Been a rough week here in the pew. Usually by Thursday of the week I have the blog written and I began to delete or add where needed. This time however I have only a blank page. I started the blog in 2013 and at the start of 2016 I devoted full time to it, trying to publish once a week and there are 75 posts to date. I have no formal training or education in the writing arts and it is a lot of work to put something on a page every week. Thanks to the digital age, Bill Gates and the wonderful world of knowledge that can be acquired on the internet, I have managed to sneak by. I was told, write about things you know about. Well the truth is I don’t know about a lot of things, which isn’t such a bad thing, it narrows the field a bit but produces a result I wasn’t counting on. Things I know about aren’t all that interesting. There was one thing I wanted to know more about, I wanted to know more about God and Jesus.

Now I have always thought of myself as a Christian, I believe there is a God and I know about Jesus. For a long time that was my standard answer to the question “are you a Christian?” When I look back at the years gone by a more appropriate picture of my faith would be as follows. I was like a person on a golf course, standing under a large tree during a violent thunder storm. “You believe in God?” “You bet I do”  I uttered quickly before the next lighting strike. When the sun came out I went back to the game. I have come to realize that being a Christian isn’t a game. There are no time-outs and no such thing as halftime, there is no quarter given. (weak play on words) It has been a difficult week and in retrospect a disappointing few weeks. There is so much chaos in the world.   The partisan divide in our nation which is driven by such hate and lack of civility has placed us at the mercy of those who use violence and destruction of things and people they disagree with as an acceptable form of expression of opposition to current elections and others policies. Silence comes in many forms. I will share one example with you. After 9/11 all air traffic was grounded for a few days. Ever look up and see the contrails (Contrails or vapor trails are line-shaped clouds sometimes produced by aircraft engine exhaust.) crisscrossing in the sky and wondering who was up there and where were they going? There was for those few days an empty sky, there was a visual silence. Well that is where I’m at today. To one who writes or tries to, a blank page is the ultimate definition of silence.  I have given thought lately to lay the blog aside. It is a case of time spent and results. Don’t misinterpret what I have written here. A lot of time is spent in preparation and after all these years the blog has never caught on. There is also the consideration that maybe I don’t write so well. I have been wondering if my energies would be better spent creating  bible studies, which keeps me in the word and requires research and study. This is not a question of ego, it is about how I can best serve and reach people with the good news. Well I have managed to fill the page with a rambling dissertation of my personal frustrations. You know God never leaves a blank page……and if you listen and seek you will see and hear.

Romans 8:25-27Common English Bible (CEB)

25 But if we hope for what we don’t see, we wait for it with patience.

26 In the same way, the Spirit comes to help our weakness. We don’t know what we should pray, but the Spirit himself pleads our case with unexpressed groans. 27 The one who searches hearts knows how the Spirit thinks, because he pleads for the saints, consistent with God’s will.

I do not know how this ties in, as I was writing, the above verses came to mind. William Barclay writes in his series Daily Bible Study:

THE first two verses form one of the most important passages on prayer in the whole New Testament. Paul is saying that, because of our weakness, we do not know what to pray for, but the prayers we ought to offer are offered for us by the Holy Spirit. The New Testament scholar C. H. Dodd defines prayer in this way: ‘Prayer is the divine in us appealing to the Divine above us.’

I know that I need to pray and seek his will but I have no words. H. Dodd gives this advice. We cannot know our own real need; we cannot with our finite minds grasp God’s plan; in the last analysis, all that we can bring to God is an inarticulate sigh which the Spirit will translate to God for us.

I think that applies to many of us. We need to leave the chaos and uncertainty of this world behind and just pray. His will be done…..jk