So this morning I was almost finished with my ‘quiet time’ and I started to just skim over a particular portion of a book so I could move {quickly} on to my next duty {laundry finishing my Nora Roberts book}. At which point, I stumbled across this statement and got my spiritual ‘feet’ swiped right out from under me. In a totally good way, of course.
“Even the most ordinary waiting is never easy. It calls for a kind of surrender, a letting-go. When we wait, we relinquish control. Fallow time, the waiting time in prayer, is also dull and bare but it is not wasted time even though it seems that way.”
{sigh}…forget skimming, huh?
“The times of silence, which can seem like failure, are really threshold times of testing. Tests are rarely pleasurable, and they can be difficult, strenuous, even excruciatingly painful. But they always have a purpose.” {bleh.} “In my university teaching days I always had to remind my students – and myself – that tests were not the final exams. Rather…”{are you ready for this}“…there were a device for checking progress along the way, to find gaps and deficiencies, to consolidate and ultimately to strengthen.”
{Hello.}
“Good tests, even when the results were disastrous, pointed toward…eventual good news. Testing always has a purpose. It is not the same as toying with someone, teasing or tormenting. Given my druthers, I would rather not be tested, but…”{here we go again}“…untested I remain an unknown quantity, a matter of appearances only.”
{ouch.}
“Serious tests can push us to our limit, bring us to the edge of despair when we are sure that we are not strong enough, when we feel that we will be destroyed. Serious tests, when they are past, leave us surprised, fatigued, and perhaps a bit shaken, but…amazed at the new depths we have found within ourselves.”
“The God who loves us tests us by…being silent.”
Here’s just a bit more…
“An untested faith, like an untested miracle drug or an untested fire extinguisher, is full of promise but not yet dependable enough to be trusted. Falling in love is a wondrous experience, but…it is not yet love; rather it is a prelude to love, a necessary preliminary. Growing up spiritually can be a laborious process… This is a demanding love, challenging us to embrace maturity.”
“Just as a hospital patient necessarily and usually voluntarily relinquishes control in the hope of healing, so the waiting soul accepts – by no means easily – the bleakness of spiritually arid times or the painful state of desolation.” {The Practice of Prayer/Margaret Guenther…some emphasis mine}
I could go on but…let me just encourage you to get the book. And I would say this ‘spoke’ to me, however, that would be the hugest understatement of the year. I love how she said that if I were to remain untested, my potential would be there but ‘not yet dependable enough to be trusted’. {As Madea would say, ‘hellur’.}
Ironically while I enjoy silence, I don’t like feeling {or being} ignored.
Which makes me thankful God doesn’t stop working on me just ’cause I get a bit majorly aggravated every now and then…. 
{Image courtesy of Flickr}
