Sacred Prayer - a 5-Day Reading Planনমুনা

When you are yearning to have a relationship with God, your sacred work is to be still long enough to pay attention and locate your soul—so you can know where you are in relation to God. The holy work of being human is to keep paying attention to the location of our own souls: location, location, location. And then attention, attention, attention—to what is happening within our own souls.

What we pay attention to is how we spend our lives. Pay attention mostly to the news—and we can end up spending our one life on headlines. Pay attention mostly to screens—and we can spend most of our days in a digital haze. Pay attention mostly to the negative—and we spend the only life we have on the very things that we wish weren’t.

As it turns out—we gain more of whatever we pay attention to.

Pay attention to love—and you are given more love. Pay attention to the good and the beautiful—and you spend your soul on what is good and beautiful. Pay attention to sunrises and laughter; pay attention to smiles and patches of light on the floor; pay attention to God in the everyday moments. So the question is: What do you really want more of?

Attend to God—this is the best way to tend to your own soul.

If you stilled your soul right now, could you attend to the voice of God speaking directly to you? . . .

Without daily attentiveness to the way of Jesus Himself, to the questions of Jesus—it’s

our default to drift away. . . . God’s voice still reverberates across time and wakes our souls.

• “Where are you?” God called in the garden, the One always looking for the way to us (Genesis 3:9).

• “Who do you say I am?” Jesus questioned Peter (Luke 9:20).

• “What do you want?” Jesus asked His disciples (John 1:38).

• “Where have you come from, and where are you going?” the angel of the Lord asked a fleeing Hagar (Genesis 16:8).

Maybe if we begin to attend to, to answer, God’s questions, we’d be less likely to question God’s ways.

Prayer

Father, You have surrounded me with goodness and beauty, and I sometimes get so busy that I overlook it. Today I will be still and attend to You as I soak up Your presence. Amen.