As you may have picked up, this quest for the abiding
Presence of God has become the whole of my spiritual life and discipline. There
are other disciplines of course. But the one that encircles all of them and
turns discipline into pure delight is the practice of God’s presence. Brother
Lawrence says that when he joined the monastery in the 17th century,
he quickly put aside all the prayer books and prescribed disciplines, thinking
they would only serve to confuse him, and took up the single intent to remain
as focused and happy in God washing dishes as during prescribed hours of prayer
or anywhere else.
I’ve been experimenting with inviting and maintaining the Presence
of Jesus as a felt reality for 18 months now, believing that the Holy Spirit is
always leaning into us and the only hindrance to us feeling Him is in our minds
and bodies. Last week I managed to maintain that warm intimate feeling of His
Presence for 7 hours uninterrupted. I’ve had plenty of failures this week as
well. But even in spite of my failures, it remains true that my resting state
for the last 18 months, and particularly for the last 3 months has been joy.
It’s rare to catch me on a bad day.
This year I’ve been looking for others who have personally
experimented with the abiding presence of God and written about it. This is my
list so far:
Francis of Assisi
Brother Lawrence
Andrew Murray
Frank Laubach
Dallas Willard
Sarah Young
I’ve heard Thomas a Kempis and Thomas Kelly are on this list
as well though I haven’t read them yet. Do you know of others? People who chronicled
their personal journey into God’s abiding presence?
This week, I stumbled across Frank Laubach’s “Letters from a
Modern Day Mystic” and “A Game with Minutes” for the first time. I want to
heartily recommend him to you. The first time I opened his book, I felt the
Holy Spirit like a sledgehammer rush in. It was like reading my own journal. I
shouted out loud with joy!
Here is a man who believed that Paul’s admonition to “pray
without ceasing” was not only practical but normative to the Christian
experience. Laubach was a lonely missionary in the Phillipines in the 1930’s.
He made it His sole ambition to live constantly in God’s Presence and writes
beautifully about his joys and failures in “Letters from a Modern Day Mystic”.
As I read, I felt an intense kinship with him. I could see myself over his shoulder
as he typed on his typewriter about his adventures in the Spirit climbing up
Signal Hill in Mindao each evening and coming back to describe the sunset and
thing God had showed him. He talks about inviting God into the motion of his
hammering on typewriter or the methodical movement of His jaw as he chews his
food. He found he was able to maintain a feeling of God’s Presence throughout
the hustle and bustle of his day and it changed everything for him.
He developed an easy way to start Practicing God’s Presence,
which he called his “game with minutes”. To win his game, he endeavored to
bring God into His mind and feel His Presence once per minute. God’s Presence
came to him like electricity in his body, a warm loving presence, and a quiet
voice in his mind.
He talks about a preacher who gives his parishioners a scorecard
asking them to play their own “game with minutes” during the sermon. The
parishioners mark a tally each time they were able to bring God into their
minds. In this way, they pay attention to what God is saying through the sermon
and begin building a muscle memory for God’s Presence. He talked about the
benefits that playing the game with minutes would have for students memorizing
a lesson, a married couple growing their relationship, a businessman making a
presentation, not to mention the benefits of Christ’s presence reminding us to
pray quietly for those we pass on the street, to bless them, and to see their
humanity through the eyes of Christ. Can you imagine the possibilities?
Laubach inspired me with his “game with minutes” to press deeper
into my own quest to bring Jesus into situations where I have not welcomed him
before: teaching a seminar in India, going to the chiropractor, sitting in a
day-long meeting. The more tiny and mundane situations I can walk through with
Christ’s Presence resting on me, the more total my transformation becomes.
I’d encourage you to pick up your own copy of “Letters from
a Modern Day Mystic”:
Let me know what you think! In the mean time, how about
starting your own game with minutes? Can you win your game for 30 minutes? How
about an hour or a whole morning? If it helps, write down your experiences!
Laubach expressed a deep desire that everyone who finds the Presence of Jesus
invading and abiding in their lives should write them down and share them with
a world hungry for His Presence!
