fragile shalom

Guilt is a great motivator...here it is Dec 8th and I'm feeling guilty for not writing anything here for so long...
one insight I a have been thinking about lately... from Eugene Peterson
"While I was growing up my parents would often invite missionaries to our family home in Montana so they could rest and recover. When I was around fifteen years old or so there was a man who came to visit us one summer. He was a Frenchman named John Wright Follett, a small, bird like man who had never married. He was a teacher of quite acceptance in the Pentecostal movement in the thirties and forties and because his name was a household name in our circles, I was in awe of him. When I met him he was probably seventy years old. One day he was laying in a hammock with his eyes closed and I wanted to talk to him. I told my mother I wanted to talk to him and she said, "Just go up and talk to him, it's okay." I timidly approached the hammock and said, "Dr. Follett how do you pray?" He didn't open his eyes at all. He just grunted and said, "I haven't prayed in forty years!" He stunned me and I walked off totally puzzled. Since then I have realized the wisdom of the man. You see, anything he had told me I would have imitated. I would have gone and done what he said and thought that's what prayer is. He risked something to teach me what prayer was, and I'm glad he did. Prayer wasn't something he did, it was something he was. He lived a life of prayer. It took me about six or seven years to understand what he had done but it was sure better than wasting time trying to imitate what he did."

Living a life of prayer. another quote..."Prayer is practicing the presence of God in everything we do. Prayer is justice, it is peace, it is changing diapers and it is making a beautiful sculpture. How can we you limit prayer to meer words? (Pete Greig, 24-7 Prayer)

So as Peterson says somewhere else all our "formal" prayers are the preparation for the real "prayer time"
Those who have ears...