My first article about Angela.

http://thegrieftoolbox.com/article/my-angel-angela

I have a million thoughts and feelings about this but the main one is "release."

Thank you God for this opportunity to put my voice and heart out there.

Secret prayer. It's not so secret..

Lord Jesus,

I come to you naked and exposed. You know my heart. My thoughts. My weakness. My sins. My pains. Lord I bare myself to you. I ask for Your Holy Spirit to reveal in me what needs to be confessed. Bring truth to my inward parts. Bring cleansing to my sinful ways and weakness. Lord take everything in my life and allow it to be used for good. Do not let me hinder You Lord. Stick me in the back seat so I stop trying to drive. I can't reach that steering wheel. I submit to you my dreams, my desires, my ways and ask for Your ways , desires, and your dreams. I ask this all in Your precious holy wonderful name, Jesus! Amen!!

Prayer— Battle in “The Secret Place”

08

23

2013

When you pray, go into your room, and when you have shut your door, pray to your Father who is in the secret place; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you openly —Matthew 6:6

Jesus did not say, “Dream about your Father who is in the secret place,” but He said, “. . . pray to your Father who is in the secret place. . . .” Prayer is an effort of the will. After we have entered our secret place and shut the door, the most difficult thing to do is to pray. We cannot seem to get our minds into good working order, and the first thing we have to fight is wandering thoughts. The great battle in private prayer is overcoming this problem of our idle and wandering thinking. We have to learn to discipline our minds and concentrate on willful, deliberate prayer.

We must have a specially selected place for prayer, but once we get there this plague of wandering thoughts begins, as we begin to think to ourselves, “This needs to be done, and I have to do that today.” Jesus says to “shut your door.” Having a secret stillness before God means deliberately shutting the door on our emotions and remembering Him. God is in secret, and He sees us from “the secret place”— He does not see us as other people do, or as we see ourselves. When we truly live in “the secret place,” it becomes impossible for us to doubt God. We become more sure of Him than of anyone or anything else. Enter into “the secret place,” and you will find that God was right in the middle of your everyday circumstances all the time. Get into the habit of dealing with God about everything. Unless you learn to open the door of your life completely and let God in from your first waking moment of each new day, you will be working on the wrong level throughout the day. But if you will swing the door of your life fully open and “pray to your Father who is in the secret place,” every public thing in your life will be marked with the lasting imprint of the presence of God.

LISTEN

Listen ~

When I ask you to listen to me and you start giving me advice, you have not done what I asked of you.

When I ask you to listen to me and you begin to tell me why I shouldn't feel that way, you are disregarding my feelings.

When I ask you to listen to me and you feel you have to do something to solve my problem, you are not listening, you are taking control.

Can you please just listen? All that I asked was that you listen, not talk or do --- just hear me.

When you do something for me that I can and need to do for myself, you contribute to my fear and inadequacy, and feeling helpless.

But when you accept as a simple fact that I do feel what I feel, no matter how irrational, then I quit trying to convince you and get about the business of understanding what’s behind the irrational feeling. 

Just talking can help me figure it out.

When that’s clear, the answers are obvious and I don’t need advice, maybe just support.

Irrational feelings make sense when we understand what’s behind them.

So, please listen and just hear me . . .

And, if you want to talk, wait a minute for your turn --- and I’ll listen to you.


(author unknown)