イモ对《Sacred Rhythms》的笔记(3)

There are moments in our lives when we cry out inwardly," I don't care what anyone else says; there has to be more to the Christian life than this!" This book is for those moments in your life and mine. It is about hearing Jesus speak right into such moments with whispers of understanding and hope;" There are desires in you that are so deep and so true and so connected to the essence of who you are; those are the desires I want to meet---and not just partially, but abundantly."

Jesus knows how quickly our passions, even the most noble, can wear us out if we are not careful. I think he also understands that the sources of our exhaustion are many and complex and often we are completely unaware of how they taking their toll. There are the obvious sources of exhaustion like a heavy workload, many family responsibilities, busy seasons when extra activities crowd in, but there are more subtle sources of inner exhaustion as well. We might be functioning out of inordinate sense of "ought and should," burdened by unrealistic expectations about what it means to be a good Christian. Since we are not always sure how to live with our humanness, we feel guilty when we are tired, ill or grieving and try to shove it down rather than attend to it. But it takes energy to repress these aspects of our humanness, and eventually the effort itself wears us out. 此处省略N段 When we don't attend to our vulnerabilities and instead try to repress it all and keep soldiering on, we get weary from holding it in. Eventually it leaks out in ways that are damaging to us and to others.

Prayer means letting God's creative love touch the most hidden places of our being and prayer means listening with attentive, undivided hearts to the inner movement of the Spirit of Jesus, even when that Spirit leads us to places we would rather not go. Perhaps the deepest reason we are ambivalent about the intimacy of true prayer is that intimacy always leads us to a place where we are not in control. When we give ourselves to another person in the act of love, we are not in control. When we give our heart and our life to another in committed friendship and marriage, we know that we give them the ability to do us great good or great harm. While we choose our intimate ones as wisely as we can, there are no guarantees. We can never fully control another human being. Our pattern of intimacy or nonintimacy with other human beings are the very same patterns we bring to our relationship with God, whether we are conscious of it or not. Depending on what our previous experiences with intimacy have been, relinquishing control can be difficult or even impossible. If we have a high need to be in control in our human relationships (and most of us do), intimacy with God will be very challenging to us. If we are afraid of intimacy or hold ourselves back in human relationships, that will be our pattern with God as well.