I know yesterday I said retirement was lonely, but this is a work in progress...as I am a work in progress. Anyway, today I was reminded of the sweetness of quiet and time to think. I have settled on 9-10am as my quiet time.
This morning I read the first five chapters of Mark ( my new friend) in the Message, and question after question piqued my curiosity, like why did Simon and Andrew, James and John just leave their fishing nets and follow Christ? Were they just young men looking for a confident leader to follow, like the young men at BBC? Or were they such knowledgeable Hebrew children that they readily saw in Jesus the prophesied Messiah?
Then I noticed that Jesus, the Son of God and very God Himself, needed quiet. So much so that He fled His bed before dawn to find a place where He could hide and pray. And He did that more than once. Mark tells how Jesus climbed a mountain to pray. Can you see Him, sweaty, His hair sticking to His forehead and neck, His robe torn by pricker bushes along the path, His fingernails broken and dirty as He pulled Himself up over rocky boulders to rest in their shade. It took a rugged mountain to provide a place for Him to get away and pray. And we want a comfortable chair, or a desk with a good lamp...
Mark is the action book, the record of an impatient man...who wrote what he saw, without commenting on it all that much. His perfunctory record of the facts though, has invited closer observation and as I said before, lots of questions - and that, my friend, is not a bad thing.
So today I am learning to embrace the quiet, to read right now this book of Mark, a few chapters at a time, slowly, savoring, asking questions, writing in the margins, a kind of dialoging with the text. It's been a while since I could do this, to read and listen without rushing. It's a good thing, I think.
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