You create a path of your own by looking within yourself and listening to your soul, cultivating your own ways of experiencing the sacred and then practicing it. Practicing until you make it a song that sings you.
Sue Monk KiddRead
God is at the tip of our scalpels, our screwdrivers, our computer terminals, our dust rags, our vacuum cleaners, our pencils and pens. He is with us in our wheelchairs, or on our hospital beds, when all we can do is sit or lie flat. When we envision Him and His purpose in what we do, then we begin to grow aware of His presence in the middle of it. We are able to engage in our inward conversation with Him as we work, naturally, without strain. He becomes our partner, our collaborator.
Interpretation
God is present in our everyday actions and tools, and recognizing this helps us feel His companionship and purpose.
This quote emphasizes that God's presence can be found in the ordinary aspects of life and the daily tools we use, from medical instruments to writing utensils. It suggests that when we acknowledge and envision divine purpose in our work and struggles, we experience a deeper connection with the divine, allowing for natural interaction and collaboration with God in our lives, regardless of our circumstances.
In practice
In a speech about finding meaning in our work, one might quote this to illustrate the idea of divine presence in daily tasks.
You create a path of your own by looking within yourself and listening to your soul, cultivating your own ways of experiencing the sacred and then practicing it. Practicing until you make it a song that sings you.
Finally, I began to write about becoming an older woman and the trepidation it stirred. The small, telling "betrayals" of my body. The stalled, eerie stillness in my writing, accompanied by an ache for some unlived destiny. I wrote about the raw, unsettled feelings coursing through me, the need to divest and relocate, the urge to radically simplify and distill life into a new, unknown meaning.
I watched him, filled with tenderness and ache, wondering what it was that connected us. Was it the wounded places down inside people that sought each other out, that bred a kind of love between them?
I felt amazed at the choosing one had to do, over and over a million times daily--choosing love, then choosing it again...how loving and being in love could be so different.
Where do you come from?"...This is the number one most-asked question in all of South Carolina. We want to know if you are one of us, if your cousin knows our cousin, if your little sister went to school with our big brother, if you go to the same Baptist church as our ex-boss. We are looking for ways our stories fit together.
Back in the autumn I had awakened to a growing darkness and cacophony, as if something in the depths were crying out. A whole chorus of voices. Orphaned voices. They seemed to speak for all the unlived parts of me, and they came with a force and dazzle that I couldn't contain. They seemed to explode the boundaries of my existence. I know now that they were the clamor of a new self struggling to be born.
Let Christ turn your natural optimism into Christian hope, your energy into moral virtue, your good will into genuine self-sacrificin g love! This is the path you are called to take. This is the path to overcoming all that threatens hope, virtue and love in your lives and in your culture. In this way your youth will be a gift to Jesus and to the world.
We need silence to be alone with God, to speak to him, to listen to him, to ponder his words deep in our hearts. We need to be alone with God in silence to be renewed and transformed. Silence gives us a new outlook on life. In it we are filled with the energy of God himself that makes us do all things with joy.
Prayer is the practice of drawing on the grace of God. Don't say, "I will endure this until I can get away and pray." Pray now - draw on the grace of God in your moment of need. Prayer is the most normal and useful thing; it is not simply a reflex action of your devotion to God. We are very slow to learn to draw on God's grace through prayer.
There is nothing more important to learn about Christian growth than this: Growing in grace means becoming like Christ.
Dear God, I surrender this thought to you, for I would see the miracle that lies behind it. Amen.
The greatness of prayer is nothing but an extension of the greatness and glory of God in our lives To fail to pray, then, is not to merely break some religious rule - it is a failure to treat God as God. It is a sin against his glory
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