At a retreat I led recently, I asked the participants to take time to ponder the meaning of the words we were saying as we read the scriptures, said prayers, or sang a hymn. Usually we recite prayers or sing hymns so quickly that we don’t pay attention to what the words might be saying to us. Thus we miss their meaning or the potential ‘shot in the arm’ we might receive if we slowed down and paid attention to them.

As we sang the hymn ‘Take Time to Be Holy,’ I too tried to focus attentively on what we were singing. The words in that hymn are what I consider to be thought provokers. One phrase truly jumped out at me: ‘Be calm in thy soul.’ They reminded me how important it is to pause, to be quiet, to calm our souls, to try to re-connect with God. This is especially true during what I call the dry seasons of our life, those times when we feel like we are in an arid desert regarding our faith and our spirituality.

As a spiritual director and workshop/retreat leader, it’s important that I acknowledge my own times of being in the desert. Like everyone else, I too need to ‘be calm in my soul’ and ‘take time to be holy,’ to ask questions about my spiritual journey and my beliefs. I don’t always come up with answers, but I must keep asking the questions about my relationship with the Divine.

Certainly pausing to calm our souls or to pray are ways we can re-connect with the Divine. I think of spending time with God as being comparable to plugging an appliance into an electrical outlet or logging onto the Internet. We don’t really understand how it works, but we know when we ‘plug in’ or ‘log on,’ something happens and we benefit.

It’s true that we may not always feel like ‘taking time to be holy’ or ‘being calm in our souls’ or turning to God in prayer. But if we are brave enough to try to make the connection, we just might access new energy and insights. And we may find that we have established a live connection to our Creator.

Beloved Creator, often we are not sure what it means to be ‘holy’ or to worship or to serve you. But we want to plug in and log on with you. So help us to learn to ‘be still in our souls’ so we can ‘make time to be holy.’ We need and want a live connection to you. Amen

Joy Carol
www.joycarol.com