I really enjoyed this particular experience of solitude, although I encountered some challenges that Henri Nouwen mentioned in his writing. As I began my period of solitary prayer, I felt bombarded by a lot of inner chaos. I realized that for about the past week I have been neglecting a decently active prayer life. As a result, my thoughts and feelings were much more cluttered, disorganized, and unattended to. Worries and anxieties of mine clouded my mind. It was hard to seek the Lord in the midst of those things, to tell those distractions that they were not welcome. But then, in my solitude – the place where I am finally in the right position to give things up to the Lord, I understood something else that Nouwen wrote about. The struggling I encountered in my solitude became the way to hope, “because our hope is not based on something that will happen after our sufferings are over, but on the real presence of God’s healing Spirit in the midst of these sufferings.” There was such an overwhelming feeling of peace and relief. This is something I have absolutely experienced with the Lord before, but when you don’t consistently talk to him about your issues and the things that consume your mind, you lose sight of that. Becoming in touch with the hopeful presence of God in the midst of chaos in my life prepared me so well for worship. I could actually focus on him and simply lifting his name higher. I prayed these things over the rest of the congregation as well. It was so much easier to sense the Spirit there, to see what he was doing, and to understand how to be a part of it. I enjoyed this practice of solitude before worship, and will probably continue a variation of it before times of worship in the future (as well as in my own personal prayer life)!
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