receptivity

“Contemplative practice is a skill, a discipline that facilitates a process that is out one’s direct control, but it does not have the capacity to determine an outcome. A gardener for example, does not actually grow plants. The gardener practices finely-honed skills, such as cultivating soil, watering, feeding, weeding, pruning. But there is nothing the gardener can do to make the plants grow. However, if the gardener does not do what a gardener is supposed to do, the plants are not as likely to flourish. In fact, they might not grow at all. In the same way a sailor exercises considerable skill in sailing a boat. But nothing the sailor does can produce the wind that moves the boat. Yet without the sailing skills that harness the wind, the boat will move aimlessly. Gardening and sailing involve skills of receptivity. The skills are necessary but by themselves insufficient. And so it is with contemplative practice and the spiritual life generally.”

Martin Laird

The spiritual disciplines are not what create intimacy with Jesus. They create the space to nurture intimacy with Jesus. When we spend time in silence, solitude, prayer, lectio divina, etc., we open ourselves up to what God may want to do within us. The very act of being still in God’s presence is an act of surrender…surrender to our agenda, surrender to our dependency on words, surrender to Him. And the more we practice surrender, the more we open the way to true transformation.

Consider today what you are practicing that puts you in a place of surrender to God, that says to Him –“I am yours…do with me as you like.”

Grace and peace,
Deb

Photo by TropicalLiving http://www.flickr.com/photos/tropicaliving/3019532658/