Circum Spective

Can You Hear Me Now?

They move from cell phone conversation to text message to tweet to website to i-tune ... and then start all over again. This generation seems incapable of contemplation. And that is a very bad thing. Because if one is incapable of quiet contemplation, then one is equally incapable of hearing “God’s voice” on a consistent basis.

We are raising a generation of rude, anti-social, easily distracted exhibitionists who are terrified of silence and completely incapable of quiet contemplation and prayer. And I’m not even talking about unbelievers here. Of course, they won’t be able to recognize God’s voice. I am referring to the generations being raised by professing Christians.>

Raising God-fearing children (who will become God-fearing adults) is about so much more than just dragging them to church and “saying prayers” at bedtime. It begins with things as fundamental as teaching them how to think. Not what to think, but how to think.

A child — a person — must practice being quiet and still with his own thoughts. A child must be encouraged to be contemplative. A child must have role models who are comfortable with quietness, stillness and silence, role models who pray (and not just the talking kind of prayer, but also the waiting and listening kind).

Children must be taught to hear and to recognize God’s still, small voice.

It appears to me, however, that we are raising a generation of people who are incapable of that.

From Christianity Today.com:

Feb. 27, 2007

Crowded Loneliness

& Quiet Contemplation

By Sam O’Neal

Last week, I had the privilege of representing Building Small Groups at the first-ever Purpose Driven Small Groups conference, hosted by Saddleback Church in sunny Lake Forest, California. Because the Purpose Driven folks were running the show, I’ve returned home with a great deal of useful information, almost all of it nicely packaged into acronyms and “pathways.”

But I was most impressed by two presentations that drifted outside the Purpose Driven model. Both of them picked up the gauntlet thrown down by noted church consultant Lyle E. Schaller, who said: “The biggest challenge facing the church is to address the fragmentation and discontinuity of the American lifestyle.”

[One was] a workshop I spotted on Wednesday afternoon. It was called “Be Still.” The presenters for the workshop were Judge Reinhold and his wife, Amy. You may be familiar with Judge from his roles in movies like Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Beverly Hills Cop. He was also Aaron, the “close-talker” from Seinfeld. I just had to check out what he was going to say.

It turns out that he and his wife have produced a documentary on contemplative prayer with Scripture, otherwise known as lectio divina. The DVD, also called Be Still, features some of the most prominent Christian thinkers of our time - Dallas Willard, Calvin Miller, Beth Moore, Max Lucado, and Jerry Root, among others.

And yet, as much as I appreciated what each of those people had to say, what I found most valuable was taking the final 10 minutes to practice the discipline of lectio divina myself. The experience was very, very cool.

I alternated between listening to [scriptures read aloud on CD] and sitting quietly for several minutes at a time, allowing the Holy Spirit to seep through the tangled clutter of my thoughts and nurture me with his Word. I was surprised at how natural the experience was - at how easily the words of Jesus settled into a place of prominence once I pushed everything else out of the way.