Christmas and New Year often are accompanied by reunions and family get-togethers. Some of you may have experienced these words over the festive season: “Nice to see you again. You haven’t changed a bit”. Though these words may be offered as a compliment in contrast to aging, imagine if this was a parting comment summing up the totality of our life stage. It would be very disappointing.
Did you make a New Year’s resolution? Maybe it included a desire to grow more like Christ; this is the quest for “Christian formation”. As we take our inspiration from Richard Foster’s book, “Prayer – Finding the Heart’s True Home”, we will now spend the next weeks looking into this subject of Formation Prayer.
How does prayer move us closer to God? How does prayer stifle our lust for worldliness and self-centeredness? How does prayer encourage the fruit of the Spirit – love, joy, peace, . . . (Gal 5:22)? There is an active and passive side to this process of formation and we must see prayer as a work we do that enables this movement almost like a river that acts as a means of ferrying vital cargo back and forth from one shore to another. Prayer is a river of life.
Aging is part of life but the fact that we resist it and find it hard to accept is a proof, to some degree, that we are made for eternity. We were made for heaven and holiness is God’s plan and our prayer as we await for this destination.
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