This week at church we will be focussing on the core of what it means to follow Jesus: making time for
As we continue the journey in the sermon on the mount, Jesus turns his attention to what prayer looks like and contrasts people who go on and on with words to people who make time to be alone with God.
Being alone with God is increasingly difficult in our modern world. We have more distractions than any generation before us, and for most of us being truly alone is scary. We are scared of aloneness and so we unconsciously fill our lives with noise so we are not left alone.
This week we will be engaging with the words of Henri Nouwen who writes:
“To live a spiritual life we must first find the courage to enter into the desert of our loneliness and to change it by gentle and persistent efforts into a garden of solitude. The movement from loneliness to solitude, however, is the beginning of any spiritual life because
it it is the movement from the restless senses to the restful spirit, from the outward-reaching cravings to the inward-reaching search, from the fearful clinging to the fearless play.”
I hope that this week we can hear Jesus’s invitation to face our fears and step into what it means to discover the life-giving place of solitude and in that place find a new level of relationship with the God who loves us.
Matt