Teach me your Paths

I now understand -- only slightly -- what David means in the Psalms when he says that he praises God at night when he lays his head down and in the morning when he arises. For the last week or so, I have been going to sleep singing praise songs in my head and awakening with them in the morning. Now this is by no choice of mine. It is not as if I have said "hey I think I will start praising the lord and I'll choose this song."

Rather, it has been one of those things where a song gets stuck in your head. Unfortunately, or fortunately, I don't know, I seem to have a bad memory and can only remember the refrains of these songs. So over and over in my head goes "blessed be the name of the lord, blessed be your glorious name," or "praise Adonai from the rising of the sun to the end of every day," etc. though this is simplicity of praise itself, I sure wish that I could remember the rest of the songs, because hey those words are good to.

But I say fortunately above, about the refrains, because it is good to come back to simplicity of prayers and praises. My morning routine consists of getting up, making coffee, feeding the cats and then going out to smoke and pray --is that heretical??? :) As I was doing the latter this morning I was thinking about my spiritual journey.

It has been a long and interesting journey. Last week as I was filling out a form to become a member in our church (mainly so that I could vote that women can be deacons) I was asked when I "accepted Jesus Christ as my Saviour." It took me back to a picture I have in my head of my sister and I sitting opposite each other on a swing set sometime in 1979. She was 5 and I was 3. She led me to God right there and then. And that is where the journey began.

In the last ten years my journey has been an interesting one. God would insistently tap me on the shoulder (or beat me over the head, one or the other) until I turned to him: then my whole heart, my whole being was striving towards him. For a while. And then I would slowly turn away and take back every thing I had given to him. This has been cyclical and I truly want it to stop. So my prayer -- lifted on the smoke offering of tobacco (come on guys I'm joking here) -- was that God would keep me on his path, and teach me to stay in his will. I knew that I had read a psalm specifically about that last week so I wanted to go find it and study it some more. I did (psalm 143), but before that I found this:

4Make me know Your ways, O LORD; Teach me Your paths. 5Lead me in Your truth and teach me, For You are the God of my salvation; For You I wait all the day. 6Remember, O LORD, Your compassion and Your lovingkindnesses, For they have been from of old. 7Do not remember the sins of my youth or my transgressions; According to Your lovingkindness remember me, For Your goodness' sake, O LORD. 8Good and upright is the LORD; Therefore He instructs sinners in the way. 9He leads the humble in justice, And He teaches the humble His way. 10All the paths of the LORD are lovingkindness and truth To those who keep His covenant and His testimonies. 11For Your name's sake, O LORD, Pardon my iniquity, for it is great.

Psalm 25

And that folks is my prayer for today