The Experience of the Word

We must take His word seriously. We need to act upon it, dialog it out, see what He is saying to us so we can digest it, so it can become part of us. Prayer is a journey inward. It is the birth of love and it has to do with our heart and the heart of God. It is a life long adventure. It is never over; it is something new every day. Do not give up! Make sure that you set aside time every day for prayer. It does not have to be long because you might not have long periods of time, but we have to have some kind of time to be fed.

We come to the table every day, no matter how busy we are, even though we might be eating on the run, but we have to be fed. Have you ever thought at Thanksgiving, "Oh I'm never going eat again? I'm just stuffed". But we are there the next day. We have to come back to the table of the Lord, as well. We have to come back into His presence. He is there for us, a personal friend. He is there for us as our Shepherd. He is there for us to feed us so that we do not fall by the wayside. We must make our prayer time a priority.

If He is our friend, if He is our Beloved, if this time with Him is our top priority, if we are convinced that it is the one thing necessary, then we will be there. We will be there seeking God in quiet communication. We will come apart and simply rest awhile in his presence. Each day you need to have a quiet time. It might just be that you have to go in the bathroom and lock the door. It might be a little prayer chair you have or a prayer closet, some place where the family knows that this is your time and you can have that space because God said, "I want you know Me. But you need to be still. You need to be quiet."

Scripture says this is in the prologue of John. "In the beginning was this Word," this tremendous gift. "The Word was God, the Word was with God. The Word was in God's presence and this Word who was God and is God became flesh and made His dwelling among us". Again, this is what we are talking about, the experience of God within us. Paul in Colossians 1:25 says, "God led me to preach among you His Word in it's fullness, that mystery hidden from all generations, but now revealed to his holy ones. That is the mystery of Christ within you." Isn't that amazing? It is within us. This all happened at Baptism even though most of us had no idea what was happening. Sometimes we forget that the people in the Old Testament did not have this mystery. The mystery of Christ within us is New Testament.

We just witnessed a beautiful adult baptism a week ago. We have somebody at our center right now who is from India. He is Hindu and he received the grace to become Christian and from that to become Catholic. It upset the Hindus so much where he was working that they fired him, so he ended up on our doorstep needing a place to go. He wanted to become Catholic. One of our priests gave him instructions and one of our other priests baptized him. It was beautiful to experience this adult baptism of someone who didn't have that indwelling and now did. You could see his whole continence change. We thought he was going to take off with new wings. His face was so changed. He could not even describe the experience - there was no way to describe the presence of God. But you know when you are having an experience of God. There is no other way to know him. We cannot give someone else our experience.

Paul, this great missionary, began to realize this in Ephesians when he said, "This is why now I kneel before the Father and I ask him to give you this experience of this love, the height, the depth, the width, the breadth, that you may experience it because it surpasses all understanding." As intercessors we can pray that others will have an experience of God. This is what the Lord wants. "Prepare the way of the Lord". He wants to come into their hearts so that they will experience him just as we are experiencing him ourselves.

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