Wednesday Letter

Friends in Christ,
  I love the South.  Years ago, the end of November would find me huddled up in jackets and lumbering through the snow to get where I needed to be.  Checking the weather was a depressing task.  Now, I check the weather to see whether or not I'll need a sweater, let alone a jacket.
  But the cold is coming.  Winter has a way of sneaking up on us.  (I know, winter doesn't officially begin for another three weeks.  Tell that to the folks getting snow in the Northwest.)  It gets a little colder every day, but often not enough to notice, and then suddenly you find yourself walking outside and wondering how it got so cold so quickly.  The reality is that the weather was changing every day, but just in such small increments that it doesn't seem to be changing at all.

  I think the same holds true for our discipleship, particularly our prayer life.  When we pray, we are waking ourselves up to what God is doing around us.  The more often we pray, the more often our eyes and our hearts are opened to God's work in the world.  If we focus ourselves on improving our prayer habits, spending a little more time in prayer every day, then we'll notice a change in the way we see the world.  It won't be immediate, and many of the changes may be imperceptible, but years down the road we'll suddenly realize how different our life is.  It's not the work of one dramatic shift, but a thousand little ones.  In the conference I attended this spring, Eugene Peterson said that not everything is prayer, but everything can be prayer.  It's all about our attitude and our willingness to focus on God in the midst of our lives.

  There's an old saying that the best time to plant a tree was 25 years ago, and the 2nd best time is now.  So how will you devote yourself to prayer now, that years down the road, your life may be centered around an awareness of God's presence?

In Christ,
Keith