What do we do, when we become so consumed by what other people might think that we forget to listen to the divine direction that guides us to do the unique thing that God has called us to do?

Who have we become when we look everywhere outside the kingdom of God for sustenance, failing to realize that the magic of the manna that feeds us in the wilderness is that it cannot be stored but manifests each day?

Where can we go when we forget the reason that we are running the race to begin with and get stuck in a mode of fear – like Lot’s wife – and cannot go any further?

How can we collect the pieces again when they have become fragments of dreams and purpose scattered along the path of pure potential?

Why do we believe that our prayers have stopped listening to us, as though God is a person with such a busy schedule that the depression and despair that digs deep in our souls cannot be healed?

Why are we losing so many friends and family this season, including those who take their own lives because they can no longer bear the weight of the world?

People call us, reaching out for someone to listen.  It is important that our patience be strong enough to hold their pain – even if only long enough for them to testify and for us to be a witness.

We may not be able to recognize those who would take their lives because they lose their jobs, their homes, their cars, and feel the quicksand of debt surround them until they cannot breathe into the openings of God everywhere for new life and better opportunity.

Our ability to listen for awhile, or to hold them in our arms, or to feed them fresh manna from the sky that we carry within our hearts might be the life raft that they need to sustain them.

Will you give your brother or your sister another chance?  Will you slow down long enough to lift them from their mat of impossibilities?  Will you stir the waters that need an angel to stir them?

God is the goodness and mercy that sings to every cell of our bodies.

God is the embrace that carries us forever.

God is the table that eternity prepares before us, feeding us ever-lasting good as arrows flight before us and below us, and even beneath us.

God is that hand that leads us through the shadow of death without fear, with the sweet voice of divine guidance.

Will you listen, and answer without judgment or condemnation?

God is the bounty of fresh ideas that never stop blessing Heidemarie Schwermer, a German woman who made a deliberate choice at 68 years old to leave her apartment and give away her belongings – even her pension check – and live a life without worry about where she will eat and sleep and live.  The same God is available to each one of us.

We are the vehicles of answered prayers.

We are the rod that parts the messiness.

We are the deliverer of miracles.

We have to be courageous enough to run the race against the existing structure of norms and expectations and instead use the appearance of lack to open doors of new understanding.

In her film entitled Living Without Money, Heidemarie blesses us with a new paradigm of living in the margins – where we rely on the unseen to feed, nourish and sustain us.  Heidemarie never goes hungry.  She never sleeps outside.  She is never barefoot and naked.

Heidemarie reminds us that most of us worship a God of consistency, sacrificing the fullness of our creative Spirit to the expected, to the normal, to the work shift, and the store, and the purchase and the stuff – instead of trusting God as the inexhaustible supply of the unseen and the unreliable and the unimaginable that carries us across life’s vast waters with a walk that is steady upon them or a rod that will part them so we can cross.

She envisions a world that is so loving and protective, money is not necessary.

She raises the question whether we have all become so greedy that we cannot feed, clothe, house, and educate our sisters and brothers?

Are we all so busy that we cannot open our eyes to see those who are suffering and take a moment to give whatever they are asking for, whatever they believe they need?

Have we all failed to see that manna is the good that pours from each one of us?

Oh God show me how to be your love that never stops pouring, a love that blesses those who are suffering, a love that feeds those who need to be fed, a love that guides those who cannot find a way out of no way, a love that strengthens those who have had enough.

Oh Divine God of Absolute Good, forgive me for my resistance to giving. 

Forgive me for my resolute selfishness. 

Forgive me for failing to remember that I am your universal love that never stops blessing. 

I am your endless stream that will heal my brother and my sister’s thirst. 

Oh Holy Spirit allow me to trust the endless bounty of all that you are, and give me the faith to walk a path of deliverance from greed, to run the unique race that you have formed beneath my feet that is only for me and the blessings that I alone can deliver. 

Liberate my light to shine with the presence of your eternal gifts that never stop filling the cracks of lives in the margins with grace. 

Show me how to recreate a norm that  sustains with supernatural power, so that I can baptize all who would follow you with a new spirit. 

Let me die in the wilderness of fear but be resurrected in the temple of eternal faith. 

May I be Christ in the hopelessness of all of those who have had enough and need to believe that You are the only glory that there is.

 

from Prayers Who Come To God Asking For Nothing
Copyrighted 2016 by Cecilia B. Loving