hearing God's call

Dougie is an architect. David is the pastor of an independent fellowship here in Edinburgh.

We'd arranged to meet today. Dougie I've met before and got to know just a little bit. David ... well, I know his daughter better. I'd never set eyes on the guy before!

We were meeting to talk through some issues relating to prayer. How best to encourage the people in this part of town to pray for the city itself. How to give a sense of shared identity, or 'solidarity', in what we're all about.

All in the context of Pray for Scotland, I suppose.

It was good to have the chance to meet like that. And what struck me was how in speaking abbout prayer we were actually most of the time concerned to be thinking about hearing the word of God for ourselves.

We kind of assume that prayer is all about us doing the talking. Spouting forth to God about this and that. Praise and thanksgiving. Confession, petition. All that sort of thing.

When really it's far more a sort of 'conversing' with the Lord - and giving him the time and space to speak with us and share his heart with us.

The big thing always is for us to get clear just what the Lord is saying to us in these days. Where the Lord is leading. What the Lord is calling us to be and do.

Learning to listen is just as much the heart of prayer as anything else, I guess. Maybe it is in fact the actual core of the thing.

That's what we've been trying to do here, anyway. Keep our ear to the ground as it were. Or up in the clouds. However you like to think of it. But hearing what God has to say. Where he's leading us these days.

In many ways my 'preparation time' is really doing just that. Listening for what the Lord has got to say and figuring out just where it is he's leading us.

Which at present is plainly to be down some new and demanding paths.

But more of that another time.

I was really quite aware today that growing old is actually just such a new and demanding path for growing numbers of the folk within our fellowship here.

Calling by to see such folk, some in their homes, some now stuck in hospital, it dawned on me again how hard this whole last stage in life can be. How much the exercise of faith has got to be involved to cope with all the challenges that failing health and strength can bring.

And maybe that's a lesson for us all in terms of how we learn to care not just for people who are growing old, but for our planet, too, as years and decades pass. Time takes its toll on the planet as well.