- 1 Kings 3: 5, 7-12
- Psalms 119: 57, 72, 76-77, 127-128, 129-130
- Romans 8: 28-30
- Matthew 13: 44-52
- On Job Training
- In the early days of computer science, there were few degree programs in the subject. When hiring computer programmers, McDonnell Douglas was happy to find anyone with a technical degree. The rest would be learned as the new hire went along.
- If you define ministry as a calling from God to you to serve in His Kingdom in some capacity, think of a ministry that you ventured into that you felt ill-prepared for.
- Why did you get into that in the first place?
- What was your "on the job training"?
- What did you learn about yourself in the course of that work?
- What did you learn about God as you went along?
- The three essentials
- My father-in-law used to say that only three things were essential to life as a Catholic: Pay, pray, and obey. He wasn't uniformly a cynic by any means, but sometimes, obedience to God can seem burdensome.
- What are the type of decisions, questions that you have put before God in your life?
- What made you think to ask Him for His guidance?
- How did God make His will clear to you?
- How do you know that you got it right?
- Whose idea of good
- We are always ready to say that good comes of following God. But who gets to decide what is "good"? And how are we at recognizing what is good?
- What are some tough times in which God drew you closer to Him?
- Do you think that God orchestrated that challenge, allowed that challenge and put it to use, or pretty much lets events fall where they may, and helps us through the tough times when they come?
- What good came to you from that challenging time in your life?
- Do you ever wish that God could have somehow brought about that good without the tough time?
- Priorities
- Do you eat to live or do you live to eat? Ideally, each of us ultimately asks "how is this use of my time, this expenditure of money, this consumption, this training, ... bringing me closer to God? I think that achieving that mindset takes a lifetime for most of us.
- Besides sleeping, what single thing do you spend the most time on in any given week?
- Why do you do that?
- Have your reasons changed over time?
- Is this use of your time making you holier?
- Preparation for Reconciliation
- How is God equipping me to be better in some way that I am following Him?
- How can I involved God more in a decision that I am facing today?
- Where is God calling me to greater trust?
- Where might God be calling me to transform my motivations?
Prayer Changes Things
When I was young, we would encourage each other with the slogan "prayer changes things".
Deep down inside, I took that to mean that if you do it just right, and long enough -
You can pull an Abraham and change God's mind about something. As long as it's important.
I always wondered how much time I needed to spend in prayer a day.
Was it a specific period of time? Maybe you prayed until you got the right results?
I always wondered what it took to get the prayer gold medal.
How holy do you have to be before God starts answering your prayers anyway?
If you don't get the answer that you want, what does that mean?
How do you even know an answer to prayer when you see one?
Then I began to see prayer as a way of getting out of myself, getting a little distance
Giving God some room in my heart on the matter so that He can speak to me above the noise of my worry.
Giving me a chance to see things from a different perspective, and maybe learn about the bind I was in.
Then I began to see the things that I wanted to pray about as a door to the sacred -
A means to draw closer to God, learn His perspective on the situation
And find solidarity with all those who have or are having the same problems.
And I realized that my call in all of this was to grow in trust and indifference.
Trust that God was going to be with me -
And the freedom to be indifferent to the outcome, as long as it brings me closer to Him.
And now I realize that prayer does change things.
It changes how I see things, why I do what I do.
Prayer changes me.
Shalom!
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