....I will keep in perfect peace."
I have asked for prayer in this area before and have made some progress. However, I need to make a lot more.
I have learned from the Bible and people like a world famous missionary, now deceased, Frank Laubach whose letters are excerpted from, below, that the only antidote to junk thoughts, the only way to fully walk the love walk, is to keep talking to Abba around the clock in prayer and praise, sometimes singing to Him.
But this has not been easy, as I have all my life been in bad mental habits.
Please pray for me to truly "Practice the Presence of YHWH" aka God through keeping my mind stayed on Him for all my life.
Thank you and I will be praying for you too.
-----------------------------
Laubach deals with the question of whether it is possible to have contact with God all the time. Can we think his thoughts all the time? Must there not be periods when other things push God out? Laubach's response to this issue should be fully quoted, for it gives us the heart of his understanding of the constant conscious hold on God. Admitting that he once thought there must be periods when God is excluded, he continues:
... But I am changing my view. We can keep two things in mind at once. Indeed <518> we cannot keep one thing in mind more than half a second. Mind is a flowing something. It oscillates. Concentration is merely the continuous return to the same problem from a million angles. We do not think of one thing. We always think of the relationship of at least two things, and more often of three or more things simultaneously. So my problem is this: Can I bring God back in my mind-flow every few seconds so that God shall always be in my mind as an after-image, shall always be one of the elements in every concept and percept?
I choose to make the rest of my life an experiment in answering this question.
The tremendous results of this experiment are found in the narrative of these letters. They are elaborated more systematically and practically in the Game with Minutes (1961), where the method was reduced to calling God to mind for at least one second out of each minute. But the quotation given contains the psychological principles back of Laubach's method for achieving active union with God, constantly abiding in the abundant life.
Within weeks of beginning his experiments he began to notice differences. By the end of January 1930, and with much still to learn about his method, he had gained a sense of being carried along by God through the hours, of cooperation with God in little things, which he had never felt before. "I need something, and turn around to find it waiting for me. I must work, . . . but there is God working along with me." He discovered by March 9 that "This hour can be heaven. Any hour for any body can be rich with God. In a manner familiar to the mystics of all ages, we find him saying to God: "And God, I scarce see how one could live if his heart held more than mine has had from Thee this past two hours." He experienced difficulties and failures in maintaining his consciousness of God, but in the week ending May 24 he began to experience a further dimension in his conversations with God. In a moment of immersion in natural beauty, "I let my tongue go loose and from it <519> there flowed poetry far more beautiful than any I ever composed. It flowed without pausing and without ever a failing syllable for a half hour." This brought him a deeper awareness of God in beauty and in love.
Reflecting upon the results of two months of strenuous effort to keep God in mind every minute, he exclaims: "This concentration upon God is strenuous, but everything else has ceased to be so!"
From: http://www.dwillard.org/articles/artview.asp?artID=43
I have asked for prayer in this area before and have made some progress. However, I need to make a lot more.
I have learned from the Bible and people like a world famous missionary, now deceased, Frank Laubach whose letters are excerpted from, below, that the only antidote to junk thoughts, the only way to fully walk the love walk, is to keep talking to Abba around the clock in prayer and praise, sometimes singing to Him.
But this has not been easy, as I have all my life been in bad mental habits.
Please pray for me to truly "Practice the Presence of YHWH" aka God through keeping my mind stayed on Him for all my life.
Thank you and I will be praying for you too.
-----------------------------
Laubach deals with the question of whether it is possible to have contact with God all the time. Can we think his thoughts all the time? Must there not be periods when other things push God out? Laubach's response to this issue should be fully quoted, for it gives us the heart of his understanding of the constant conscious hold on God. Admitting that he once thought there must be periods when God is excluded, he continues:
... But I am changing my view. We can keep two things in mind at once. Indeed <518> we cannot keep one thing in mind more than half a second. Mind is a flowing something. It oscillates. Concentration is merely the continuous return to the same problem from a million angles. We do not think of one thing. We always think of the relationship of at least two things, and more often of three or more things simultaneously. So my problem is this: Can I bring God back in my mind-flow every few seconds so that God shall always be in my mind as an after-image, shall always be one of the elements in every concept and percept?
I choose to make the rest of my life an experiment in answering this question.
The tremendous results of this experiment are found in the narrative of these letters. They are elaborated more systematically and practically in the Game with Minutes (1961), where the method was reduced to calling God to mind for at least one second out of each minute. But the quotation given contains the psychological principles back of Laubach's method for achieving active union with God, constantly abiding in the abundant life.
Within weeks of beginning his experiments he began to notice differences. By the end of January 1930, and with much still to learn about his method, he had gained a sense of being carried along by God through the hours, of cooperation with God in little things, which he had never felt before. "I need something, and turn around to find it waiting for me. I must work, . . . but there is God working along with me." He discovered by March 9 that "This hour can be heaven. Any hour for any body can be rich with God. In a manner familiar to the mystics of all ages, we find him saying to God: "And God, I scarce see how one could live if his heart held more than mine has had from Thee this past two hours." He experienced difficulties and failures in maintaining his consciousness of God, but in the week ending May 24 he began to experience a further dimension in his conversations with God. In a moment of immersion in natural beauty, "I let my tongue go loose and from it <519> there flowed poetry far more beautiful than any I ever composed. It flowed without pausing and without ever a failing syllable for a half hour." This brought him a deeper awareness of God in beauty and in love.
Reflecting upon the results of two months of strenuous effort to keep God in mind every minute, he exclaims: "This concentration upon God is strenuous, but everything else has ceased to be so!"
From: http://www.dwillard.org/articles/artview.asp?artID=43
