FINDING THE PLACE

"Early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up and slipped out to a solitary place to pray."  (Mark 1:35 NIV)

Researchers once surveyed people about their favorite room in the house. The top answer was the kitchen. People love that one. Most husbands’ top answer was the bedroom. Want to guess what the top answer was for mothers of young children? The bathroom.

Why? You lock the door. You keep those little rug rats out of there for at least a couple of minutes. You keep your husband out of there for at least a couple of minutes. The idea is that you find some place where you know you are alone. You are free of stress. You find sanctuary -- a holy place.

God wants to give us sanctuary. There is another kind of presence when we are gathered together, but there is a unique way in which we experience the presence of God when we are alone.

I have one friend who finds this special solitude with God at a little Italian restaurant. Another friend experiences it most often while driving country roads. One finds it on airplanes. Another likes to go to a retreat center in the hills of Malibu Canyon. Still another finds it is the early hours of the morning in his office. You will recognize the place where you can be yourself before God. 

-- John Ortberg in “The Me I Want to Be”

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IN THE MIDST OF SUFFERING

“And in the same way -- by our faith -- the Holy Spirit helps us with our daily problems and in our praying. For we don’t even know what we should pray for nor how to pray as we should, but the Holy Spirit prays for us with such feeling that it cannot be expressed in words.”  (Romans 8:26 TLB)

In solitude, we come to know the Spirit who has already been given to us. The pains and struggles we encounter in our solitude thus become the way to hope, because our hope is not based on something that will happen after our sufferings are over, but on the real presence of God’s healing Spirit in the midst of these sufferings. 

-- Henri J. M. Nouwen in “Making All Things New”

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A CONSTANT GUIDING PRESENCE

Whenever I hear of a Christian copping out of some undertaking for God in order to wait to learn God's will for his or her life, I have to ask, "Where in the Bible does it tell you that God will reveal the divine plan for your whole life?  It seems to me that it's just the opposite.  The Bible lets us know that God keeps us in a constructive and spiritually edifying state of dependency.

"There are two ways I could tell you how to get to my house," I tell them.  "I could draw you a map, and you could use the map to figure out how to get to my house on your own.  You might or might not get there, depending on how good a mapmaker I am and how good you are at reading maps.  But better than giving you a map would be if I got in the car with you and guided you all the way.  If I showed you every road to take and every turn to make as we drove along, you would get to my house without any trouble."

I then go on to explain that God directs our lives by being a constant guiding presence, rather than by giving us directions to follow by ourselves.  We are not given a road map for the rest of our lives, because that would enable us to chart life's course without leaning on the Lord.  Rather, as it says in John 16:13, Jesus sends the Holy Spirit to us with the promise that the Spirit will be a guiding presence in our lives. 

-- Tony Campolo in “Following Jesus Without Embarrassing God”

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