In the past few weeks, our lives have slowed from the busy pace of late spring with its baseball and work schedules and the final push of the school routine. Things are slower around here. And I am working my way back to normal on so many levels after a rough stretch. And we are praying for new direction in our lives, praying to understand God's will for us, praying to know the way.
That combination of happenings has led me to really focus on getting my prayer life back in order. To focus on rebuilding intimacy with God. I have spent so much time hurting in the last nine months, clinging to God for my very breath at times, weeping all my bitterness out onto His wounded feet, it's hard to imagine how I could have lost a sense of intimacy with Him. But lose I did. My Scripture reading, my meditation, all just dry. Prayer has been like eating Saltine crackers lately. I want to fall in love with Jesus all over again. I want to be young and fresh and zealous all over again. I want to trust and hope and sing His praise with unabashed joy once again. In light of where I've been, this may look a little different than when I first fell in love with Him, but it's possible. It's what He wants for me. It's how He loves me, fully, zealously, joyfully. And it's how He wants me to love Him in return.
It is no new discovery that silence is a necessary component for building a fruitful prayer life. Catholic saints and more recently, Catholic bloggers, have written eloquently on the subject. And I agreed wholeheartedly with their assessments. I just didn't exactly get what the Lord was trying to tell me right away. I'm like that sometimes, a little dense with the Lord.
But as I've put my focus on building an intimate prayer life, I've come to see that silence is not just about creating quiet pockets for prayer throughout my day. Silence is not only about guarding my time from the screen noise that can overtake me at times. Silence is not only about limiting online conversation. Silence in an intentional, purposeful fast. Silence is letting yourself be lonely.
My husband had to spend some time out of town in the last few weeks. His being gone fills me with a sense of his absence, with a sense that someone is missing. And that sense makes me lonely. He wasn't as available to me as he usually is when he's away and so that sense of his absence was all the more acute.
My natural reaction to feeling "alone" is to look for other voices to fill that sense of absence, of loneliness--to call friends or sisters or nieces--to chat away the time so that I barely notice he's gone. To chat up. To barely notice. He's gone. Oh. So not good. This time around I finally got a glimpse of what God was trying to say. My husband is my beloved. I'm supposed to notice he's gone. I'm supposed to feel lonely without him.
And so I felt the Lord calling me to fast while my husband was away. To intentionally put the phone back down and not dial. To desire conversation, and to feel the hunger, but not to feed it. To desire affirmation, to thirst for recognition, and to stay thirsty for a while. To feel the human longing for intimacy and to fill it, not with humanity, but with Him. To silence not the noise others make, but the noise I make. In my own head. In my own heart. To fast from even good, fruitful conversations with holy, like-minded friends. To fast from their encouragement.
Why? Because in our loneliness, we see our neediness. We begin to see just how clingy we are. Like little babies who are feverish and miserable cling tightly to you, begging you with clutching fingers and whimpering voices to assure them that they are okay. I whimper. I cling. Someone tell me I'm okay.
I don't like to see my neediness. It's shockingly embarrassing to realize how much I look to others to validate, affirm. When my confidence is waning, when sloth is lurking, when fatigue makes joyful service feel impossible, I look for a quick fix, a word of love, a little laugh, an "atta-girl". None of these things are bad in and of themselves. But what I realized is that they are like feeding myself a steady diet of cup cakes. I feel full right after, but the fullness doesn't last long. And the bottom out makes me feel worse than before and I need more cupcakes to feel full the next time around.
But in the fasting, I felt the hunger. And I waited. And I felt the humility of how much hunger there was. And I waited. I got so hungry, I cried. And I waited. And sometimes night fell and the darkness felt very dark and very lonely. And I waited. And I called out to Him to fill me. And I laid my scared, tired, feverish little girl self in His lap. And I drank living water and I consumed living Bread. And in time, I fell in love again.
I fell in love with the husband I missed so much, and I desired his company more than I have in a long time. And I fell in love with my God again. The God that feeds my hunger and isn't critical of my neediness. The God that created me to need. To hunger. To thirst. In the depths of my soul. The God who knows how badly I need to be loved. And who wants to rush in and fill me.
And all I have to do is let myself be empty. Be lonely. Be hungry. And He will come to fill me with the kind of friendship that makes me strong and healthy, full and satisfied. So that friendship cupcakes taste ever sweeter because I am not expecting them to feed a hunger they were never meant to feed.
I am still learning. I still reach for conversation when it might be better to wait. I still tend to think of screen time and chat time first when I feel myself begin to tire, begin to get hungry throughout the day. And I don't always wait when I should. But I am working. And I am learning to be lonely. And to see the reality of neediness. And to fill it with love worth waiting for.
