desert saints
March12
A friend and colleague, posted this yesterday on her newly formed blog and it encouraged me so much I wanted to share it with you. Carolyn Culbertson has been on staff with Crusade for many years and exudes with wisdom and love, she is the type of woman that I would love for God to form me into. She is real and firm, has a heart for prayer, and loves being around people who love the Lord. Yesterday she blogged about desert saints, a group of men and women who gave up a comfortable lifestyle because they weren’t satisfied, they wanted to know God deeper, in a way that the early church is described as and then she writes this:
I think that Stinters are modern desert saints. No, they are not perfect – neither were the desert saints! But they want something – they want to follow hard after Jesus. A comfortable, easy, distant acquaintance with Him is not enough for them. They want to do what he does, to go where he goes, to learn what He has to teach them, even though it costs them.And so they give up the things that make them comfortable – distractions, friends, safety. And they go into the “desert” of Merida, or Costa Rica or East Asia or Lithuania or Moscow or Croatia, and they struggle – to learn about themselves, to love others. And they have nothing to depend on but God.If you are a Stinter, take heart. You have, I am sure, struggles from the outside – and from the inside. God is doing more in you and through you than you can imagine. The desert saints (there were an estimated 30,000 men and women who went to the desert) became the impetus for a new generation of believers – including Athenasius, who fought for the truth of the deity of Christ, Jerome, who first translated the scripture into Latin, and Augustine, who became the foremost theologian of the church. And here we are today, partly because of their struggle.
Here is a quote from “The Sayings of the Desert Fathers”“Poemen said about John the Short that he asked the Lord to take away his passions (i.e. strong emotional reactions and desires). So his heart was at rest, and he went to a hermit and said, “I find that I am at peace, with no war between flesh and spirit.’ The hermit said to him ‘Go and ask the Lord to stir up a new war in you. Fighting is good for the soul.’ When the conflict revived in him, he no longer prayed for it to be taken away, but said, ‘Lord, grant me strength to endure this fight.’Men and women of God – Fight!
Such encouragement from a woman I deeply respect. Thanks for praying for us, pray for us to stay in the fight to the very end.
As we draw nearer to Easter, and to the middle of March, I have the same feeling I get every spring, the thinking of what’s ahead, the nearing of summer, the hope of change in season and in life. Would you pray for me? For my heart to stay engaged with Jesus and here in the battle. There is warfare surrounding us, we sense it daily. Pray that I would fight for my personal times with God, that I would be a good manager of my time, and that my heart would focus here. Tomorrow I have a whole day to spend with God over some of these things, and I know that part of the reality of the ending of a semester (and especially this one) is that there is transition, and a big one which is coming upon us quite quickly. But, we’re not there yet, so pray that God would show me how to hang in the balance, and experience joy and peace that comes only from His endless flow.