Where's the Passion?

I have a confession to make. It's a serious one and one that isn't easy to make. And that is that for the past three years, my life has been on a spiritual slide downhill. It was a while before I recognized that it was happening. But my previously passionate times of prayer became more...reluctant...I guess is the best word. I still prayed, but it had become, rather than something I was drawn to by love; a duty and an obligation. The cries of my heart to God dried up and all that was left were words. The words soon even stopped flowing and I had to struggle to come up with them when called upon to pray in public...this was because they were no longer flowing from my heart; but were oozing from my mind.

My times of private study and devotion became more and more rare, until they were sporadic fits of guilt-ridden times when I was looking more at the clock than at God. When I read Scripture, I could not believe that once, I was driven from one passage to another and was filled with excitement when I read it...and that God showed me thing after thing which I needed to thrive spiritually. Now it was dry...boring...too familiar.

And I hated all of this, once I recognized the change in my heart. But I seemed to be powerless to stop it...One thing led to another...Awful words began to pour from my mouth...Anger and impatience were my predominant moods.... I thought, occasionally of my prior times of prayer and worship -- with longing and sadness. I would try to will them back into existence, but it seemed that God had turned His back and walked away.

I was able to maintain a good farce at church and Bible Study...but if there was anyone spiritually perceptive watching me; I' m sure they knew that my comments were prompted from my thoughts and past knowledge and not my heart and present experience. I was not setting out to deliberately fool anyone...because, you see, I was also fooling myself.

Recently, I made a decision...to spend just 15 minutes with God in my morning time...and I began to read Oswald Chambers' My Utmost for His Highest again. I've read it, as I've told you, many times...but God opened my eyes spiritually and began to pull Scripture passages together...and tidbits from sermons...and from here and there...until, this morning I was led to spend over an hour, going through the Bible and making connections.

I want to share with you what those connections are...but don't want this post to run too long. I promise I will bring it to you in the next day or two. Keep an eye open for it. Maybe your heart is on a treadmill and you are missing the open countryside where you once walked. Maybe you, too, feel like God has walked off somehow, leaving you to play church by yourself. If so, I hope these posts will help you. I pray they will.

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