- Home Page
- Kids' Korner
- Worth Repeating
- Bumper Sticker Wisdom
- People's Tip
- CC's Blog
- First Baptist of You
- Jacques' Prayer
- Joy1!
- Mellowing Into the Moment with Milo
- Christian Corner Cafe'
- Community Calendar & Bulletin Board
- Contact Us
- Circle of Love Documents
Jacques' Prayer
Foreword
I’ve been a Christian for nearly 40 years now, and there comes a point in your Christian journey where you want more. You yearn for more. You realize there has to be more to this Christian experience than a bag of rules and a bunch of church services. As a child, at some point you reach the magical conclusion that your parent is not just out to be the kill-joy in your life, but that there is actually something to all their seemingly random acts of oppression and kindness. At some point, you start looking for patterns and then rationale behind the “do’s” and “don’t’s” of what your parent is consistently and insistently calling love.
Live long enough, and you’ll also find yourself in one of life’s predicaments that simply requires more than pat answers and feel good sermons. It is at that magical, transitional point that you will really reach out to God going out on the limb farther than you ever dreamt possible for you to do. You reach. You stretch. You long. Why? Because you need answers! You need for this thing you call religion to work, and work right now. You need to hear from God and know that you know that He not only answers prayers, but that He answers your prayers; that He not only answers prayers in a timely fashion, but that He’s answering your prayers right now.
It is the combination of knowing its time to take this whole faith thing to the next level and the need for God to be as real and as known as the back of your hand that you extend your hand. It’s when powered by those two fuel cells that you are rocked out of your perch of safety to a distant place full of discomfort, excitement and adventure. Once and for all, you are going to try to get close to God or die a mental, psychological, and spiritual death trying. You are going to fight to understand what in the world is going on and what is it God is really after and trying to say. You are done with the baby food of Christianity and ready to eat the meat Paul and early Christians seemed to dine on regularly. This is it, and you’re sold out.
Well, you may never have reached that point. Let me say, it’s ok and I understand. If that’s you, I’ve been where you are. Take comfort in knowing that in time, whether on this side of living or the other, “we will understand it better by and by.” As for me, I want to understand it better now. I want to hear from God now. I want to understand God now.
Being a parent has opened up my eyes to God in whole new ways. For that reason alone, I would encourage people to have children. They are wonderful perspective generators. For me, my little ones have not only encouraged, but enabled me to view things from a parental perspective in ways I simply had not fully considered. Suddenly I began to see trends, patterns and explanations of why a loving Heavenly Father might do what He has done - things that just didn’t seem to make sense to me before, but I accepted in faith. (Thank God for faith! It is the bridge between our ignorance and our enlightenment that keeps us from saying and doing stupid stuff we would have long regretted.) Suddenly I now find myself looking at the Word from a whole new vantage point - that not of a child, but a parent.
Meanwhile, I’ve long wondered what it would be like to have a conversation with God. You know, a real sit down fireside chat with the Holy of Holies one-on-one like a Barbara Walters special. Perhaps more Biblical, I’ve often wondered about God’s walking and talking with Adam in the cool of the evening in the Garden of Eden. Whether talking about the likes of Abraham, Moses or Samuel of the Old Testament, or the disciples and early Christian church of the New, folks have had conversations with God. If you have never put yourself into the Bible and understood things from the vantage point of its characters, then you truly haven’t read it. In so doing, you have to ask yourself at some point, what it must have been like to have the God of all creation actually talking to you, reasoning with you, listening to you, and responding to you directly. For me, my mind races with the possibilities. Then one day, I let go. I let my mind go asking it the near blasphemous question: “What would God say?”
Now, I will be the first to admit that I hardly have the capacity to think on the level of God. Indeed, “His thoughts are higher than my thoughts, and His ways higher than my ways.” Yet, I marvel at the ways of Albert Einstein. Albert Einstein is said to have come up with his great theories, including that of relativity, because he saw it happen in his mind’s eye. He recognized that there were patterns, mathematical patterns, showing up all around him. Based on those patterns, he calculated in his mind what would happen if they were applied way out - way past where his physical arm or mind could reach or see in the natural. He reasoned, in my opinion, that there must be a God for the patterns are infinite and designed. It was based on that “belief” that he came up with his theory - a theory and a science that has helped us translate our world and move beyond it to go to places and heights never imagined. Well, imagined, but never thought possible perhaps. The bottom line is that he picked up patterns and allowed his mind to follow things to their natural ends following those patterns. Why do I mention such scientific mumbo jumbo in the middle of a book forward involving spiritual things? Being a parent has opened my eyes to the ways and patterns of a parent. Looking around I’m seeing patterns a God of order has put all around me, around us, to show us His way. My desire to hear from Him, my newfound interest in His ways, not just His words, and my beginning to “get it” seeing the rhyme and reason of patterns put right before me having been there all along, has worked to fuel the questions of “What if”. What if I were like those in the Bible who talked to God? What if God talked to me directly? What if I were the one walking with God as friends in the cool of evening in the sanctity of His garden? What if I got the chance to ask him anything I wanted and He responded as one being interviewed?
Well, as previously stated, I let me mind go. I allowed my mind to guess, take a stab at, and even imagine that I was having a conversation with God’s Holy Spirit. This book, Jacques’ Prayer, is the product of some of my “let go” sessions. They have become an intricate part of my prayer life and Christian growth. With them and through them, I have been constantly challenged to review my thoughts, actions and life while ever asking, “What in the world would God say about that!” Is it fiction? Well, that’s for you to decide. I just know that I’m not prepared to stand flat footed and assert that all that is within this book is from God. That has been and would be a real struggle for me, so I can only imagine what a leap of faith that would be for you. So let’s just say that it is an exercise in the great mental exercise of “What if” - perhaps one of the greatest tools available to the human mind and spirit.
Be Blessed and enjoy the ride,
Jacques
go to: entire foreword back to top
Live long enough, and you’ll also find yourself in one of life’s predicaments that simply requires more than pat answers and feel good sermons. It is at that magical, transitional point that you will really reach out to God going out on the limb farther than you ever dreamt possible for you to do. You reach. You stretch. You long. Why? Because you need answers! You need for this thing you call religion to work, and work right now. You need to hear from God and know that you know that He not only answers prayers, but that He answers your prayers; that He not only answers prayers in a timely fashion, but that He’s answering your prayers right now.
It is the combination of knowing its time to take this whole faith thing to the next level and the need for God to be as real and as known as the back of your hand that you extend your hand. It’s when powered by those two fuel cells that you are rocked out of your perch of safety to a distant place full of discomfort, excitement and adventure. Once and for all, you are going to try to get close to God or die a mental, psychological, and spiritual death trying. You are going to fight to understand what in the world is going on and what is it God is really after and trying to say. You are done with the baby food of Christianity and ready to eat the meat Paul and early Christians seemed to dine on regularly. This is it, and you’re sold out.
Well, you may never have reached that point. Let me say, it’s ok and I understand. If that’s you, I’ve been where you are. Take comfort in knowing that in time, whether on this side of living or the other, “we will understand it better by and by.” As for me, I want to understand it better now. I want to hear from God now. I want to understand God now.
Being a parent has opened up my eyes to God in whole new ways. For that reason alone, I would encourage people to have children. They are wonderful perspective generators. For me, my little ones have not only encouraged, but enabled me to view things from a parental perspective in ways I simply had not fully considered. Suddenly I began to see trends, patterns and explanations of why a loving Heavenly Father might do what He has done - things that just didn’t seem to make sense to me before, but I accepted in faith. (Thank God for faith! It is the bridge between our ignorance and our enlightenment that keeps us from saying and doing stupid stuff we would have long regretted.) Suddenly I now find myself looking at the Word from a whole new vantage point - that not of a child, but a parent.
Meanwhile, I’ve long wondered what it would be like to have a conversation with God. You know, a real sit down fireside chat with the Holy of Holies one-on-one like a Barbara Walters special. Perhaps more Biblical, I’ve often wondered about God’s walking and talking with Adam in the cool of the evening in the Garden of Eden. Whether talking about the likes of Abraham, Moses or Samuel of the Old Testament, or the disciples and early Christian church of the New, folks have had conversations with God. If you have never put yourself into the Bible and understood things from the vantage point of its characters, then you truly haven’t read it. In so doing, you have to ask yourself at some point, what it must have been like to have the God of all creation actually talking to you, reasoning with you, listening to you, and responding to you directly. For me, my mind races with the possibilities. Then one day, I let go. I let my mind go asking it the near blasphemous question: “What would God say?”
Now, I will be the first to admit that I hardly have the capacity to think on the level of God. Indeed, “His thoughts are higher than my thoughts, and His ways higher than my ways.” Yet, I marvel at the ways of Albert Einstein. Albert Einstein is said to have come up with his great theories, including that of relativity, because he saw it happen in his mind’s eye. He recognized that there were patterns, mathematical patterns, showing up all around him. Based on those patterns, he calculated in his mind what would happen if they were applied way out - way past where his physical arm or mind could reach or see in the natural. He reasoned, in my opinion, that there must be a God for the patterns are infinite and designed. It was based on that “belief” that he came up with his theory - a theory and a science that has helped us translate our world and move beyond it to go to places and heights never imagined. Well, imagined, but never thought possible perhaps. The bottom line is that he picked up patterns and allowed his mind to follow things to their natural ends following those patterns. Why do I mention such scientific mumbo jumbo in the middle of a book forward involving spiritual things? Being a parent has opened my eyes to the ways and patterns of a parent. Looking around I’m seeing patterns a God of order has put all around me, around us, to show us His way. My desire to hear from Him, my newfound interest in His ways, not just His words, and my beginning to “get it” seeing the rhyme and reason of patterns put right before me having been there all along, has worked to fuel the questions of “What if”. What if I were like those in the Bible who talked to God? What if God talked to me directly? What if I were the one walking with God as friends in the cool of evening in the sanctity of His garden? What if I got the chance to ask him anything I wanted and He responded as one being interviewed?
Well, as previously stated, I let me mind go. I allowed my mind to guess, take a stab at, and even imagine that I was having a conversation with God’s Holy Spirit. This book, Jacques’ Prayer, is the product of some of my “let go” sessions. They have become an intricate part of my prayer life and Christian growth. With them and through them, I have been constantly challenged to review my thoughts, actions and life while ever asking, “What in the world would God say about that!” Is it fiction? Well, that’s for you to decide. I just know that I’m not prepared to stand flat footed and assert that all that is within this book is from God. That has been and would be a real struggle for me, so I can only imagine what a leap of faith that would be for you. So let’s just say that it is an exercise in the great mental exercise of “What if” - perhaps one of the greatest tools available to the human mind and spirit.
Be Blessed and enjoy the ride,
Jacques
go to: entire foreword back to top
