Scattered Thoughts...

Man, it's past midnight! I was going to make another entry for Thursday. But today is now Friday. Oh well, it really doesn't matter. Who needs a structured, organized view of life, anyway? And who's to say that this blog runs on my time zone? I should check that out...

Anyway, tonight we had an appartment meeting. It was pretty good, Mike, our advisor, had some good advice for improving the function of our group. It might lead to more conflict, but in the end it was really encouraging. So cool.

Since I don't think original thoughts anymore (I am hardly qualified) here's something cool that happened to me today, which I will record for your spiritual edification and for the glory of God (that's how the Pilgrim begins all of his stories in the book, there are some really cool ones):

I have been reading as a devotional the Way of the Pilgrim. I highly recommend it, especially to people who have read about or have read excerpts of the Philokalia, or have otherwise studied the thoughts of the Eastern Orthodox Church. The basic plot of the book is that one day the author went to attend liturgy and heard his priest preach on Paul's exhortation to "pray without ceasing." The passage bothered the man, so he went out and started asking people how to do it. He didn't get any good advice until finally he found a wise old hermit who agreed to teach him.

The basic idea is that one should pray "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me." The prayer actually appears in different forms throughout the book, sometimes it ends with "on me a sinner." The prayer is wonderful because within it there is the whole of the gospel. That is, there is the wholly perfect God, who we can know through His Son, the Christ. On the other side there is the man praying. He is in desperate need of the mercy of this Holy God, because on his own there is no way that he can achieve heaven. Our hope in this mercy is founded in this very Incarnation. In the Eastern Orthodox Church the focus is on the Incarnation, not on the atonement.

Anyway, his spiritual father assigns him a certain amount of times to pray the prayer a day. He continues this for a few weeks, at which point the monk would increase the amount for the Pilgrim. The end result is that the Pilgrim begins to love to pray the prayer, and cannot live without it. There's a lot more to it than what I can put here, so it's worth a read to understand the beautiful concept.

Anyway, so I've been starting to pray the Jesus Prayer when I have spare time. It's just an awesome way to connect to God. Earlier today I had a really bad asthma attack, as I posted. And it really hurt, and continued to hurt well into the afternoon. I was coming home from the one class I went to, and I remembered many miraculous stories recorded in the book about people who had trusted on God through the Jesus Prayer, and I figured, God heals... He can heal me.

So I started to pray the prayer, and prayed it the whole way home, and by the time I got home the pain had noticably decreased, and I could get a full breath in for the first time all day. So praise God from whom we can receive all blessings! He is truly Good and full of power.

Now I have to work on my Annotated Bibliography for Middle Eastern History. Bah humbug!