Tuesday Freewrite

Today was the first day of a summer prayer initiative called 24/7 Corvallis. I have always dreamed of 24/7 prayer for our city, and I was re-inspired when I saw the people who did the UK Blessings had a 24/7 prayer for London (or maybe it was all of the UK). I am just glad that I did not have to head it up! Someone else was inspired, or a group of people from The Hive were inspired and invited me to come along. So I took the 6-6:30 am sport since I know most people don't like to get up that early. I woke up at 5:11 am and was able to get my prayer time in from the "Inner Peace in Darkness and Light" Retreat in The First Spiritual Exercises. Jeannette from SEEL PDX is heading up four 25 day guided retreats through this book.

So today was the Valley of Dry Bones in Ezekiel. The imaginative contemplation was imagining myself being commanded by God to prophesy. It was pretty powerful. The line of spiritual direction in the book was about my own dry bones, but I don't think it was speaking to my dry bones because I feel the sinew and muscles and breath of life coming through me. It is not a dry time of my life. It is one overflowing. It is a gift of God's grace. But I felt called to prophesy over a group that I am in. Can you LORD make something out of this field of dry bones? YES. So I prophesied with hope. I was so discouraged two meetings ago, but then I read Life without Lack by Dallas Willard, and he encouraged a day with God in everyday life. (So Ignatian.) So I walked with him through the morning with this group a few days later, and God gave me eyes to see with his eyes. It was good. I really felt like leaving before reading about this day with God because of the darkness of that group. 

So after my prayer time for this group, it was my time to pray for my city, and I prayed Ezekiel 37 and Valley of Dry Bones. This time I meditated in The Amplified Bible, and it said that the Valley of Dry Bones was in the "midst of the valley." Well, my city, Corvallis, is in the midst of the Willamette Valley. The name, Corvallis, in Latin means "heart of the valley"! So it was good to pray for my city in this way. If was a prophecy over it. 

After this, I took a nice walk and listened to Pray as You Go. After this freewrite, I will put some time into my 18th Annotation adaptation of my Exercises for Everyone manual. Oh, speaking of that, Fran referred TWO women to me to go through the Exercises! I am talking to one tomorrow morning, and I have not heard back from the other one. I am so excited, and this is an answer to prayer to gain more experience taking people through the Exercises. I am still praying about sending it to Tony, but I will have to pray that God provides his email address to me to send it. 

I also got a big goal done yesterday. I was able to go through ALL the modules for the Boise Spiritual Direction Cohort and put handouts I will use with my directees in a folder on my desktop and also printed up in a notebook that will go right next to my spiritual direction chair. I had started the process of doing the physical papers the evening before. I got that notebook with all my readings and information from the class in a notebook too. But the actual going through each file in each module and printing off pertinent ones took me from 2:30-10:30 last night! Eight hours! It did do some editing of some of the handouts to make them for a directed versus for people who are training to be directors. I also added some attributions because some of the handouts were lifted directly from books but not attributed. I think this is very important to do. I also edited some of the Enneagram stuff because whoever wrote them does NOT understand the Types and the Instinctual Variants and gets them all mixed up (something that I wrote in my evaluation of the School of Spiritual Direction where I think their teaching on the Enneagram is the weakest part of their program - but not with Marty and Sandy because they have the humility to admit they are not experts, and I appreciate that so much about them). I also had to reformat a very GOOD handout on the Enneagram. That took some time. 

Well, my timer went off a while ago, but I wanted to finish my paragraph about the big goal I was able to finish yesterday. Today is two Pilates classes with weights. After that, I will continue with my 18th annotation editing. This summer is going to be going through every room of the house and decluttering and deep cleaning. I will also get all my photo books and photo albums caught up!

TTFN!