It's a quiet night. Outside the window, downtown is racing by me, but up here on the 17th floor, it's just me and Bob Marley.
And it's quiet inside. I have found a measure of peace over the last 2 years. A peace that changes into new peace every day, and it defines itself differantly.
Since I have returned to Canada, things have been crazy. I have been crazy.
Trying to figure out what I am doing, and what I am not doing. A mixture of jet lag and just pure laziness.
That laziness has robbed me.
So I woke up this morning and realized I need to get some things in order. One of the biggest things that normalcy has kept me from is that daily time in prayer. So I went outside and walked along the river.
In my time of prayer I heard myself praying that the Lord would lead me to people today. Divine appointments.
The rest of my day was jammed with unexpected meetings with people. Even randomly running into people on the street.
Prayer is a hard thing for people to understand. Understanding is definatly part of the problem. It's not about understanding, it's about doing.
I realize that I can not explain this, and right now everything is too jumbled in me to make sense at all, but I long for prayer. I long for time seek my Lord with my concerns and for direction, and He does speak. And he does listen.
Prayer has become an essential part of my faith. It is my communication with the Lord. Without it, I am lost. I long for the chance to seek Him.
It's a great way to give up smoking, because prayer becomes the crutch that holds me up when I am weak. It renews my strength, and when we can hear the Spirit speak to us life, we find prayer changes things.
I think many people are disalusioned about prayer because they feel like it is in vain. For years I struggled with understanding the validity of prayer because I failed to see how it was working.
Prayer is not a wishlist to God. It is seeking God for His will, not seeking God for His assistance in giving us what we want.
Motives.
Perhaps that is the secret to prayer. Right along with sin.
Unrepentant sin, especially habitual unrepentant sin, keeps us from hearing the Lord. Praayer seems to make no differance because we can not hear the Lord speak. Our ears are clogged up by our sin.
If we can not even obey what God tells us through His word, how will we ever listen to Him in prayer.
Obedience to His word is imperative for a fruitful prayer life.
Like most every other thing in relation to God, we need to give God the freedom to speak to us/respond to us/respond at all, anyway he wants to.
When we set about having an agenda and/or an expectation of what we think God may do, we allow ourselves to become disapointed.
God will never act in the way we think he will. If you can imagine how something might happen, then there is a good chance it will not happen that way.
I love the imagry of revolution so often portrayed in reggae music.
I think it is the struggle against bondage and slavery. Perhaps that is what so many of us relate to, because we are all caught up in that feeling of oppression. We all feel oppressed.
The struggle of these last days seems to be one of slavery versus freedom.
The word Jah is a name of God used in the Psalms.
Jamaica, unlike the other Caribean islands, was the only island whose missionaries were not from Spain. They were from England.
This meant that the missionaries to Jamaica were not catholic, but protestant.
Spain was not part of the refortmation, where as England was. When you look at the Caribean islands you see the result of typical missions work. You had a bunch of missionaroes come and tell native people that they were wrong and they needed to change. Spain was especially bad at this, as evidenced by thier slaughter of pretty much everyone who did not seek refuge with the earlymissionaries, and sometimes, even killed them.
If you look at those islands today, you will notice the native religions are now just a mixture of their faith with the faith of the former missionaries. Cuba has Santeria, which is amixture of catholicism and thier native beliefs. Haiti is about 90% catholic and 110% voodoo(I am aware those figure make no sense).
These "new" or occult/pagan practices are the resultof the merging of faiths as the result, as I see it, of not being sensative to the cultural impact of introducing new faiths to new cultures without leaving these cultures any room for their heritage.
Jamaica, with its English influence, was very pentacostal/charismatic, and that influence contributed to the rasta faith so closely resembling christianity. It was a lifestyle and an expression of their sense of oppresion.
The Hebrew slaves in Egypt exected delieverance from a Messiah.
Happiness is a humanistic thing based on pleasure seeking. True joy comes from feeling that we are pleasing the LORD, and that Joy is much better than the happiness that comes from having no drama in my life. Because I can have Joy and still be in pain, or suffering, or bombarded with temptation. Temptation does not make one sin, and sinning often alieveates temptation,which is a perfect rationale to sin. But suffering through temptation is what Christ did in the wilderness and what we are called to do daily.
I have made some wonderful steps in my life. Yet, I still sometimes want the things, or to do the things, I gave up. I gave them up for reasons that if I do not daily remind myself of, then my will to resist them is not as strong. That is what it means to die daily.
I picked up a book in Maui called Militant Evangelism.
I am not sure how far I made it through that book, but there is somethign about the imagery which the title portrayed that made me want to pick up that book.
The bible is full of militant type referances. But that militant battle is never portrayed as a psyical one, but a spiritual one, and that is the real trick.
It is so easy for people to get side tracked on issues and before long, things happen that take the militant into a very real and violent thing.
Look at the Crusades, but take an even closer look at Israel or Northern Ireland.
Religion has always been a convientient justification for man to kill one another, yet I never see Jesus even hinting that violence is the path we should take. On the contrary, He spoke of love.
I see that the militant expression of faith is effective, but we must always remember that we are called to love, and the battle is a spiritual one not a psyical one. The spiritual battle is fought through our choices and our behavior.
Ephesians 6 speaks of the armour of God.
This book sounds interesting: http://www.cesnur.org/testi/rasta.htm
