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Sunday, October 31, 2010

Contemplative Prayer

I love doing all of these different spiritual disciplines each week. Some of them are more challenging than others, but it teaches me something new every week. I have been growing in my walk with the Lord and it's so encouraging to see and hear about the other students growing too!

This weeks discipline was different types of prayer. I chose contemplative prayer - that is being still before God and allowing him to speak and use me. To practice this in particular, I woke up each morning and relaxed my body. I would focus on one part of my body at a time and pray for that area of my body and surrender it to the Lord. I prayed for him to move through me and use each part of my body for his glory.

There were several ways I saw God using different areas of my body to be his light to the world. I'll share a couple with you..

After the first day of practicing, I went to my mom's house and instead of going on the internet - which I do quite often, I walked through the door and cleaned up her kitchen. It was nice to take that weight off her shoulders once she gets home after working a hard day at the office. I was able to look back and reflect on how the Lord used my hands to help serve my mom.

Another instance was when we had a couple guys come over to install a television programming system. This job should have taken them an absolute maximum of 2 hours, by the time they left our house it had been a little over 9 hours. This was not their fault though, there were a lot of difficulties and circumstances from how other people installed things prior and built our house. The people ended up losing another job they were supposed to go to by having to fix the mistakes other people made at our house. They were at our house from 11am-8:15 pm. In the mean time we had made dinner and it was ready to eat. My family didn't want to eat in front of them while they were still there working. One of them mentioned that they didn't bring any food with them (and I'm sure it wasn't easy to sit there smelling us cooking either..). Instead of eating the dinner we prepared, we offered our plates to the two workers. It was a blessing to those men to have a meal in their stomachs before they traveled off to another job that someone still wanted them to go to. We even were able to talk to them about God too!

I have been thinking throughout the week of the ways I am using the hands, feet, arms, legs, face...etc. that God has graciously given me. I have really made myself aware of my facial expressions too. I have been told in the past that I have an intimidating face or I look really intense, that is not the way I want to be a light to the world. I want to have a sincere smile and be a friendly face to those I encounter. I don't want to live a countless life. I want to look back on my life and be thankful for the opportunities the Lord gave me to serve him with my body.

"Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore, honor God with your body." 1 Corinthians 6:19-20. I want to live this out each day!

1 comment:

  1. What a great challenge to use each part of your body as a Holy example of what God teaches us each and every day. It takes discipline to make sure we are aware of how we should use our own "tools" on our body to serve God and serve others. Sometimes it is the little things like our ears for listening, or our eyes for seeing someone who is hurting that can really make a difference. Praise God for our little tools :)

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