What am I doing on the internet anyway? If you know me well, you’ve heard me say, “I want a cabin in the woods with no internet!” Anything over-sized or out of balance is dangerous, even well-meant intentions, and anything is also profitable in God’s hands. At this point, my “dog-leashed-resistance” has run its course, so I enter the cyberworld of communication.
Words! What are they? We speak them inside our heads, from our mouths and even our hearts as we sense and feel; we speak various tongues or languages that differ both in country and region; always to communicate. But if we speak for the purpose of communicating, then in reality we speak only one language and to convey—ideas, experience, love, warning, etc.
With so many words to choose from, it’s hard to find just the right ones! Mind-melding as Spock in Star Trek, is so much more effective in that experience and emotion creates the full story! Being a visual perceiver, I appreciate the fact that a picture speaks a thousand words, and yet you cannot know my heart. I will do my best to weave it into all I am, all I say, and all I do.
This website is the outcome of the question our pastor posed in January of 2017: What has God called your heart to? Having recently attended some silent retreats with the Catholic church and receiving healing only from drawing close to God in the silence, I wanted to offer this experience to others. The immediate inside-my-head-words were, Run a Prayer Center!
A “calling” is not a “choice” like choosing to teach as an occupation. I love teaching; this was different. Did it mean … manage a building for groups … live with prayer as a central … center on prayer? I had no idea. I only knew that as a double negative can emphasize as well as contradict, it was as if I couldn’t-not live toward the call even while not knowing all it entailed.
Directly after this “call,” the lights went out in my spiritual life, and I struggled desperately to pray while the words seemed to have been taken from me and wouldn’t form. The required reading for the course on becoming a spiritual director included a “dark night of the soul.” The term was familiar, but in my mind reserved for super-spiritual people which I was not!
In essence, we learn God and about God through life-experience, senses, and we also know Him and about Him cognitively. He simply cuts off the experience portion and the way we have sensed Him through time and chooses silence in essence to say, “Reach! Reach for Me! I’m bigger than you know!” Elsewise, we would stay in our little bubbles and miss out on so much!
The silence was indeed deafening, and the struggle took me from a place of being able to tell someone all about God, to a speechless, wordless wonder of Him. I experienced HIM, and in no other way that I had done. In January of 2023, a full year six years later, God lifted the darkness to the point that I found myself sprinting to keep up!
This website is only just developing and will be “under construction” for some time. I continue to listen to the directions God gives, and they are usually toward rather than a location. He has shown me that writing is involved, but to take control of the process stops His work every time and I’ve learned not to do that AND to “ASK FIRST.” So, I welcome you to . . . whatever comes!