Desire

I’ve decided to spend this Holy Week here in Manila (I normally go home to our province), with a silent agenda of being and wanting to be “alone” with God.  To retreat, read a book and spend time of once again, getting to know Him.  Discovering the intimacy on how He continuously works in my life.

With the temptation to sit down on a computer and work, aha, I find myself without any creative ideas.  I become restless.  Allowing myself to be silent, I picked up a book and read.  With the first few pages of “The only Necessary Thing,”  a compilation of the words of Henry Nouwen, I once again found a greater desire to know God and to be with Him.

Let me share a page..

God’s Desire for Us

I am deeply convinced that the necessity to pray, and to pray unceasingly, is not so much based on our desire for God as God’s desire for us.  It is God’s passionate pursuit of us that calls us to prayer.  Prayer comes from God’s initiative, not ours.  It might sound shocking, but it is biblical to say:  God wants us more than we want God!  The English spiritual writer Anthony Bloom (Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh) says it better than I when he writes:

“We complain that God does not make himself  present to us for the few minutes we reserve for him, but what about the twenty-three and a half hours during which God may be knocking at our door and we answer, “I am busy.  I am sorry.”  Or when we do not answer at all because we do not even hear the knock at the door of our heart, of our mind, of our conscience, of our life.  So there is a situation in which we have no right to complain of the absence of God, because we are a great deal more absent than he ever is.”

So, who is more in need of our prayers:  we or God?  God is.  Who wants to be heard most:  we or God?  God does.  And who “suffers” more from our lack of prayer:  we or God?  I say it in awe but without fear:  God does.  As long as we continue to reduce prayer to occasional piety we keep running away from the mystery of God’s jealous love, the love in which we are created, redeemed and made holy.

- Henry Nouwen (Prayer and the Jealous God)

God has been seeking us all this time.  We don’t have the right to complain that we don’t feel Him.  For He has been knocking at the doors of our hearts.  Maybe not in the manner that we wanted to, but in ways that could direct us to a path closer to Him.

Let Him feel you this Holy week.  Feel His DESIRE for you.  He wants too show it fully.  Embrace it.

I end this entry with a beautiful (and a favorite) song from Jaci Velasquez.  Have a blessed day.

A MercyGrass moment.

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