How an ordinary person awakens to a life as prayer. Continued from yesterday . . .
My misery shut me down. Sleep was the only way I could find respite. In sleep, I could inch myself minute by minute toward the day I would leave. One afternoon as I slept a fitful sleep, the Light came to me, an angel awakened me—though it still seems hard to believe. Some, of course, will dismiss this as the fabrication of a troubled mind trying to find a way out of its trauma. It’s true that the psyche is remarkably agile and able to find ways to rescue itself. But it would be a pity to dismiss such a grace, or for me to forget it. Just as the desert was stripping me of all that had become as Pharaoh to me, so too this terrifying nothingness was my baptism into my own exodus—a death necessary for rebirth.
Roused from my sleep by the angel, I heard these words: “You didn’t need to come this far to learn what I must teach you. Though perhaps you did—to finally know the futility of searching the world for answers. The journey is within, and anyone can take it without even leaving home. The fullness of God is near as your breath, near as the beating of your heart. For the kingdom of God is within you.”
All was suddenly full of light. Fire everywhere.
End of series. For more, download my free ebook Returning to the Center: Living Prayer in a Distracting World. Available here.