“To wait with openness and trust is an enormously radical attitude toward life. It is choosing to hope that something is happening for us that is far beyond our own imaginings. It is giving up control over our future and letting God define our life.” Henri J. M. Nouwen
I’m guessing this is an ongoing discipline for everyone. Sometimes we wait well. Sometimes we choose well. Sometimes we give up well. We live in the ebbs and flows.
That last phrase, “letting God define our life,” is another way of describing my word for 2025 – Rest.
No other picture best captures how it’s played out than this.
I’m eager to play, create, commune, and gather the fruits of waiting, choosing, and giving up.
Many of my more moving moments of prayer have been when someone is being prayed over.
Maybe it’s because we don’t do it enough. Maybe it’s because we wait too long. Maybe it’s simply because it’s the breath of communion.
Each time my spiritual director prays over me, there’s an invitation and connection with the Holy One. Those two things are always in reach, but they seem energized by the words and spirit of a fellow believer.
I’ve witnessed this twice in the last two months while praying over believers in emotional and spiritual pain. It seemed either they were hearing words they didn’t know how to voice or cries exactly aligned with their hearts. These were holy communion moments.
In a different but similar way, I’ve experienced this by an unexpected means this week. Rather than reading my daily scriptures, I’ve utilized the audio reading on the app. Since I’m in Psalms, my experience feels very much like I’m being prayed over. Phrases rang truer, praises raised higher, and promises rose stronger.
Maybe scripture feels lifeless for you today. Maybe someone reading it over you would restart your inhaling and exhaling.
Maybe you’ve ran out of words to pray. Maybe someone praying over you could pick up where you left off, even say what you didn’t know how to or knew you needed to.
The following chapter in Hartgrove’s book warns, “Buckle Up!”
After encouraging nurturing roots of love, he immediately offers that you can expect spiritual challenges. His first reference retells the story of the desert monastics’ “describing the ‘noonday devil’ who attacks after one commits to stay and begins to feel the heat of high noon.”
This is where the book’s subtitle, “Rooting Faith in a Mobile Culture,” gets highlighted. To stay, to root, to pursue stability “against the seas of constant change makes us susceptible to temptations we would not otherwise have occasion to know.”
The practice of stability cannot be reduced to a quick fix for the spiritual anxiety of a placeless people. It is a process. It takes time…To persevere in the process that leads to real growth, we must learn to name and resist the midday demons.
These are the three midday demons:
Ambition’s Whisper
Boredom’s Rut
Vainglory’s Delusion
I’m quite familiar with the first two. They often show face at high noon. Hartgrove offers several countermoves to these temptations focused on both spirit and body including physical activity, engaging community, and dying well.
This book, available on hoopla and an easy weekend read, is worthwhile. If you only read chapters four and five of this book, you will be enriched. However much you read, you’ll find yourself wiser and pondering your stability.
Reading while traveling last weekend I gained a broader definition for stability thanks to Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove. His book, The Wisdom of Stability, affirmed and challenged me, leaving me with this evaluation-I’m decently stable, but there’s always need for growth.
It’s important to point out what Hartgrove is addressing. He’s not talking about the need for emotional regulation or mental wellness. In simple terms, he shares a message of valuing staying put, committing to less wandering, and acknowledging “there comes a time to set seeking aside,” as Kathleen Norris states in her foreword.
Example: I overheard someone this morning describing the makeup of three fantasy football leagues they’re active in. One is made up of college friends; another is made up of childhood friends. Possibly without intention, this person is practicing stability in a way that many of us aren’t.
To practice stability is to learn to love both a place and its people. -Chapter 4, “Roots of Love”
Hartgrove uses trees to explain in chapter four. His analogy rings true, especially for those living where I do. Last year’s hurricane season wreaked havoc. Ask those who live where I moved in April. The community lost over a third of its trees. Why? Their roots couldn’t withstand the winds.
The chapter title, “Roots of Love,” comes from a thought by Benedictine Anselm of Canterbury, a twelfth-century monk who compared a restless monk to a tree. “If he often moves from place to place at his own whim, or remaining in one place is frequently agitated by hatred of it, he never achieves stability with roots of love.”
One temptation in the face of agitation is to flee (more about temptations in part two). Hartgrove challenges us to accept this goes against one reason we were made-to intimately share life with our landscape and its people.
How else can we learn the attention that is needed to really know a community? How else would we ever gain the patience that is required to care for a place over time?
Friday, I chose to go inside Chick-fil-A for lunch rather than hurry through the drivethrough. Not many other customers made the same choice, so the hostess had few people to chat up. She chose me as her customer to get to know. She asked a pretty standard question for non-Floridians, “Did you grow up in Florida?” I have to honestly answer that with a no. But when I say I’ve lived in Florida since 1986 and in this area since 2002, the reply is usually something like, “Well, you might as well have.”
More than once my seeking has tempted me to move on.
More than once, I’m reminded that God is wiser than me. With his wisdom comes stability, and with that stability comes wisdom.
Psalms 24:7-10 CEV (A Psalm by David) [7] Open the ancient gates, so that the glorious king may come in.
[8] Who is this glorious king? He is our Lord, a strong and mighty warrior.
[9] Open the ancient gates, so that the glorious king may come in.
[10] Who is this glorious king? He is our Lord, the All-Powerful!
Suppose the ancient gates are entries to your mind, body, and spirit.
Even though he created you, this king doesn’t do force entry.
Even though your gate would yield to his command, this king knocks and waits for your reply.
It’s a common thought for those engaging him for the first time that it has to happen in a formal setting-church, monastery, temple, retreat center, for example. The psalmist declares, “Not so.” The gate controls are yours anytime of the day no matter your location.
This king waits to receive access to you, to be with you, all of you. And maybe unbeknownst to you, you’ve been waiting for him, too.
Opening your gate to this king makes room for connection you’ve been waiting for.
Opening your gate to this king makes preparation for healing you’ve been waiting for.
Opening your gate to this king makes room for communion you’ve been waiting for.
Opening your gate to this king makes it possible you exit the gate together.
What you’ve been waiting for may just be waiting for you on the other side of your gate. But it’s not actually a what. It’s a who.
Started listening to a new audio book, In the Shelter by Padraig O Tuama. In chapter one he asked an interesting question about prayer, one I’ve not heard worded this way before. “Where is it that we are when we pray?”
It’s a different way to challenge one’s emotional and mental approach to prayer.
We are often in many places. We are saying to ourselves, “I should be somewhere else,” or, “I should be someone else,” or “I am not where I say I am.” In prayer, to begin where you are not is a poor beginning.
To begin where you are may take courage or compromise or painful truth telling; whatever it takes, it’s wise to begin there. The only place to begin is where I am.
Not where you want or feel you ought to be. This could mean rather than naming your present state-confused, frustrated, hurt, angry, lonely, unhappy, etc.-you ask for where you want to be or where you feel it is your duty to be-fulfilled, joyful, connected, healed, satisfied, understood, peaceful, etc.
Not in many places. We can often pray about what has happened, what we fear is going to happen rather than what is happening in this moment. We can be drawn to focus on the past or the future to the point that the present is ignored, maybe even avoided. The result that we aren’t even intending can be distance, even creating space for drifting to begin.
I believe what he’s encouraging is twofold. One is raw honesty. The other is naked vulnerability.
Prayer that is honest and vulnerable, not pious or fake, says to God, “I’m here. I believe you are too. Let’s talk.”
I listened to Kathleen Norris’s book The Cloister Walk this week. Fascinating.
A highlight was Chapter 13, an honest look at her 10 years of relationships with celibate men and women.
In them the strengths of celibacy have somehow been transformed into an openness that attracts people of all ages, all social classes. They exude a sense of freedom.
She acknowledges her own struggle to understand how this can be, yet rejects culture’s prejudice take on reasons for celibacy.
As celibacy takes hold in a person over the years, as monastic values supersede the values of the culture outside the monastery, celibates become people who can radically assess those of us out in the world, if only because they’ve learned how to listen without possessiveness, without imposing themselves. With someone who is practicing celibacy well, we may sense that we are being listened to in a refreshingly deep way. And this is the purpose of celibacy. Not to obtain an impossibly cerebral goal mistakenly conceived as holiness, but to make oneself available to others, body and soul. Celibacy, simply put, is a form of ministry.
Natural tendency is to reject what we don’t understand or aren’t willing to be open to accept as necessary.
Ministry is a choice.
Availability is a choice.
Listening is a choice.
Our obedience to God’s choices for us won’t always be understood or accepted by others. Jesus actually told us to expect this to happen, to follow calling, to be about the Father’s work.
It’s necessary for transformation, for freedom.
Be strong in your obedience. Your body and soul will thank you. So will other’s.
I first heard this song after being pointed to it by a nose hair friend going through hard times. It’s on my 2025 Rest Playlist, which I started my day with today. Because friendship was on my mind, I listened to this song with a different ear and heart.
Here’s the thought that surfaced:
Some friends are better valley friends; some friends are better highlands friends.
I can hear some head scratching. “John, true friends, real friends don’t care about valleys and highlands. They’re in it for all of it.” Heard. But let me tell you my experience.
Back in the early-90s while in my 20s, I had a group of friends that got together often to play card games. Anywhere from 4-6 of us. We were friends mostly through work and church. Some were married, some single. We were very much highlands friends.
Eventually we all parted ways as relationships go, yet we tried to keep in touch. And then, one of the couples got a divorce. In that moment, we were challenged.
I had never experienced friends getting a divorce. For that matter, I’d never experienced anyone divorcing that was close to me. It was foreign territory. An unknown valley that I was more observing than experiencing. And as much as I tried, it was just awkward. The result? These days we’d call it ghosting. I felt a lot of guilt about it.
Forward five years, another couple of church friends got divorced. This time, I knew better, and I was the valley friend they needed. I had grown in what it meant to be a friend through the valley. That experience led me to go back to my first divorced friend and acknowledge I could have been a better friend through his valley.
Here I sit almost thirty years later, and it’s like I’m the opposite-better valley friend than highland friend. And when I listened to this song this morning with my friend evaluator hat on, it was a call to grace.
Grace for myself. Sure, I’d like to be the ideal friend regardless of the space. When I believe I’m not, grant myself grace to grow in whichever land my friend is walking.
Grace for my friends. Sure, I’d like them to be ideal friends regardless of my space. When I’m tempted to say they aren’t, grant them grace to grow in the land I’m walking.
Maybe the lesson isn’t as much about valley and highland friends. It’s about grace granting, to others and to myself. “All the same.”
John Gregory 