Sunday, July 01, 2007

Some Sense of Humor: Personally I Don't Find it All That Funny

But God is up there in heaven laughing away.

So I made this agreement with His Almightyness that when I am at Gradual School I will go to morning prayer with the monks on Saturday mornings if He wakes me up at 5:30 in the morning. I don't set the alarm for that, in my humble estimation quite unholy hour, and if I don't wake up, no harm no foul, but if I do wake up I have to go to prayer with the monks.

I would say that in the four-plus years that I have been here I have missed morning prayer maybe three times. He is a pretty good alarm clock when He wants to get His way.

Well I am at Gradual School this weekend, but I drove down on Saturday morning instead of Friday night because mrangelmeg and I are taking a ballroom dancing class on Friday evenings. I wasn't even here for morning prayer, so I figured all bets were off for this weekend, but His Almightyness had other plans.

This morning, Sunday morning, I was brought to complete and utter awakeness (is that really a word?) at exactly 5:30. It was so light outside that I got scared and thought I had messed up the time on the clock when I set the alarm to go off at ten till seven, so I jumped out of bed to check the time on my cell-phone (I live in a different time zone than they are down here so I get messed up easily).

Nope, it was 5:30. With a sigh of relief I got back in bed, and was attempting to go back to sleep when I began this inner dialogue with His Almightyness:

Himself: Hey this is my time

me: Uhm no prayer this morning, it's Sunday

Himself: Do you really need the monks to pray? You can Find Me in All Things like a good student of Ignatius. Get up and come out for a walk.

me: you have to be kidding me.

Himself: Do I sound like I'm kidding, If you think you are going back to sleep, think again.


I went for a nice walk around the Abbey grounds for about a half hour.

Who says the spiteful Old Testament God no longer exists?

Pax

1 comment:

Adoro said...

Oh, I know that dialogue.

I've also asked for a "wake up" if God wants me to go to Mass or something. He always comes through.


He actually MADE me sleep once, though, and it was really what I needed. God is merciful; even when we think we need to be somewhre and want to be somewhere, if we leave it to God he still acts according to His mercy.

But that dialogue; I've made the mistake of telling God that if he woke me up, I'd go to X. He indeed woke me up and then I spent an hour making excuses as to why I needed to sleep more. This has happened more than once, and whever I "skipped", well, I regretted it, and whenever I was obedient, well, it was a joyous occasion.

God is so good to us. Never ignore that dialogue. He really means it!