As the Sabbath begins this week it is a much different environment than last Friday - last week the warmth of the fire helped drive out the chill in the air, this week the A/C is on pushing back against the 80 degree temperatures outside.
My thoughts this week look at how we humans process data. We are innundated with so much information that we organize it into similar pieces of data then "chunk" them all together, processing the whole chunk at once. It is a lot like the way we learn to read. We begin by reading every letter sounding them.out individually to get the whole word. Eventually we begin to read whole words at a time (we can even read the word if it is misspelled or the letters are all mixed up!) We move up to reading phrases or even whole sentences at a time. The problem with this is that sometimes we get moving so fast we see see words in the sentence that aren't really there. Going back and rereading the sentence often yields the same misreading because our minds are primed with misinformation.
This week in my morning prayer time I found myself asking God to show me what he wants from me. In the midst of this conversation, in the stillness listening for God, it suddenly hit me that in my race through life I hadn't slowed down enough to read the sentence correctly - I had mixed up the letters and even added one that didn't belong. God doesn't want anything FROM me, there is nothing I can give Him (besides total surrender of myself to Him.) Instead God wants everything FOR me - He wants to give me peace, He wants to give me joy, He wants me to have contentment, He wants me to have life and have it more abundantly.
I learned this week that I need to stop asking what God wants from me, and instead ask how I can experience all that He wants for me more perfectly and completely.
