nsilence. And in that silence, as I gazed up at the sunlight sparkling through\nthose high upper windows, or followed a secret tug drawing me down into my own\nheart, I began to know a prayer much deeper than \u201ctalking to God.\u201d Somewhere in\nthose depths of silence I came upon my first experiences of God as a loving\npresence that was always near, and prayer as a simple trust in that presence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Almost four decades later, when\nI was introduced to Centering Prayer through the work of Father Thomas Keating,\nit did not take me long to recognize where I was. In a deep way I\u2019d come home\nagain to that place I first knew as a child in Quaker meeting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What I know now, of course,\nis that the type of prayer I was being exposed to during those meetings for\nworship was contemplative prayer. In Christian spiritual literature, this term\nall too often has the aura of being an advanced and somewhat rarified form of\nprayer, mostly practiced by monks and mystics. But in essence, contemplative\nprayer is simply a wordless, trusting opening of self to the divine presence.\nFar from being advanced, it is about the simplest form of prayer there is.\nChildren recognize it instantly\u2014as I did\u2014perhaps because, as the\nsixteenth-century mystic John of the Cross intimates, \u201cSilence is God\u2019s first\nlanguage.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>LET THE DEW OF MY PRESENCE refresh your mind and heart.\nSo many, many things vie for your attention in this complex world of instant\ncommunication. The world has changed enormously since I first gave the command\nto be still, and know that I am God. However, this timeless truth is essential\nfor the well-being of your soul. As dew refreshes grass and flowers during the\nstillness of the night, so My Presence revitalizes you as you sit quietly with\nMe. A refreshed, revitalized mind is able to sort out what is important and\nwhat is not. In its natural condition, your mind easily gets stuck on trivial\nmatters. Like the spinning wheels of a car trapped in mud, the cogs of your\nbrain spin impotently when you focus on a trivial thing. As soon as you start\ncommunicating with Me about the matter, your thoughts gain traction, and you\ncan move on to more important things. Communicate with Me continually, and I\nwill put My thoughts into your mind. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>PSALM 46:10; He says, \u201cBe still, and know that I am God;\n( A) I will be exalted. ( B) among the nations, I will be exalted <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>LUKE 10:39\u201342; She had a sister called Mary, who sat at\nthe Lord\u2019s feet listening to what he said.40&nbsp;But Martha was distracted by\nall the preparations that had to be made. She came to him and asked, \u201cLord,<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>1 CORINTHIANS 14:33 NKJV; For God is not a God of\ndisorder but of peace\u2014as in all the congregations of the Lord\u2019s people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Young, Sarah. Jesus Calling Morning and Evening\nDevotional (Jesus Calling\u00ae) (p. 510). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cPrayer is talking to God\u201d: with these words nearly all of us receive our first religious instruction. Certainly I did. As a child, I learned the usual first prayers and graces (\u201cNow I lay me down to sleep\u201d and \u201cGod is great, God is good. . .\u201d), followed, a bit later, by the Lord\u2019s Prayer [&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\/20453"}],"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=20453"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20453\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20456,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20453\/revisions\/20456"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}