god

Prayer is the return message

Every morning, I set aside time for God. Upon awakening, I say a prayer of thankfulness and petition to God for guidance and strength, and then, after taking care of my morning hygiene, I go downstairs and sit down to read a few passages of scripture as well as some other spiritual literature. This period of reading is followed by twenty minutes of silent, centering prayer, after which I write a poem for my Meditations of a Gentle Warrior blog and a longer piece for my personal website. 

On a perfect day, this is all done first thing in the morning before my wife and daughter wake up. Many days, however, this time is broken up by my making breakfast for my daughter and helping her get ready for school or whatever other activities she has going on. When this is the case, I usually listen to a spiritual podcast or lecture while prepping her food. 

Lately, I am listening to a variety of things, including Father Mike Schmitz’s ‘Bible in a Year’ podcast, the audiobook version of Henri Nouwen’s ‘Spiritual Direction,’ the ‘Turning to the Mystics’ podcast with James Finley, Steve Macchia’s podcast ‘The Discerning Leader,’ as well as a variety of YouTube talks by Fr. Mike Schmitz, Bishop Robert Barron, among others. 

Today was a snow-day for my daughter so she didn’t have school and we all slept a little later than we usually do. For me, sleeping in means waking up at around 7am. I have never really been a late sleeper. When I woke up, I said my prayers, listened to a talk by Fr. Mike Schmitz while making some french toast for my daughter, and then sat down to read and sit in silence.

A few minutes into my silent prayer, I heard my daughter walking down the stairs. I could sense that she was trying to be quiet because she saw that I was in prayer and, to the degree that a nine year old is capable, she tends to be very respectful. My eyes still closed, I could feel her standing next to me. She then leaned in, kissed me on the forehead, said, “I love you,” and walked away. 

She asked for nothing. Unsolicited and without expectation, she simply returned the love so freely given to her. Her kiss and the words, “I love you,” were her return message, her way of saying to me that she knows I love her, that my love is felt by her, and that this love is reciprocated. In that moment, it occurred to me that this is what prayer is really about. Isn’t it? It’s our way of saying, “I love you,” to the one who has loved us since before we were in the womb, much like I have loved my daughter since the very possibility existed of her ever even being born.

Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity

To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox. 

Finding God’s purpose in a snowstorm

As the snow began to fall, I grew increasingly anxious. The feeling of inevitability settled upon me like a heavy weight being laid upon my chest. My mind raced in denial as my schedule, my plans, and my desires for the coming day and an unknown number of days to follow began to slowly disappear with each falling flake. Then the messages started pouring in. 

“With the snow coming, should we cancel classes?” “Are we closed tomorrow?” “What are our plans for tomorrow? It looks like the roads are going to be bad.” 

With every text, my mind rebelled, rejecting the idea that I was going to be stuck in the house, the momentum of my life coming to a grinding halt because of some snow. I grew increasingly irritated at the thought that my appointments, my jiu-jitsu classes, and my daughter’s school would all be canceled for what amounted to less than a foot’s worth of accumulation. 

Putting out of my mind other people’s concerns, their safety, and their wishes, an argument started up in my mind. “I grew up in the Northeast,” I thought, “We got way more snow than this and we still went to school. My father still went to work. He woke up early to shovel and went about his day. What is wrong with people here? They are always looking for any excuse to stay home and it’s ruining my plans.” 

Then the thought came to me, “What are you really bothered by? What are you afraid of? Do you think you are in charge of all of this? Even if you show up to open the academy, no one else is coming to train with you this morning. They are dealing with their own problems. They have their own kids and jobs to worry about. Why are you so bothered by the idea of staying home with your family, of being still, of being stuck with yourself?”

As I sat with these thoughts and feelings for a while, I said a prayer, asking God what He was trying to teach me, asking what the lesson in all of this was, and asking Him to use this moment of anxiousness, resistance, and discomfort for His purpose. After a bit, I began to settle down and accept the situation for what it was, for what all circumstances, pleasant or unpleasant are, and that is an opportunity for God to express His love for us and for us to either accept or reject that love. 

Did I want the academy to be shut down for snow? Did I want to stay home all day? Did I want my daughter to miss school (she loves school)? To all of these questions, the answer was a resounding, “No!” However, I also had to ask myself, “Do I trust my Heavenly Father? Do I long to know His will and to serve His purpose? Do I have faith that He is not doing this, whatever ‘this’ I happen to be upset about now, to punish me, but to teach, guide, and shape me in His image?” Yes, of course, yes, even if that “Yes” is the reluctant “Yes” of a child who, having just been scolded for throwing a tantrum, knows he was wrong for doing so. 

Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity

To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox. 

Tension between the world and the Word

At church this past Sunday, the pastor gave a sermon that centered around a passage from the book of James which states, “Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says. Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like someone who looks at his face in a mirror and, after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like (James 1:22-24 NIV).”

As part of the sermon, the pastor gave out small, circular stick-on mirrors for the congregants to take home and stick in a conspicuous place as a reminder of James’s message. My daughter and I each took one on the way out, but as my daughter received hers, she dropped it on the floor and exclaimed, “Oh no!” When she picked it up, she let out a sigh of relief and said, “Whew! It’s not broken. I won’t have seven years of bad luck.”

Being in a hurry to get down the road, I didn’t think much about what happened. But then, as we were leaving the church, I noticed one of these small mirrors on the steps, broken in several pieces. “Someone dropped their mirror,” I said to my daughter. “Oh no,” she replied, “Whoever dropped it is going to have seven years of bad luck.”

Hearing what she said a second time, I couldn’t let it go. We had just left a church service wherein we heard about, praised, and proclaimed our faith in an almighty God and here my daughter was, albeit innocently, worrying about superstitious bad luck from a broken piece of polished glass. I said to her, “You know that God is more powerful than a broken mirror and that is just a superstition, right?” “Of course,” she replied confidently and sincerely.

As we drove away, this interaction got me thinking about how, even when it seems innocent or insignificant, the teachings of the world and the teachings of God are so often in direct conflict with one another. This tension between the world and the Word is a fact of life as old as humanity itself and is precisely why God gave us the filter of Scripture through which to view and understand life. I can’t and don’t fault my daughter for her childish superstitions because she is, after all, a child, but this experience did make me take a look in the mirror, so to speak, and ask myself where I hold false beliefs that keep me from accepting God’s truth.

Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity

To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox. 

God wants you to make a decision

I have recently been struggling with what to do with my life. More specifically, I have been contemplating a career change. This has me thinking about whether or not I want to go back to school, either for my master’s degree or for some type of specialized certification. Where I struggle, however, is in trying to discern what path God wants me to take.

Where does He want me to go? What is He trying to tell me? What is He asking of me? How can I best serve Him and my fellows in this next chapter of my life?

I have prayed extensively about this and I actively listen for answers in meditation. In addition to my spiritual practices, I have also been talking to people I trust and doing a lot of reading, research, and listening to podcasts for inspiration. In spite of all of this, I feel stuck. I simply do not know what my next steps should be.

Then, while driving to church this morning with my daughter, I feel like God gifted me with a clue. My daughter and I were talking about what she wanted to eat for breakfast. I gave her two options and asked her to pick one. Unable to decide, she assigned each choice to one of her hands and asked me to choose, left hand or right.

Growing somewhat frustrated at her indecisiveness, I told her that neither choice was better or worse than the other and that she simply needed to make a decision. As the words left my mouth, I realized that I was telling her the thing I needed to hear. In my words to her, I could hear God speaking to me. As I spoke to her as my child, I could feel God speaking to me as His child, with the same love and sincerity that I have for her in my best paternal moments.

From this perspective, I was able to see that, while God will lovingly lead me to a point, ultimately, He requires that I make a decision. He does this precisely because He loves me enough to not impose His will on me. Like a loving father, He is guiding me, not to blindly do His will, but to make good decisions of my own free will based on what is in my heart.

Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity

To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox.