Cold dark street.... dark to light

I'm sitting in Tucson at a coffee shop on Grant and Campbell. It's 3 AM and its finally quiet. I mean, really quiet. There isn't even that hum inside your head that you get after you listen to loud music. It's silent. And that is why I have headphones in with music going. I don't like the quiet. It scares me. It forces me to think, and I am prone to having an all too familiar episode of an "over analytical conversation with myself." But why give my mind the chance to rob me of hearing God's whispers in this wind.

I don't want to get bogged down with too much thought right now. I just want to point out the beauty of looking out into a city that is completely asleep. Knowing that in a couple of hours, life will begin its cycle once again. But for now, I sit in silence with my coffee and it is almost as if I have found the "Pause" button. While everything rests, I reel in my day, my thoughts, my prayers... myself. Who am I? I am a child of God. And right now... right this second... for the first time all day... I sit in peace together with God on my mind and in my heart. We are tuly blessed. Thank-you God for giving me the time to recognize your peace one more time. It is all that keeps me.

prayer?

I have found that its a hard thing to pray. It's an odd concept because I look at my day and realize that I am in communication with God all day long. But I think that is a different kind of communication. Not the kind of prayer that I am having a hard time doing. I'm talking about finding the time to actively seek out a one on one talk with God. Just you and God. Me and God. God and me? Hmm, my grammar sometimes lacks when I am writing thoughts. Anyways. The other day I had an extremely stressful day and I was just dealing with a lot of garbage. And the more and more I got bogged down, the less and less I had a desire to seek after God in prayer. As the day progressed and the stress piled up, it was almost as if I had put up a barrier between me and God. And there was. And there is. This wall. This unspoken, almost un-recognizable disconnect that was cutting off the one thing that I needed to survive... God's love. God's peace. His patience. God.

One of the hardest things to do while living in America is to feel like I need God. I almost have to place myself in situations where I am cut off from the amenities of life so that I become aware of my basic need for God. There are days where I feel like I want to cut myself off from the world in hopes that I might somehow get desperate for God by default. It is truly painful to know that I need something and will be empty without it, but be so numb to it all to do anything about it. Some people say that there are some emotions that are just too powerful for human's to endure. I personally feel that the absense of emotion is the worst "feeling" of all. It's almost like I want to say "give me something. I don't care if its pain... I just want to feel again." Numbness. Dang I hate that. We weren't designed for that. There are many things that we weren't designed for.