Practicing the spiritul disciplines
Our pastor coaches us on silence, prayer and meditation
From now until Ash Wednesday (Feb. 22), a small group of Hobson members are studying the "spiritual disciplines." (You're invited to join us each Wednesday at 6:15 p.m. in the Sunday school wing of our building. A light meal is served)
Based on Biblical teaching and the teaching of the Rev. John Wesley, founder of the Methodist Church, the spiritual disciplines are practices that help us deepen our understanding of and our relationship with God. Those disciplines are: inward, outward and corporate.
In the past two weeks, we've discussed the inward disciplines:
- Meditation
- Prayer
- Bible Study
Our relationship with God through Jesus Christ should be central to our lives. It should 
be the foundation on which all other relationships stand. Each week in worship, we say in out statement of faith, "We are not alone...." As a child of God, we are never alone; we are connected to the God who claims us. God is omnipresent, which means God is EVERYwhere.
God is always with us because God is inside of us—we are created in God's image, we are loved and God is down in our souls. It is when we practice the spiritual disciplines that we KNOW and can feel that connection to God.
When I talk about meditation, I believe that "silence" is a discipline that has to come before meditation and prayer. We have so much noise and clutter in our lives, that many of us say, "I don't have time to pray" or "I can't make space in my day for meditation."
But people of faith need to work hard to stay connected to God and to one another, and that requires being still and listening. The Number 1 pollution problem in our world is noise pollution. It is the noise that comes at us and bombards us from everywhere.
In communing with our God, we have to shut out the distractions in our lives so that we can have that life-giving connection. I go on a spiritual retreat every two years, and silence is a part of that retreat. We spend most of our time in complete silence, and it takes days for my mind to slow down enough for me to hear God. We need times when we can just be, because it is in the "being" that we can feel and hear and know that love of God.
I don't know if many of use can even feel comfortable turning off our cell phones and our email, because we're afraid we might miss stuff. But what we are missing is quality time with God and listening for the unexpectedly blessings that come when we connect fully with God in silence. We need to take seriously the need to meditate and pray and study, and to do that, we have to open ourselves up to be quite and still in the moment and allow God to interact with us.
Christian meditation is the ability to hear God's voice and to respond to God's Word. Many times when we pray, we're just giving God our laundry list of wants. But prayer and mediation, in the deepest sense, require us to make time and space to let go of all the stuff cluttering our minds and to listen for God as God speaks to our souls.