I recently went to a silent retreat for a weekend. Once there, I noticed it was taking quite some time for my body and soul to unwind and slow down. Both finally matched the restful, tranquil and sacred place where I was. Why did it take so long for my body and soul to wind down? Like a car at 160 miles an hour, it took time to literally slow down my thoughts, the pace of my walking and my …
Category: Quiet
We went to Hilton Head recently and I got to do something quite special. I sat alone in a beach chair in the water as the tide went out. For 30 minutes my mind and soul were transfixed on the wonder, scale and epic nature of the ocean. For me, the vastness of the ocean is a powerful metaphor of the immense nature of God and the expanse of His everlasting love toward us. Even the waves lapping on the …
“Very truly I tell you, the Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does. – John 5:19 (NIV) I don’t know about you, but I do a lot each day by myself….not “as I see the Father doing” How do we reach this oneness with God, where we only do what the Father desires of us? Surrender might be high on the list. …
“Because so many people were coming and going that they did not even have a chance to eat, [Jesus] said to [his disciples], ‘Come with me by yourselves to a quiet place and get some rest.’ So they went away by themselves in a boat to a solitary place.” Mark 6:31-32 …
I was at a local County Fire & Rescue Department recently conducting training when everyone’s radios began to squawk with alarms. Two fire captains launched into action and left what I thought was quite valuable training! 😉 A call had gone out for a house fire. Not too soon later they returned to the training and shared that the call was a “false alarm”. Someone mistook the smoke and flames from a controlled burn for a house fire. …
According to research, the average American is bombarded by somewhere between 247 to 850 commercial messages per day. Some research puts the number near 3,000 messages per day. Do all these messages have an effect on you? How do you react to such a massive earful telling us to….”Get it now!”, “Have it now!”, “Get thin!”, “Invest here!”, “Buy it here!”? Such a huge number of messages tend to make me consider one of two things: 1) I do …