Fr. Dave's Thoughts - January 17, 2025

Dear Friends,

I trust that you had a wonderful Christmas season and are now settling into the new year. I am finally getting used to writing 2025. It always takes me a couple of weeks to figure that out. I don’t know how many of you remember your “star words” from last January, but I want to invite you to dig them out and spend some time reflecting on how your word came into play for you in 2024. This Sunday, I am going to make star words available to you during church. I want to refresh your memory on what these words are about and how to use them to hear what God may be saying to you through the star word that chooses you.

First of all, I want you to remember that the use of star words is a prayer exercise. Our normal human inclination when we receive something like this is to study it and attempt to understand it intellectually and project our own thoughts onto it. We human beings are problem solvers by nature, so I want to invite us all to be conscious of this. How much of our thinking about our word is actually an attempt to problem solve? Why this word? What does it mean? How do I apply it to my everyday life? Even when the connection you feel toward your word seems obvious, God may have other ideas about how that word is intended to work in your life this year. For those of you who don’t feel particularly connected to your word, there is an opportunity here for a whole new adventure with God. So I want to propose that instead of thinking about your word and how it may apply to your life, i.e. problem solve, that you surrender your word to God and ask God, through prayer, why the Spirit chose that word for you. Instead of thinking about the questions posed above, turn them into prayer. Why God did you choose this word for me? God, what do you want me to know about this word? God, how do you see it working in my life today? These are prayers. By surrendering our word to God through prayer, we can begin to understand how it is that God sees us and how God wants to interact with us.

The second thing I want to acknowledge is how difficult it is to stay with a single word for the entire year. If we look at our word as a problem to be solved, if we are continually trying to figure out what it means for us, we will soon tire of it and put it away. If we use it as the starting point for prayer, however, we are much more likely to stay with it for the whole year and be transformed through our encounters with God. Prayer takes time and patience, but most of all it takes our willingness to surrender our own patterns of thinking to God’s pattern of thinking. If you are struggling to hear God through your prayer with your word, I invite you to honestly ask yourself if you have surrendered your own thoughts and thought processes so that you can hear God speaking to your heart. Rest assured, we all struggle to hear God, so this process of surrendering is, at the very least, a daily affair, if not an hour by hour one.

I appreciate your openness to this prayer practice over these past couple of years. For those of you who have committed yourselves to it, I hope that you have found it fruitful.  

Peace,

Dave