of the office on Fridays.

Pastorjim@starpoint.net

Meet Pastor Jim and his Family

Pastor’s Corner

Just the other day I was in an emergency room where a child was being attended to after a rather serious accident. While the blow to the head had rendered the child somewhat unconscious he was still agitated; mumbling and moving restlessly on the gurney. When the child’s parent got there they said to the child, “It’s O.K., I’m here now.” While still not fully awake it was impressive to see what effect these words had on the child. The child calmed and stilled. The monitors measured positive responses in breathing and heart rate.

Oh, how much are we like that child!? We are the children of the God, Emmanuel: God-with-us. We so often forget that God is the God of here and now. In the restlessness of our spirits, we need to remember our Heavenly Parent says “It’s O.K., I’m here now.”

To live in the present, we must believe deeply that what is most important is the here and the now. We are constantly distracted by things that have happened in the past or might happen in the future. It is not easy to remain focused on the present. Our mind is hard to master and keeps pulling us away from the moment; from the here and now, from God.

Prayer is the discipline of the moment. When we pray, we enter into the presence of God whose name is God-with-us. To pray is to listen attentively to the One who addresses us here and now. When we dare to trust that we are never alone but rather that God is always with us, always cares for us, and always speaks to us, than we can gradually detach ourselves from the voices that make us guilty and/or anxious and thus allow ourselves to dwell in the present moment — to be fully with God. This is a very hard challenge because radical trust in God is not obvious. Most of what our culture tells us invites us to distrust God. God is caricatured as a fearful, punitive authority or as an empty powerless nothing — an emotional “crutch” for those weak of character or gumption.

Jesus’ core message was that God is a lover, whose only desire is to give us what our hearts most desire. To pray is to listen to that voice of love. That is what obedience is all about. The word “obedience” comes from the Latin word ob-audire, which means to listen with great attentiveness. Without listening, we become “deaf” to the voice of love. The Latin word for deaf is surdus. To be completely deaf is to be absurdus, yes, absurd. When we no longer pray, no longer listen to the voice of love that speaks to us in the moment, our lives become absurd lives in which we are thrown back and forth between regrets about the past and worries of the future!

If we could just be, for a few minutes each day, fully in the here and now, we would indeed discover — despite our restlessness and angst— that we are not alone and that the One who is with us wants only one thing: to give us love. As we move forward from this exciting time of growth and renewal, may we allow ourselves to hear our loving Lord whisper in our ear, “It’s O.K., I’m here now.”

Be God’s,

Pastor Jim