Getting Better

I've been spending time this past week considering my position. Not that of Senior Pastor, but rather that of my "Emotional Bankrupt-ness"

I'll probably speak more of it later, but I have been finding myself busy and emotionally tired, to the point of, well, despair. I'm trying to take appropriate steps to get back to a healthy disposition.

Anyway, all that just to highlight a part of Fred Peatross latest Grace Awakening newsletter. He writes:

The word ?busy? is the symptom not of commitment but of betrayal. It´s not devotion but defection. To compare it to the former is no less than scandal.

 

For the better part of my journey ?doing? has been three steps ahead of ?being.? The ?busyness? of schedule and time has averted the priority of prayer. But from this time forward, I am committed to doing the original work of being in deepening conversations with the God who reveals himself to me and addresses me by name. I don´t want to dispense handouts describing God´s busyness; I want to report and witness out of my own experience. I don´t want to live as a parasite on the first-hand spiritual life of others, but to be personally involved with all my senses, tasting and seeing that the Lord is good.

 

I know it takes time to develop a life of prayer; set-aside, disciplined, deliberate time. I know I can´t be busy and pray at the same time. I can be active and pray; I can work and pray; but I cannot be busy and pray.  I cannot be inwardly rushed, distracted, or dispersed. In order to pray I have to be paying more attention to God than to what people are saying to me, more attention to God than my clamoring ego. For that to happen there must be a more deliberate withdrawal from the noise of the day and a disciplined detachment from the insatiable self.

I know it's a bit of a journey back, but if my life is going to mean anything in the end, it will be effected by the decisions I make today. Fred's onto something here.

"Hello, my name is Randall, and I'm a recovering pastor..."