 |
| Credit |
Hello Friends! I hope your writing journey is going along well as we head into the next weeks leading right through Palm Sunday and onto Easter (Resurrection) Sunday! Honestly, I am finding myself feeling especially blessed with the writing prompts and Rachel’s words. It’s like opening a little present every day! Well I am thrilled to have my friend and sister in grace, Stacy Artis from A Life Lived Well here today. Stacy and I have an ADD connection – we think a lot alike! I can imagine us sipping coffee, talking in circles and having no problem following one another! Here’s Stacy!
Good morning and a big thank you to Dawn for inviting me to guest-host this week! I am so honored to share in this journey of Writing to God with you.
I’ve been keeping journals since I was about 8 years old and bought my first little blue diary with a tiny silver key at the local G.C. Murphy’s. So, it felt pretty natural to start journaling about my journey once I became a Christian and once I got over my pre-Christian hangups about what prayer should and shouldn’t be, I started writing a lot of my prayers down. As someone who struggles with ADD, writing my prayers down helped (and still helps) me keep my focus.
When Dawn first introduced her plan to form a little community of people all working through the same devotional book I was intrigued, but honestly thought “I do not need another thing to do.” It kept coming back to me, though, and after praying about it I decided to join in. What I was already doing was very similar, so it wouldn’t be too big of an adjustment. I thought it would be nice to have the directed prompts every day and the feedback from the other people who where doing it.
The actual writing hasn’t been hard or a big change, but the prompts have been amazing! The prayers I wrote before….there was nothing wrong with them, but they were wide, all encompassing, rambling. I tried to cover every person, every need, plus touch on praise and gratitude and, and, and…. They were often several pages long and took a lot of time to put on paper. Writing to God has taught me to focus on a single aspect of who God is. That focusing on one thing has helped me to be still and deepen my relationship with my heavenly Father, to get to know him better.
Day 25, Feeling a Prayer, was the one that touched me the deepest this past week. The scripture for that day came from Psalm 34 and I haven’t yet been able to get it out of my mind. I have been rolling it over and over in my mind, repeating with my tongue, making it a part of me.
“Taste and see that the Lord is good…”
I am to use every sense to experience my relationship with you, my God. I am to taste and see and touch and hear and even smell that you are good!
Oh, Lord…David loved you so fully and exuberantly…so much so that he wrote song after song of praise to you, so much that he sang and danced naked in the streets…CONSUMED with the pure joy of knowing you, of knowing you were his God. To know you like that, as Father, Abba, Daddy. To praise you in all things and with all things. Sharpen my senses, God, that I may fully use each one in my worship of you, in my journey to live a life that is prayer.
Fill my senses, and teach me….to see you in the swaying field of flowers and the silent snow and the smiles of the ones forgotten by the world; to hear you in the words of a prayer and the laughter of a child and the tears of one in pain; to taste you in the sweetness of communion wine and the salt of the sea on my lips and the tartness of a ripe apple; to feel you in the warmth of the sun on my shoulders and the grasp of a baby’s hand on my finger and the cool green grass between my toes; to smell you in the fragrance after the rain and the fur of a newborn puppy and the ocean breeze….teach me to know you in everything.
I am feeling so blessed by this journey with the Lord. I hope you are, too, and I’m looking forward to hearing what God’s been doing in your life this week. Thanks for spending a part of your day with me.
************************************************
Please stop by Stacy’s place:
!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=”//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js”;fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,”script”,”twitter-wjs”);
Upcoming Reading:
*Week 4. 3/20-3/23 Days 29-32; Palm Sunday through Wednesday (3/24-3/27) from Prayers and Prompts for Holy Week (at the back of the book!)
Enthusiastically, Dawn 
lovely.
LikeLike
Stacy, your prayer and heart resonate within me. I remember thinking the same thing! Do I need to do one more thing? I also remember wondering if you would be able to commit as I knew you had lots going on! BUT, here you are- your words are refreshing. I can sense your energy and focus with this writing endeavor. I do believe it is sharpening and refining me…thank you so much for joining in this journey and hosting here today.
LikeLike
Stacy- I agree the prompts from this devotional have focused my written prayers, too. I love how you wrote a psalm of Praise to our Creator using the five senses…This week I have been mulling over Day 28 (Unrequited) which is almost opposite of the feelings prayer…it's a prayer when we “feel” distant with God…I used the prompt: “Do not overlook me…” from the Job passage…Just writing down that line, I realized one of my greatest fears is being overlooked and that it is a universal cry of the heart to be noticed.Here is the prayer I wrote:Notice me.Love me.Let me be,Let me go,Let me in,Let me out.Applaud me.Accept me.Affirm my dreams, desires and downfalls.Know me.Trust me.Listen to me.Acknowledge my opinions, struggles, ideas and hopes.Love this forum, Dawn! Thanks for giving us this place to pour out our hearts! Kel
LikeLike
Beautiful writing! Inspirational!!!
LikeLike
Kel, that was beautiful! Thanks for being here!
LikeLike