How do we respond to a world in need? Usually, the answer is jumping into action. But, what if we took a minute an turned inward? What if we spent a little more time with our beauty? Might the world appear more beautiful to us, even in it's brokenness? Spiritual practice brings us home. I work with many different people and I hear over and over, I don’t know how to pray. I just don’t know how to do it. And I say, in Mary Oliver’s beautiful words, stand still and learn to be astonished. Look around. Spend five extra seconds when you are speaking with someone and say within your heart as you look into their eyes, You are a child of God. Take a dab of oil on your fingertip each morning, and rub it on your heart saying, I am beloved. Let the warm water run over your hands and feel it. Soak it in. When you do, you won’t need gallons and gallons of it in the shower. We run around busy, needy and self indulgent, because we are afraid of standing still. We fear intimacy; with God, with ourselves, each other and this planet. So, we run around and search for God and drain this world of Her resources. If we do not know that we are loved at the very core of who we are, we become empty. We seek from the world, rather than being filled up by God and allowing this fullness to overflow and spill out into the world. We are not horrible people. We are afraid. We never learned to love and trust, and most importantly experience, intimacy with God. Intimacy cannot be forced. It is not something you can hurry up, and do, because we have to. That is why fear is not a motivator for sustainable social change. Deepening into intimacy with God is like the unfolding wings of a butterfly. You cannot force it, or they will die. When the butterfly pokes out of her cocoon, her wings are wet and crumpled. They unfold, and they come together like folded hands in prayer. And they stay that way for a long while. As I watched this process unfold in the habitat on my kitchen table this spring, I thought something was wrong. Why were her wings staying together, and for so long? Then I read on the instruction packet, she keeps her wings together to pump blood into them. She is getting ready to fly. Thank God, I did not interfere. My will sometimes can really get in the way of God’s work.

What is your spiritual practice? What brings you alive? What helps you to live life more fully? What helps you stay with yourself? I believe, person by person, the more we turn to the big Love within us and remember the treasure that we are, the more this planet and all of us on it, will heal. It might be a quiet response, but the power in this stillness can transform how we relate to ourselves and to everything around us.