Articles By: Keith Meyer

Damon was a sharply dressed man in his late twenties with a look of desperation. I noticed him fidget as he stood waiting in a line of people who had just heard me speak. He asked me for prayer and an appointment to meet to talk about his life and the message I gave, “Slowing Down Enough to Go at God’s Speed—the Speed of Love.”

The day chronic pain entered my life has now taken an unwelcome and unwanted place in my memory alongside happiest day: my wedding day, and the birthdays of my children. The 24 hours before it came would be the last pain-free day of my (basically) comfortable 45 years and the beginning of a new life for me. A violent trespasser, its tortuous presence inhabiting my body, would always accompany my day-to-day experience from then on. I’ve come to call this presence, simply “the pain,” which began witha literal thorn in my flesh.

I have often quoted a priest who said that his daily experience with God more often than not is “like being with a stranger in a very dark room and the only way you know they are there is because they occasionally clear their throat”.

“Prone to wander, Lord I feel it, prone to leave the God I love. Here’s my heart, O take and seal it, seal it for thy courts above.”

That old hymn expresses my desire for always being attentive to my Father, His Son and Spirit—who I also am consistently wandering away from. Yet they are always “there” for me, graciously giving me “my space”, and mostly just waiting quietly for me to grow sick of going it alone, occasionally whispering or even rarely shouting when needed, in unceasing hope of my return.

My rural home’s screened in porch, two stories up and in view of my own private nature preserve, has been a sanctuary for me where God has met me so often that it formed within me the same kind of space inside my heart. We might have to downsize in a move this year, but its gift is now in me and I will take it wherever I go.

It leads me in a powerful vision for the Lord’s Prayer.

I was given the gift of a small stick of dynamite for the soul. A Quaker pastor who wanted to bless me at a retreat l led for their annual pastor/spouse retreat gave me The Human Condition: Contemplation and Transformation by Thomas Keating and bless me it did—just in time for my current life journey!

Fasting is all about feasting.

That thought was new to me.  It helps with how I enter into practices of the Lent season.  It isn’t what I give up that matters (although I always do give up something) as much as what I indulge in that makes Lent meaningful.

One evening over this past holiday season, my kids and I were trying to decide which movie to go see.  I had been to everything I had wanted to see and so had they.  Since they have no problem seeing movies over and over they went to the closet for an old favorite. “Oh, no,” I groaned. How many times do I have to sit through “Dumber and Dumber”?

Advent has come to have new meaning for me because of two little known German pastors, Arnold Blumhardt and his son, Christoph, and their recovery for the church of what it means to biblically “wait” on the Lord, what they termed, “waiting and hastening”, partnering with God in prayerful action.

Last week I listened to a radio program that made me stop in my driveway and keep the radio on—and so long that my wife came out to see what might be wrong. The interview was with an employee of Hazelden, the most famous of Minnesota’s many drug and chemical treatment centers (a sidenote: Minnesota is known to many by its license plate slogan, “Land of 10,000 Lakes”, morphed to us locals as the “Land of 10,000 Treatment Centers”). The show was about a new edition of AA or Alcoholic Anonymous’s “bible” of recovery stories, known as the Big Book.