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Praying for 'inward peace'

11/17/2016

     Amy Carmichael, a missionary in South India (1895-1951) wrote: It is good to remember that immediate answer to prayer is not always something seen, but it is always inward peace.
     I need to hear this. How hard it is to remember the basics of faith, which I sum up as inward peace and love, these days. Jesus tells us not to be afraid, a message purported to be mentioned in the Bible 365 times, one for each day of the year. When I read the paper and listen to the news and I get afraid. My heart, where prayer and inward peace abide, gets smothered by my mind.
     After centering prayer this morning, I heard that I must stay away from the news if I want to answer God’s call to pray. What is a connection between do not fear and enter through the narrow gate?
     This post is surely a work in process, and hopefully progress as well.

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Patience....again~

9/16/2014

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“There is nearly always something deep in our hearts about which some special word has been told us by our Lord, or about which we have some inward assurance that we know it is from Him.” So writes Amy Carmichael, a missionary in India from 1895-1951.

I appreciate Amy’s language, language of another century. “Our Lord” isn’t a term I hear very much in my UCC church. In fact, I don’t hear it at all. But no matter, I get the point. What is it that God is placing in my heart? What word do I hear? Honing it down to only one word helps me clarify what inward assurance God is giving me. Today it is patience.

The final draft of “Very Grateful”, the memoir I’m writing about my mom is almost completed. I am impatient with the little details that I have to attend to before I send it to my editor tomorrow. I pray for patience, trusting that the work will be done, and accepting that this isn’t the last time that God will have to send me that special word.

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Inspiration from Amy Carmichael~

6/27/2014

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Amy Carmichael spent her life as a missionary, living in South India from 1895 until her death in 1951. I am often inspired by her words of faith published in Edges of His Ways: Selections for Daily Reading. Yesterday it was this:

       We must learn to pray far more for spiritual victory than for protection from battle-wounds, relief from their havoc, rest from their pain. We must reach the place where we bend all our prayers that way, or (for I want to be honest) our chief prayers.

       We are so eager to pray for a specific, tangible outcome, often a physical cure or personal material gain. But we can’t all be healed, we can’t all win the game; for someone to win, the other must lose. It is oh so human to pray this way, but that’s not the path God asks us to follow. To even assume that I know what God wants sets me far from God.

        I do know, however that God wants a spiritual victory for everyone I pray for, and for me, too. Perhaps my best prayer is to lift up my concerns to God, pray thy will be done, and then get out of God’s way. Anything more is hindrance or at the least superfluous.

      And yet, today I am praying for physical healing for three people. Yes, I’m definitely asking God that they get better so they can go on with their lives. If I don’t plead with God in this way, I lose compassion. So thank God for today’s comment by Carmichael:

     Yet He has told us to ask for what our hearts desire and so it is right to ask, and to ask earnestly, only with this :if” in the depths of our hearts, ‘If it be Thy blessed will, if it be for Thy glory.”

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Humility trumps pride~

8/3/2013

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I’m always coming up with questions about humility because humility doesn’t come easily to me; and yet I desperately want it.

      Here are some posed by Amy Carmichael, a missionary in Sound India from 1895-1951.

“Humiliation: Do we like to be praised? Do we find it difficult if mistakes are shown? Which matters most to us—that the work should be well done or that people should know that we did that work? Is our “I” in the dust?”

     If this were a test, I’d flunk. I want to be praised. I don’t want my mistakes to show, even to myself. It is important to me that people know I did the work, especially when it is well done. I let my “I” shine whenever and wherever I can.

     A friend who practices Buddhism told me that it’s good for people to know of our good work because it will inspire them. I wanted to agree with him but in my heart of hearts I didn’t feel humble about it, even as I knew that that could be true.

     My personality is split because in my heart of hearts I also know that any good I have is grace. If I could bring the two together, my life might not look different, but I know it would feel different and be different. Humility trumping pride. That’s my prayer.

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Amy Carmichael~

4/11/2013

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      Every morning I read Edges of His Ways: Selections for Daily Reading, from the notes of Amy Carmichael, who was a missionary in South India from 1895 until her death in 1951. She read scripture (many translations), and shared her ponderings throughout the years. Her writings helps keep my faith alive and dynamic. I also appreciate and am strengthened by language of the day in which she wrote.

     Here is an entry that continues to challenge me. It is in response to Luke 22:50, 51: And one of the them smote the servant of the high priest, and cut off his right ear. And Jesus answered and said, suffer ye thus far. And He touched his ear, and healed him.

     “The last thing the Lord Jesus did before His hands were bound was to heal.

     “Have you ever asked yourself, If I knew that this was the last thing I should do, what would I do? I have never found the answer to that question. There are so very, very many things that we would want to do for those whom we love, that I do not think we are likely to be able to find the chief one of all these. So the best thing is just to go on simply, doing each thing as it comes as well as we can.

     “Our Lord Jesus spent much time in healing sick people, and in the natural course of events it happened that the last thing He did with His kind hands was to heal a bad cut. (I wonder how they could have the heart to bind His hands after that.) In this, as in everything, He left us an example that we should follow in His steps. Do the thing that this next minute, this next hour, brings you, faithfully and lovingly and patiently; and then the last thing you do, before power to do is taken from you (if that should be), will be only the continuation of all that went before.”

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Praying for 'inward peace'

Patience....again~

Inspiration from Amy Carmichael~

Humility trumps pride~

Amy Carmichael~

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