Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

He says, “Be still, and know that I am God;
    I will be exalted among the nations,
    I will be exalted in the earth.”
The Lord Almighty is with us;
    the God of Jacob is our fortress.

• Psalm 46:10-11

“Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist whose research is the basis of the Myers-Briggs personality test, put it bluntly: ‘Hurry is not of the Devil; it is the Devil?’ The modern-day sage Richard Foster writes, ‘In contemporary society our Adversary [a biblical title for the devil] majors in three things: noise, hurry, and crowds. If he can keep us engaged in “muchness” and “manyness,” he will rest satisfied.’ A journalist once asked theologian Thomas Merton to diagnose the leading spiritual disease of our time. Merton gave a one-word answer: ‘efficiency.’
“We tend to attribute the complexity and busyness of our lives to a false culprit. We blame it on our environment. The pace of activity in our cities, our workload or office culture, our stage in life, and the current demands on our time are the assumed chief causes of our overwhelmed lives.
“Quaker missionary Thomas Kelly, writing in 1941, made a different observation after spending a full year ‘slowing down’ and ‘simplifying’ on a twelve-month sabbatical in Hawaii. Like other Americans, he had carried with him to the tropics the ‘mad-cap, feverish life’ he knew on the mainland. Your inner life is not a mirror image of your environment. if anything, the opposite is true. We create an environment that mirrors our inner life. Kelly observed:
“ ‘Strained by the very mad pace of our daily outer burdens, we are further strained by an inward uneasiness, because we have hints that there is a way of life vastly richer and deeper than all this hurried existence, a life of unhurried serenity and peace and power. If only we could slip over into that Center! If only we could find the Silence which is the source of sound!’
“All of these teachers are circling around the same thing: hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life in our day.
“I’m sure the sons of Korah want all of us to be mentally and emotionally healthy, but what‘s at stake isn’t only our ability to stay centered. When this psalm urges us to ‘be still,’ it’s not pushing us toward a self-care retreat; it’s undermining an ancient conspiracy. All the way back at the beginning of the story, Adam and Eve took and ate the forbidden fruit from that one forbidden tree. They sinned. Then they hid, made clothes, argued, and blamed. They dealt with their sin through what Richard Foster calls ‘muchness and manyness,’ what Michael Zigarelli names ‘busyness,’ and what Dallas Willard diagnoses as ‘hurry.’ And ever since then, we’ve always found it easiest to ignore the truth as long as we never stop moving. In the fall of humanity, we mastered the art of hurry. ‘And so we end up as good people, but as people who are not very deep: not bad, just busy; not immoral, just distracted; not lacking in soul, just preoccupied; not disdaining depth, just never doing the things to get us there,’ says Ronald Rolheiser.”

• Tyler Staton, Praying like Monks, Living like Fools

Sorry for the long quote, but I was in too much of a hurry to trim it down…

I could not find the quote in my C. S. Lewis “Rolodex”  …  Come on!  Doesn’t everyone have one?!

No?!  In some book somewhere, probably Letters to Malcolm, his fictional character just for the sake of writing about prayer in “letter” form, Lewis made the comment that it was probably better to sit in a comfy chair and be fully awake while praying than it is to pray with hands folded, on your knees next to your bed, your head bowed, and being half asleep.  To be honest some of my best dreams (not remembered, but I woke up feeling excited about how God had revealed something, but not remembering what it was, when I fell asleep while praying.  And I am sure that I am not the only one.

So when Rev. Staton speaks of prayer posture, he is not talking about the physical posture.  Look at my misquote of C. S. Lewis; whatever gets you in the right frame of mind when considering that you are about to talk to not just the greatest power in the universe, but the source of all power in the universe.  Now that is the spiritual posture that you need to be in when praying.

But then Rev. Stanton places his thumb on our biggest problem.  We are too busy.

I read the Thomas Merton suggestion of our greatest disease: “efficiency.”  I shouted, “No!”  That was my strong suit.

My greatest asset wherever I worked was the greatest disease that gets in the way of a better communion with our Lord and Savior.  Ouch!!!!

I mean.  I only write eleven posts each week and a couple are rather long, none very short.  And my wife’s final request before she died was that with her gone, I could write more.  In prayerful consideration of her request, I had been praying about how to add the Psalms and Proverbs as a twelfth post each week, and I was leaning toward that being a fulfillment of her request, but …  Yikes! Busyness… Muchness… Efficiency…  Not of the Devil, but the Devil!

When my wife died, I was balancing grief with the business of someone dying.  Do not expect a post on exactly what to do.  I asked a question about what to do when your spouse dies on one insurance / banking website and they did not even need the Death Certificate.  Another credit union required an original.  (So far, I have used three originals.)  One required the original be faxed (as if they could tell).  Who has fax machines anymore?!  Another accepted a pdf of a scan of the original.  One accepted a copy.  You need a vehicle notary if the car is in your spouse’s name, a regular notary, etc., etc.  You may need a secure bank to bank computer transaction device, but many banks have no idea what that is.  Note: If the deceased is former US military, they give you ten originals of the death certificate for free, but they will arrive about a week after you are done with all the madness.

And madness it was.

Then, it was planning the memorial service.  Maybe the best thing is to do all of that in a week’s time and be done with it, but my son wanted his family to attend and help me start packing so I can move closer to them.  In with them until I find a place.  The ten days that they were here caused my pulse and blood pressure to spike dangerously high.  The youngest is going into third grade.  I request all true believers on the face of the earth to pray for his third-grade teacher.  Think a supertanker of patience, and that might not be enough.  But he is such a cute kid … when he’s asleep.  Whatever this article has been on our busy lives, remember there are third graders out there who are cute as a button, but they are a lot busier than you could ever be in dreaming up mischief.  And to paraphrase the Rolheiser quote above: not being bad, just thinking he is entertaining.

But I had the pressure of grief, the pressure of the business end of a spouse’s death, the pressure of trying to recover from my grief to get two weeks ahead on my writing before the memorial, the pressure of five added people in the house, laundry every other day which I did before they woke up (I refused to fold their clothing), and answering all their questions on “Do we keep this or do we throw it away?”

But when they left, I cried for about an hour.  I was finally alone with no particular deadline, other than I was then less than a week ahead on my writing.

In A. W. Tozer’s This World: Playground or Battleground, he wrote about Moody Stuart’s rules to a successful prayer life, and one was “praying until you pray.”  In other words, reach the end of your prayer list and keep going, and when you have nothing else to pray about, stay with it.  Then God has the chance to get in a word or two.  We never have the time to pray until we hear God’s answer.  We request and think God is then behind our idea.

I’d rather be working on God’s idea than anything that I have come up with.

Lord, guide me. I mean it, Lord.  I need help.  It is a busy world, and being a widower, the idea of not having enough time left to finish what I have started comes to mind.  After all, I have been digging through my wife’s many closets (to my one) to find crochet projects that are unfinished, knitting projects that are unfinished, rubber-stamping projects, ceramics, etc.  My daughter-in-law found enough greeting cards to celebrate a thousand birthdays and offer sympathy to hundreds who have lost a loved one.  Even Matthew Henry only made it through the book of Acts and his assistants had to finish his commentary.  I have no assistants.  Lord, we need to learn how to slow down when society’s accelerator pedal is stuck on full speed ahead.  We need to be still, so that we can know You.  Without knowing You, how can we know what You want us to do?  In Your name I pray.  Amen.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.