Saturday, January 14, 2012

Silent 15


Trent is doing a series in youth group right now about worship: the different parts of it, what it means to different people, individual and corporate worship, etc.  As part of this each week, he has everybody do a "Silent 15", which is where we kind of spread out so we don't have people right around us to distract us and just have 15 minutes of silence.  It can be prayer, time to think, time to thank, but overall it is a small chunk of time with the sole purpose of individually and intentionally worshiping God in silence.  

Some of the youth totally embraced it.  They found their spot, made the time their own.  Some probably just used the time to poke around on their cell phone (which I forgot to take up and put in the Cell Cell beforehand).  Who knows if they really prayed, if they just sat there, if they were totally bored and hated it and were just waiting for Trent to quietly tell everyone to gather back together. 

Me?  I loved it.  But it was hard. I found it rather difficult to truly focus on God and prayer for that amount of time and not let my mind wander to the groceries we had to go get after youth group and what I had to tackle at work the next day. 

How often do you allow a whole 15 minutes just to sit and pray, reflect and silently worship?  If you're like me, it's not very often.  A lot of us probably pray while we're driving, pray while we're doing chores, etc., and that's awesome.  But what about time when you are doing nothing but pray?  I'll be the first one to say that that doesn't happen much for me.  With my life travelling at the speed of light it seems, downtime is rare, and when I have it, my first thought is to spend it with my husband or catching up on chores.   Prayer is sadly not what comes to my mind first.

Consider taking a Silent 15 for yourself sometime and see how it goes.  "But I don't have time!"  Really?  It's only 15 minutes...   "Speak for yourself, Anna."  Ok, you're right, busted.  I'm the worst at this, believing that I have no spare time anywhere for things like this.  But I'm learning to find the time, make the time, or realize it has actually been there all along, I just get so caught up in "I am so busy. What's next? Busy busy busy" that sometimes I miss the times when I don't actually have to feel busy.  

Try a Silent 15.  Let me know what you think.  

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