Sunday February 14: Touches of The Spirit

[link to full email]: https://mailchi.mp/coutreach/word-of-the-week-feb14

[excerpt from email]: Centering Prayer, then, is not just a method of prayer but initiates a process that involves the response of our whole being to the gospel and its values.” – Thomas Keating, Intimacy with God

To Practice : If you choose, you can make me clean. I do choose. Be made clean!  In what sense do you feel you have been made clean in your life? What do you feel still needs to be purified within you? How do you open yourself to God’s healing touch?

With time, some faithfulness and the Spirit’s grace, I have slowly evolved into a more present, compassionate and empathetic person.  At least I hope people in my life would agree to some extent.  I have never focused on the word ‘purify’, especially as it relates to me, but I hope Christ’s finger removes my impatience, dampens down my ego, the need for recognition and affirmation and places me more and more I a sense of equanimity.  Can I get to a place that ‘I do’, because it is the good use of time and talent and leave behind responses of others?

Prayer, centering prayer, mindfulness all open me to the present moment, the glorious moment and God is there to find and asking me to practice the fruits of the Spirit.

Today we listen to the story of Jesus as he reaches out and touches a person in need of healing. During this time of pandemic, many of us have been unable to touch our loved ones in their final hours. Today, two of the participants are grieving. Each had just lost a special person and had been unable to touch that person. By the grace of God, we reached beyond time and space to touch these two gently and lovingly.  As our time together ended, I sat at my table, tears streaming down my face. Once again, I have experienced the presence of this “ virtual” community in new and surprising ways.

Dear Susan:  I, too, was in tears during this morning’s prayer group, my heart broken open with the tenderness and sweetness of human relationships.  But gratitude overflowed as well — the bittersweet surprise of these people coming to our prayer group as best thing they could think of doing with their grief.  The silence and sharing of the group is a healing balm, the “Beautiful Pool” of our current lives.  We have been graced with such a treasure and the bonds we now share are permanent and beyond time and place. – Pamela

Sunday, February 14: Touches of the Spirit

I have been made clean of my desire to know everything over even close to everything. As a young Navy wife, I often heard the phrase “you are on a need-to-know basis, and you don’t need to know.” Trust God would take that incredibly irritating phrase from my past and use it as a tool to free me from the bondage of too much “knowledge”. What still needs purifying? My motives, my desire to help when perhaps help is not wanted. God knows what need purifying more – and I humbly submit to that gracious work. <3 linda

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