Come Thou Fount

Lately, I've been in love with the song "Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing." I go through phases in the hymnal where I hear a song and for a time, it's like the Spirit sang that particular hymn just for me. For a while, that song was "Blessed Assurance" and there was something beautiful to me about the phrase "This is my story." Lately, the song that the Spirit has been singing most to me is "Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing."

"Come, thou fount of every blessing, tune my heart to sing thy grace;
streams of mercy, never ceasing, call for songs of loudest praise.
Teach me some melodious sonnet, sung by flaming tongues above;
praise the mount! I'm fixed upon it, mount of God's unchanging love!"

I have to admit, my spiritual life has been feeling a bit of a dry spell. Actually, I suppose it's more like a drought. My prayers feel hollow, as though I'm saying the words but they're hitting the air and immediately shattering due to a lack of substance, like a clay pigeon on a shooting range. I keep praying, though, because I believe that even hollow words breaking into a thousand pieces of broken glass against the air's canopy are better than no words at all.

Maybe the problem is that I'm trying to use words.

It's hard for me not to use words. I am a writer by trade. Oh I know my paycheck and the Presbyterian board of pensions say I'm a pastor, but really I'm a writer. My congregation doesn't know this (well, the ones who read this blog will know this now), but I've actually written quite a few books. I've never published any of them, but they exist in the annals of my cyberspace harddrives and there they sit until something tickles my fancy to pull one of them out and pick at it. They're never quite done. One draft turns into a dozen more drafts, and this inability to let a book go and actually reach it out to a publisher or an agent just keeps me writing more and more drafts. Words are my safeguard, they are my sustinence. I write because I breathe and I can keep breathing because I write. Letting a book go means I can no longer pick at it and it's hard to relinquish that kind of control over my child.

And yet despite all of this love for words and language, it strikes me that perhaps words are what have been weighing me down the most. It's possible that God requires us to speak less and listen more (imagine that, right?). Or, because we lock our spirituality into one and only one medium, our spiritual life goes into a drought because it engages only one part of our being. When I was in seminary, I took a prayer and pastoral care class and we did an exercise one day where we prayed by sound. We stood in a circle facing away from each other and we closed our eyes. The professor instructed us to make the sounds that our spirit was feeling and offer that sound up to God. Some people started humming or singing, others just let out these moans like dying walruses (I seem to recall falling into the latter of the two). Praying through sound was a different experience from praying with words. The professor impressed upon us that God doesn't need our words; He only requests our entire being and our words are only one part of our being.

This week I spent some time in northern Indiana at a pastor's retreat and we took some time in our closing worship to pray with color. One of the leaders read the scripture passage and while she read, we drew pictures on the back of our bulletins. The colors, the scribbles, the depth of the lines expressed what was going on in our souls, or even what wasn't going on in our souls. When words fail us, perhaps it is a reminder from God that our words are just one part of our being and God wants ALL of us.

"Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it, prone to leave the God I love; Here's my heart, O take and seal it, seal it for thy courts above."

Where are you feeling those dry spells in your spiritual journey right now? If you are like me, perhaps you are needing to try offering up a different part of your being to God. Maybe your words are shallow and hollow and the sound of breaking glass is a reminder that our hearts say a great deal more than our words.

Yours in Christ,
Pastor Becki