A note on solitude + forgiveness

It’s 6:00 am and I’m outside waking with the dawn. Everything is still. Peaceful. Swelling with the present moment. It’s the steady beat of night turning day — luminescent diamonds cast into a heavenly host, a golden moon, and the sun that burns pink and orange when it rises and sets. Nature doesn’t rush.

 

When was the last time I truly unplugged? Like stopped simultasking with the Internet just an arm’s reach away and at my fingertips for all the questions that jump into my mind at any given moment or disconnected from the constant correspondence with friends and family through texts and social media.

 

Life has become rhythmic in an unnatural way. We’ve taken good things, in excess, that make us weary.

 

Still.

Still with the stars and the thick fog watching shapes and forms emerge from the waning dark.

Still with the cicadas and the crickets and all the things that sing on early fall mornings.

Still enough to breathe.

 

We have to get off this hamster wheel of interminable deadlines and commitments and Netflix-laden distractions. The junk food diet of weary souls. We’ve become so busy that we are running from ourselves. If we stop, we might have to confront our fabricated constructs and longstanding discontent. Above all, we might have to face our spiritual blocks and God himself.

 

If we keep moving, we can go on doing it all in our human way of striving and reaching without ever pausing to consider whether life could be different. Could life be different? We’re afraid of what different means and we’re all too often unprepared to meet God in the stillness.

 

But — what if God is not the fire and brimstone God he is sometimes made out to be? What if we could wrap our contrived-reality-TV-lives around a love so real it cannot be contained?

 

God is light (1 John 1:5). God is LOVE (1 John 4:7-8). The kind of love that feels like all the best things in life rolled up into one warm, cozy blanket in brisk fall air and bright like fall leaves on azure sky.

 

We need not do anything but notice the wonder all around us to see God’s love. But to feel God’s love, to truly feel his presence, we need to clear our hearts. Jesus has given us the template in The Lord’s Prayer below.

Here are 5 steps to clearing our hearts in prayer:

 1. Stop and get still. Remove all distractions.

 

Friends, the Lord’s prayer is our roadmap — with so much wisdom in its simplicity. To be forgiven, we must forgive as God first forgave us, releasing any and all bitterness, resentments, judgments, anything that is contrary to the fruits of the spirit (1 Peter 2:1, Ephesians 4:31, Ephesians 5:22-23). These blocks have to be addressed before we can flow freely in his love.

 

We don’t want to imply that forgiveness is easy. Just as life, forgiveness is a process and a journey that is unique to each individual and it doesn’t happen overnight. What matters is making the effort because God requires it (Matthew 6:14-15) and because holding unforgiveness in our physical bodies and our hearts makes our souls sick. Our continued and daily choice to forgive softens our hearts until we’re able to let go of the people who hurt us, their wounding actions and words, and the scars they left behind.

 

+ Hearts do not ache so deeply
+ Peace flows like a river
+ We find uncommon strength
+ Our lives become an overflow of love to those around us
+ Life becomes steady like nature and still mornings, liberated from striving

God made us to love him, and we are made to receive God’s love. Unforgiveness is a block that can keep us from progressing spiritually and keeps us from truly dwelling in and experiencing God’s love manifest in our daily lives. 

 

 

Blessings and love,

three strands