The Way of the Heart

Well I am back from the ranch and so appreciate your prayers. The stillness was actually great and really without distraction- well except the weird noises that you don't hear in the city, the two cows that kept staring at me and who I was afraid were going to charge me at any second,  and the TRAMPOLINE!! 

Oh, and the 15 gray hairs I found in my head the first day I got there. Really? I'm only 27!!

But really, by God's grace my time away was really, really sweet. When I was getting ready to run out the door on Tuesday, my eyes caught this little book that my boss, Mark, had recommended to us a while back- The Way of the Heart by Henri Nouwen. The subtitle read: Connecting with God through Prayer, Wisdom, and Silence,  and so, I figured it might help teach me about and guide me in my solitude. And indeed it did. It really rocked my world. 

Here's a little bit of what Nouwen writes in the opening chapters....

Solitude is the place of the great struggle and the great encounter....

In solitude I get rid of my scaffolding: no friends to talk with, no telephone calls to make, no meetings to attend, not music to entertain, no books to distract me, just me- naked, vulnerable, weak, sinful, deprived, broken- nothing. It is this nothingness that I have to face in my solitude, a nothingness so dreadful that everything in me wants to run to my friends, my work, my distractions so that I can forget my nothingness and make myself believe that I am worth something. 

The wisdom of solitude is that the confrontation with our own frightening nothingness forces us to surrender ourselves totally and unconditionally to the Lord Jesus Christ. 

Solitude is thus the place of purification and transformation, the place of the great struggle and the great encounter. Solitude is not simply a means to an end. Solitude is its own end. It is the place where Christ remodels us in his own image and frees us from the victimizing compulsions of the world. Solitude is the place of our salvation. 

Needless to say, the words really impacted my mind and pierced my heart. And by God's grace in my stillness these past few days that is what I experienced- a great struggle for sure, but also a great encounter with my own nothingness and consequently with my Savior, who is everything over and against my nothingness! 

It is my prayer that the Lord really did use this time to purify me and transform me and mold me into his image. And it is my earnest prayer and desire that he help me to cultivate this discipline of solitude in these next few months, and in all my life... that I might continually come back to this "furnace of transformation" and truly be changed upon encountering my Savior there!