Encouragement

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What have your birthdays been like over the past years? Mine was this week and so it has caused me to reflect on the goodness of God, the gift of life and the lessons we learn from experience. My forty-second birthday (ten years ago) was one that I can never forget.

All night long I laboured to prepare the workshop on prayer “Practicing the Presence of God”. In two days time, I would travel to the island of Grand Bahama to present a two-hour workshop. I gathered Scripture passages, prayer exercises, journaling excerpts, hymns, personal experiences, researched quotes on one diskette until at I was finally finished at two o’clock in the morning. I fell into the deep sleep of the exhausted, but not for long. My father (aged eighty-nine) shouted my name. There was an orange glow through the top of the shutters, and frantic banging on the front door. The house next door was on fire. The houses were so close that for a moment, I thought it was our own.

Prayerfully, carefully, with measured haste, I awakened our 8 year old son who had been sleeping beside me while his daddy was away. “Get Carlos to safety then go back for your father,” the Spirit whispered. I reached for my handbag and the box of personal papers (bank books, passports) while a neighbour helped daddy down the stairs. Once outside, we watched the flames spread to the roof of our homestead. The wind picked up, and the water pressure dropped. The firemen and their engines were helpless. The house was practically destroyed.

I watched from across the street, secure on God’s lap, “practicing the presence.” There was nothing else to be done. My precious workshop material was lost but the blessing of the experience was my birthday gift from God.

It was faith that made St. Paul sing while imprisoned, writing his letters with such passion. He knew that in the midst of adversity there often comes the power of the Presence, the peace of the Presence, the promise of the Presence to remain present. Daniel in the lion’s den, the Hebrew boys in the fiery furnace, Mary Magdalene at the door of the tomb, oblivious that the gardener is really her Lord, they all discover that they are not abandoned or forsaken, that God does not leave them alone.

This is no mystical moment reserved for a few. It is the hope of heaven that we can taste on earth. It is the prayer to “pray without ceasing” that makes us conscious at times, of a presence “without ceasing”. One circumstance or another may cause the presence of the Lord to seem diminished, but the “faith fact” still remains that nothing separates us from God’s love. Our faith feelings may be challenged to believe that what we cannot feel does not exist, but there is an abiding truth about God that the Apostle Paul came to know: “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38-39).

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