Beauty comes in many forms..
During a conversation yesterday with a good friend, we talked about trust in God, and how it seems that God does take care of us….but takes his time doing it. “If only God wouldn’t drag his feet so,” I complained to my friend. “If only God would take care of things sooner, without me having to wait and wait and wait!”
I think we all have experienced a trust that waited on God. And waited. And waited. Times when our hearts said, “God I only want to do your will….if only you would let me know what that is!”
Today, I had an opportunity to make a small gift. It was a sacrifice, because it cost me. But as I started to brood over the offering, I stopped myself and made the gift an offering to God.
I barely did this when I got into my car to go home and prepare for this evening’s class. I started up the car, and on the radio, the song by Joe Cocker began, “You are so beautiful….to me.” As the song hit my ears, I experienced an overwhelming sense of the presence of God…and that it was not by chance that I got into the car at the exact moment this song started on the radio.
I began to drive away, and as I listened to the words, I thought of them as God singing them to me. The more I listened, the more a realization of what I mean to God overwhelmed me.
I encourage you to download the song for yourself. I encourage you to listen to the words, and hear them as God singing them to you. I think you will then understand how I felt….
God certainly works in mysterious ways, and with quite a sense of humor too. Joe Cocker? Really?
Stevs
Over the years, I feel like I’m at least 114 years old, when feeling that I am waiting on God, looking back, I realize that most of the time, I was waiting for me. Waiting to do what I had to do to achieve what I wanted. There is an aspect of prayer that is most definitely active. It’s not all passive, as we tend to think it is.
I’ve had visions since I was a preschooler, and there was one vision, in many parts, that described prayer as the relationship of me (the petitioner), God, and time. This vision taught me to not think of God in terms of time, that time is a function in the universe unto itself.
Another vision I had that your post made me think of was when, as a women in her early twenties, I was told, “You impatience is unbecoming.” My visions never, ever were what I would assume them to mean (I’m always wrong). Instead, as I meditated on this vision, I saw a plant being over-watered, over-tended, so much so that it ceased to live. Impatience, it seems, is the anxiousness with which we treat life and God, that results in death (in many expressions). I am so old at the point that I have received the grace to see that many times, it is time that knows the way to achieving our goals. That finding the right time for something is an essential part of our relationship with God. It is a direct reflection of our faith.
Thank you for your post.
Julia: You’re words and experience are inspiring. I too am beginning to see how it might actually be more truthful to say, God waits on us, to let go, to accept, to realize he is not so severe as to expect us to be perfect. We are the severe ones.
I think of prayer as learning to be silent enough to recognize God within. I had to be brought to that silence by having my prayers seem utterly powerless. And then I learned a new type of prayer, one sitting in readiness before the Divine Being. Awesome.