Danae's 5 minutes

It’s important for me to start with a few facts:

1. I am not a morning person

2. I am easily distracted

Those facts are important to understanding how God chose to talk to me. Oh! Wait… one more:

3. I’m not naturally disciplined

Ok, that’s good.

I have struggled for a long time with acts of spiritual discipline and I have strong legalistic tendencies. I have all sorts of guilt feelings when I do not do the right spiritual disciplines at the right time and when I do not feel a grandiose sense of God’s presence while doing them. I assume it’s because I’m doing something wrong. Without getting into all that background, I want you to understand how I’m approaching this “resting on God’s spirit” deal. Even though I’ve been a Christian a long time, it’s a new idea to me and I need some serious retraining to take full advantage of what God’s offering.

Which brings me to last night (see point 1). I found myself walking through the neighborhood which is something I do at least once a week. I had already done my “5 minutes” earlier that day but I knew today I’d have to do one and write about it so I was thinking about that. I was also thinking about the Blazers, and thinking about what I’m going to be doing January 2011 and whether or not people are going to notice that I’m wearing gross sweatpants over my jeans (see point 2).

Then I started thinking about the Sunday School class I’ve been teaching. We’ve been talking about what happened to the disciples after Jesus went up to heaven. Jesus sent them a gift. I remember drawing this present on the whiteboard in red ink. It’s a box with a bow on it.

“Kids! Do you remember what God’s present is?” I said.

Standard replies were, “Jesus!” “Dying for us!” “Can I go to the bathroom?” “Heaven!”

But usually one of the other kids remembers that it’s the Holy Spirit. We talk about what that means and how we’re supposed to use it. Kind of like Mary Poppins’ bag, we can pull stuff out of there even if the bag doesn’t look big enough to hold what we need. So I wondered, do I really get that? Do I get what it means to really wait AND trust that the Spirit is what is going to get me where I want to be? Will the spirit really come through when I WANT to pray well, but don’t understand exactly how prayer works? When I want to read AND understand scripture but I can’t focus very well? I knew it had to be true, God says it’s true.

I re-prayed the scripture for today: “Teach me to do your will for you are my God. Let your good spirit lead me on a level path.” And I believed it. And honestly, I felt it too. I really felt it, I got a little teary I must say. And I heard God say, “See, didn’t I know what I was doing?” … when I created this system, when I chose to have you close to me, He was saying. And then I giggled a bit, like my soul had just been tickled.

So today, I sat at my desk a rested in those 5 minutes again. I savored that scripture, trusted that God was with me, before me, above me, next to me all that good stuff. I’m not going to lie, it feels pretty good today.

For those of you who have managed to read this whole long crazy thing please know that this “hearing from God" thing doesn’t happen to me all that often. It makes me curious… Do any of you also feel like you’re doing something wrong if you don’t get that “God’s right here with me” feeling? What do you do to push through that? Have you learned anything about what it means to wait for his Spirit?