We don’t need a praying life because that is our duty. That would wear thin quickly. We need time to be with our Father every day because every day our hearts and the hearts of those around us are overgrown with weeds.

Don’t be truth-focused. The truth is that I need to love the other person.

Communion or conversation with God breaks down into two questions: How am I doing? What is coming at me? Am I happy, sad, thankful, discouraged, angry, frustrated? What is God saying to me? What does the Word say?

The spiritual pilgrimage is the opposite. The discovery of self in relationship to God leads to a lifestyle of repentance. For example, we are seldom aware of our impatience. What we feel is everyone else’s slowness. Because we are naturally the center of our own universes, we don’t feel irritable. We just notice everyone getting in our way.

If we see our lives as a pilgrimage, then it becomes an integrated whole. It makes sense. When we understand the story, it quiets our souls. It’s okay to have a busy life. It’s crazy to have a busy soul.

Our responsibility is to cultivate a listening heart in the midst of the noise from our own hearts and from the world, not to mention the Devil.

There is nothing secret about communion with God. If we live a holy life before God, broken of our pride and self-will, crying out for grace, then we will be in communion with God. It is really that simple.

We need the sharp-edged, absolute character of the Word and the intuitive, personal leading of the Spirit. The Word provides the structure, the vocabulary. The Spirit personalizes it to our life. Keeping the Word and the Spirit together guards us from the danger of God-talk becoming a cover for our own desires and the danger of lives isolated from

If we frequently interpret random thoughts and desires as “God speaking,” we get weird. That’s what happened to one couple.