personal challenge

I've just finished reading Bob Benson's devotional, A Living Prayer, in which the author chronicles his personal quest to learn how to pray. He taps specifically into history, exploring the Benedictine order, the various elements of the mass, the Common Book of Prayer, and so on. He also quotes heavily from Annie Dillard and Frederick Buechner, two of my favorites.

Although something about Benson's writing style did not impress me, and in fact struck me as plagairized (if that can be said about a style) from Buechner (and poorly so), I nonetheless am so glad it fell into my hands, because I needed to hear what it said.

It reminded me of how crucial it is to carve out a sacred place in my life. I think when I complained about my inner disquiet a few days ago, it was the lack of this that I was feeling. I don't make time to quiet my soul, to wring confessions from it, to expose it to the weather of the Word, to offer up all the bits of praise and gratitude and fear and yearning that accumulate during a day. My prayer gutters are clogged with unshriven sins and unvoiced communication, not to mention with the daily debris of all the distractions I heap over them, and I'm not taking the time to clear them for the Living Water.

And now, even though I've been challenged, I still am finding a million other things to do. I am stalling, knowing that hard, hard work lies ahead of me. I have to create a habit out of thin air. And I have to make sure that it never becomes one of those thoughtless, involuntary habits like fixing my morning coffee or logging onto my computer. It has to be a habit in which I am totally engaged in each of those four facets of being: heart, mind, soul, and strength.

I know that this quest is not solitary, and that is part of the trouble. I am afraid of baring my soul to my Savior, because I know that that means I will find out more about who I am in relationship to Him, and that I won't like what I see. And then He'll change me, and require my complete and undivided attention and service, and it will be painful and difficult and I'll disappoint Him and fail. Already this shallow probing has made me realize more about my own laziness and cowardice and selfishness than I ever wanted to acknowledge.

But that is the reality of being a fallen human in a fallen world, and being loved by and moved to love a perfect God. And I know that it is also the only way to live a joyful, peaceful, satisfied, worthy life.

So I am going to begin carving the very pit out of my life and offering the void that it leaves to the only One who can truly fill it.