“If she got really quiet and listened, new parts of her wanted to speak.”
Making space to get really quiet and listen is holy work. And it’s kind of crazy what emerges if we’ll stop striving and just surrender. Less trying, more trusting.
I heard Glennon Doyle Melton of the epically popular blog, Momastery, speak this weekend. A dear friend invited me to go and I was so grateful. We had lunch on the water with another friend before hearing Glennon. It was all so good for the soul — including, putting on a dress and carrying a small purse and eating the Skirts on Fire steak salad at C Level, which is one of the best plates of food in San Diego if you ask me.
Glennon said a lot of great stuff, but what I’ve been thinking about since she spoke was her ideas about the “easy buttons” we push in life to keep ourselves from getting too uncomfortable. All the ways we’d rather numb than feel.
I guess because often I feel like a million raw nerve endings all at once. Very feely. And that’s a vulnerable way to go through life, to be honest.
Recently someone encouraged me to spend 20 minutes a day with my soul. “Have tea with your soul,” she told me. When we want to push the easy buttons because we need to wriggle away from the intensity we’re feeling, what I’m seeing is that 20 minutes with my soul is, actually, really what I’m after, what will settle me down, and help me begin again.
Of course, this creates a space for MY own voice to emerge. And it’s creates a space for God’s voice too. And that is magic. That is a transcendent moment–when the real me meets the real God-in-me. Which we are all longing for. Getting in touch with that “divinely endowed center.”
This is certainly not a revolutionary concept. But it is a revolutionary practice. Twenty minutes of space and time to quiet down and listen. It might surprise you what you hear. Or, it might not surprise you at all, which is telling too, isn’t it.
I can really fall back on being a “try-er” by nature. Someone who muscles through. Someone who tries tries tries.
Twenty minutes of teatime with the soul is LESS TRYING AND MORE TRUSTING. It is “learning the unforced rhythms of grace” (thank you, Eugene Peterson, for that beautiful phrase).
Because you are wildly loved,
Leeana
