SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINES

"Lord, I want to still myself in Your strength," prays author Joni Tada. And I prayed that same prayer with her.

I'm not much into meditating. Our youth and music pastor Jason illustrated a great way to meditate on scripture. Part of it included memorization of scripture. I find as I get older I don't have that capacity as much as I did in my youth. In our study of The 40 Days of Purpose, and in our recent study of Seeking Him we were asked to memorize verses. One per week was all. I might have memorized 3 total. So that's definitely a spiritual discipline I need to improve on.

There are so many others that I'll need the Lord to bless me with a long life to be able to complete, or in some cases just make headway into them. For example, today.

I awoke with a cold, somewhat better but still nagging. It was raining. Certainly a blessing in the desert. But except for one afternoon this week, we have had cloud cover like the Midwest. Warmer temps for November, no doubt. Over coffee I read the newspaper which reported a 0.38 inch rainfall in the last 24 hours. Former Pastor Keith Stanford would have said,"Balderdash!" Present Pastor Rob would probably have said, "Yeah, right." I mean c'mon. It has been reported nearly every place in the valley has received between 1 and 2 inches of rain. With more coming today.

Besides, our paper has become so negative, so far left in editorial writers' views and letters to the editor they choose to run. And in today's paper they advertise a "7 foot inflatable manger for the religious aspect of the season". What? For the religious aspect? That's completely what Christmas is about. If you celebrate something else, well sorry, but you're simply adding on to Christian coat tails. And yesterday's paper ran a picture of Glendale's tumbleweed "holiday tree". Not Christmas tree mind you. Holiday tree.

So do you see why I need meditation. And it's not even 8 AM yet. But God sees all. Maybe He even sees my anger as holy anger or righteous anger. But I'm afraid now I'm trying to control Him. Would I do that? Boy, do I need a lot of work.