We don’t call on the Holy Spirit enough.
The third person of the Trinity longs to fully immerse us in God’s love and guide us so that others may know it too.
Yesterday, I found a few old writings of mine, and I could feel the energy of the prose –as it surged all the way through from beginning to end. The language, the stories, they seemed to tumble out of me, waking me up in the middle of the night, demanding they be told.
These days, I tap and feel like my brain is becoming smoother with each passing day.
Life fatigues and I cannot tell if it is the burdens, my age, the trials of this time, or a combination of all of them. As I’ve become more teacher, the writing withered. Still, I know that writing is as much if not more discipline than inspiration. Writing requires I put one word after another, running through phrases until I find the thought I didn’t know I was chasing. I’ve been flailing and flailing and pouring out words for years now, two years with nary a nibble and I do not understand this dry season in words. At first, I thought it was a side effect of cancer. I wondered if God was trying to tell me this season was over, and that the dryness was a way of getting me to surrender.
Praying to the third person of the Trinity involves surrender. The problem for the Holy Spirit, is I am notoriously stubborn. As a kid, I pushed against the crib with my head to move it from one side of the room to another –and that hard headed determination likewise saw me through bullying in middle school, and has helped every step of the way through fifty-eight years.
So I tell God often, I need the equivalent of NEON signs for what He wants of me –and the Holy Spirit spends a lot of time orchestrating scripture and masses and encounters so I get it.
Tempting God isn’t what I’m doing, it’s asking –and acknowledging, I don’t know. I do know, I love writing. I love when I do get published, and it’s fun. I love finding and crafting stories that reveal something bigger than people expected.
Once, I was asked what I wanted people to take away when they read my work and I said, I wanted people to push away from the table as if they’d had a great meal, so great they wanted to go tell others to come eat too. That image, of words as a feasts, remains.
So sitting in the second from the last pew today, I told God, I wanted to write, but I also wanted to do God’s will -and spent much of the mass asking, “What is it. Tell me.” “Help me.” “I can’t do this alone, I need help.” My daughter and son sat with me, they’re used to me crying during mass about something –they just held my hands. It helped.
My sister had told me, I need supports, friends, community –and here I was asking for something that would not give me any of those three things. Writing is a solitary thing. The day didn’t allow for writing or grading, or seeking friends. It involved going to the laundry mat, dropping off the dog, grocery shopping, getting bagels, filling up the tank with gas, my list was twenty-four items long.
In the course of that time, my daughter told me, she considered me, one of her closest friends. She didn’t know she made my heart dance, but it did. I’d been praying the Prayers of Deliverance, and here, unbidden, my adult daughter voiced our relationship and it was part of the answer. And I knew, the rest would come, if I let myself trust the Holy Spirit more.
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