what i check

Every morning i check two email accounts, bloglines, AIM (just to see who’s on), my cell phone. I spend what I think is very little time doing that, but it is, in fact, most of the time when the house is quiet. If there are messages, I answer them, I write those message that come to mind while sitting here. It is not hard for the quick checks to take 30 minutes.

Of course, almost never is there anything which couldn’t wait for awhile.

Of course, I also can never find time for reflecting on whatever emails I may have received from God, any messages He may have left on my heart during the night.

hmmm.

technorati tags:time, meditation, unstructured, prayer

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oh no.

i need, i feel, to write something tonight, partly to keep posting on a regular basis and partly because, having spent most of the day in a seminar about prayer in churches, i probably should speak to what i have learned more about prayer.

i’m not sure, however, what i have learned about prayer, which of course is exactly what i feel about communication, which i should have learned something about in three degrees worth of study and yet, on any given day, i am reminded by situations that i know little.

or perhaps more accurately for both prayer and communication, i should say that i have not learned enough to let me feel as though i have any mastery of either.

and that is a frustrating feeling when i am talking with my wife who or whom i have known for more than a quarter of a century and still cannot figure out how to say what i feel or feel what i say or find enough time to begin talking about things that really matter.

although, it is true that when i don’t spend huge amounts of time trying to figure out how to communicate and i just live and walk and talk and kiss and smile and help and….well, then i do have the sense that we actually do understand each other and that she does have clue about how i feel.

and maybe that is also true about God?

technorati tags:prayer, communication

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praying with God

Yesterday I received a book which is already pushing my thinking about prayer in a whole new direction. In "Experiencing Healing Prayer"(Intervarsity Press, 2005), Rick Richardson suggests that when he is praying for someone, he asks Jesus what He is praying for the person. His basis is the Romans 8 text which talks about Jesus interceding for us.

I have always thought of that text meaning that as we approach Jesus, He approaches the Father. However, that same chapter says that when we don't have the words to pray, the Spirit prays for us. So we have the Spirit praying, the Son praying, the Son having prayed for us in John 14.

So what does it mean that Jesus is praying for us? Should we be asking Him what He is asking the Father on our behalf even now? I am asking God for clarification on this now as I begin to go deeper into Richardson's book–and Romans 8.