vbctransformed ([info]vbctransformed) wrote,
@ 2009-12-31 22:36:00
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Welcome!
Welcome to Vienna Baptist Church's "Transformed Living". I am glad you are here. Each day I will post a daily devotion that ends with several questions. I want to here your thoughts! Share your answers and anything else jumped out for you in the days reading. I challenge you to share ways you want to apply the daily devotion to your life and we can help hold each other accountable.
All you have to do to get started is scroll down to today's reflection. Click on "leave a comment" and sign in as anonymous-- leave your name in your actual comment.
Contact me with any questions!
Jennifer Peterson Singh

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Prayer
(Anonymous)
2008-02-15 12:30 pm UTC (link)
I got behind a bit in the reading for this week. As I am catching up I have been thinking about 'Prayer' — such an obviously spiritual thing to do.

I am not very 'spiritual' or "churchy" in vocabulary.

Yet Prayer seems to be at the heart of those I respect spiritually.


Yet to me Prayer as a concept seems a bit crazy.

This is a very non-spiritual thing to think or say.

Why would God Almighty, the creator of this incredible universe, be willing to listen to me? Why would God's connection with me be anything other than one-way: Creator to Creation?

Yet Prayer as it is articulated as a two-way connection DOES seem to have significant value as an antidote to our society's prevailing Materialism. We are surrounded by a culture that tells us that 'things' and 'experiences' and stuff that WE 'do' are the solution.

This idolatry might be countered by Prayer — an audacious affirmation that Life is more than Things, or our delightful busy-ness, business, or activity.

God Is.

Beyond a notion of prayer that any good Deist/Spiritualist could affirm (cf yoga and other good and interesting stuff) — Christ presents the reality of God Incarnate: the Deity, God Almighty — connecting with the material and the personal. This is not to affirm the absorption of transcendence into the merely material, but is a glance into the mystery of grace. The Creator connects with Creation. And the nature of that Incarnation engages that two-way continuity.

This is a touch radical, confounding logical disconnections between the Creation and the Creator.

To me, these emerging meditations are a call to Prayer, a call to Live in Prayer.

To me, this kind of Life of Prayer changes Consciousness.

That is an interesting word ('consciousness'), a blast from the past, the 60's and 70's. In that era (and continuing today) we as a society seemed to seek to "expand our consciousness" — we want to be more than we are. The keys to that expansion seem to be ideas, experiences, etc. [Music is my typical point of expansion.]

I think that a Life of Prayer might be a touch of REAL consciousness-expansion — living in overt and continuing recognition of the Presence of God.

Consciousness is a number of 'things' — mental assent (I believe in God), emotive commitment (this makes me feel 'better' — prayer changes me perhaps more than it changes God), verbalized stuff, ritual, etc. To me this kind of spiritual consciousness, living in the presence of God, must result in Action.

In this sense perhaps all of Life becomes a kind of Worship, a kind of acknowledgement that God Is — even in the midst of the really annoying things we have to do at work, etc.

Perhaps a touch of God can help transcend even the tedious into the mystery of presence?

Happy Friday.

Thanks for listening/reading.

JGviolin@gmu.edu

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