Cleansing the Imagination

Hello, Companion Mustard Seed Library book readers,

Trying to pull out a few quotes from the chapter:

"Now, we know that we are in trouble when we start to use words like "should" and "ought" and "must," because these words are signs that we are at war with ourselves. If we are at war within we do not have peace, and where there is not peace neither Jesus nor His Spirit can abide."

"Sometimes we neither want to repress our evil thoughts nor to give them up; we want to concentrate on them and enjoy them. Consequently, one person can enjoy plotting how he will bring vengeance on his enemy, and another person may enjoy her lustful thoughts, and another person may enjoy another's bad fortune."

In the author's perspective the point of prayer: "And what prayer would God want to answer more than a prayer to desire to discover our true selves? This is a prayer He will not refuse, for in no way is it selfish nor will it bring us to harm. God will begin to answer this prayer by slowly but perceptibly changing our thoughts about what is pleasurable and what is not, and about who we are and who we are not, so that in time we come to see things from His point of view, and we desire what He desires for us."

The author recounts the success of cleansing his own imagination by a method of praying wherein he let thoughts come forward and reached up to his head with his hands and "plucked" each thought from his mind with his fingers and placed it in the hands of Jesus. Tellingly though it was his "dear friend Leanne Payne, author and gifted lay minister of healing, who taught me this prayer, first by praying it with me." I think this is a very good book to read but I also think, as the author reveals about his own praying experience, that nothing beats meeting together in the faith community to worship and pray, support and encourage and help each other to come to be able to see things from God's point of view and finally desire what God desires for us.

Each chapter of this book has a list of questions and the final question for this chapter is "Describe a time in which you came to desire what God wanted for you more than you desired what you wanted for yourself."

Actually, the movie our Bible Study Class saw last night, Sydney Poitier in "Lilies of the Field" is full of people living in this question. For myself, I can think of a bunch of times when I came to desire what God wanted for me but the one I currently am struggling with is the way that hetereosexuals and homosexuals in the church are. My mind, imagination, head, desire, is full of how people particularly church people "should" "ought" and "must" talk and dialogue and converse and share and vote, etc., etc., etc., etc., and then my sort of superior and self-righteous feelings about me and others when people just don't do that and it is a process of me coming to desire what God wants for me more than I desire what I want for myself. There is a sentence in this chapter which is sort of extraordinary: "As we place the image in Jesus' hands, we watch to see what He does with it. This is most important, for it is the completion of the healing of our imaginations traumatized by evil images they were never made to contain." Isn't that extraordinary --"they were never made to contain."???????

Think we can say that everyone is put here on earth for God's own special reason/purpose and so for each of you, maybe you would like to share a time in which you came to desire what God wanted for you more than you desired what you wanted for yourself.

God bless,
Sharon