3 Days Makes All The Difference

“Did you ever know the childhood conundrum of working for a penny a day for a month, but doubling your salary each day?  If you started this wonderful pay scheme on New Year’s Day, you would be earning more than $10 million per day on the last day of January.  This is the part most people remember.  What we do not realize is that, using the same scheme, we would earn only about $1.3 million if January were three days shorter (i.e. February).  Put another way, your cumulative income for that whole month of February would be roughly $2.6 million, instead of the $21 million you earned in total during January.  When an effect is exponential, those last three days mean a lot.”         (Being Digital, by Nicholas Negroponte, p. 5)

We know the exponential power of three days in our lives.   

Good Friday through Easter made all the difference in the world.

Morning Prayer

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Everywhere I walk let it be on Your path.

Everything I see let it be through Your eyes.

Everything I do let it be Your will.

Every hardship I face let me place it in Your hands.

Every emotion I feel let it be Your Spirit moving in me.

Everything I seek let me find it in Your love.

My dear God,

I thank Your for this day.

I ask not to know where I am going.

I ask only to know and feel

In the depths of my heart and soul

That You are with me

That You are guiding me

That I am safe in the protection of Your loving care.

(author unknown)

Silence Is Golden

A significant and new understanding for me was that prayer is more about listening than talking.  That should come as no surprise, since the greatest gift we can give someone is to be fully presence and listen to them with an open heart.  God gifted us with His presence as Emmanuel ("God with us") when "the Word became flesh and lived among us."  (John 1:14)  He promised to hear our intercessions and praises, so we also take time for listening prayer.  That means we are silent before Him.

Jan Linn has been leading people on silent retreats for over twenty years.  These silent retreats are normally entire weekends during which a group goes to a monastery or some retreat center and never says a word the whole weekend.  Someone asked Dr. Linn, "Why silent retreats?"  "Because," Dr. Linn replied, "in silence we are no longer in control."

 

 Think about that for a minute.  As long as we are talking we will not hear God and we will not hear anybody else.  As long as we keep talking we will never have our positions or values challenged by God.  When we talk we set the agenda.  When we talk we have some influence over other people.   We talk to stay in control.

 

 On the other hand, when we remain silent in conversation with someone else who is talking, we allow that person to take control.  Silent prayer, whether for a whole weekend or for two minutes a day, is a time of losing or giving up control and allowing the Spirit of God to be in control.  That can be a frightening experience.  To wait before God in prayer is to affirm that God is in control.

 (Biblical Preaching Journal, William B. Kincaid, Summer, 1994)

Intercession

I thought this piece from "Praying the Names of God" by Michael Ramsey is helpful as we reflect on “intercession”: 

 

“To intercede is to bear others on the heart in God's presence. . . . Intercession thus becomes not the bombardment of God with requests so much as the bringing of our desires within the stream of God's own compassion. . . . The compassion of God flows ceaselessly toward the world, but it seems to wait upon the cooperation of human wills. This cooperation is partly by God's creatures doing the things which God desires to be done, and partly by prayers which are also channels of God's compassion.

Real intercession, then, does not consist in presenting God with a laundry list of demands or requests. Instead it involves spending time in God's presence, seeking His will, being guided by His Spirit as we offer up prayers on behalf of others.

Ask Christ to increase your desire to be like him, to speak his Word with a pure heart, and to reflect his love by becoming an intercessor, taking others into your heart so that you can carry them into God's presence through prayer."