30/11/2019
"Come, give your heart to me, just as I desire to give you mine.”
A sister of our community shares her moving experience of how she come to embrace the overwhelming love of God for her during her own Prayer Experience Retreat (PER).
If you are yearning to deepen your relationship with God like she did, registration for our first-ever Youth Prayer Experience Retreat is still open! Visit tinyurl.com/YPERregistration to register or visit www.csctr.net/yper/ for more details!
"Before PER, prayer to me felt like I was crying out into a large abyss where nobody could hear me. Well, my brain knew God was there on the other end; but my heart could not comprehend the lack of response. All I knew was this - if I prayed at the start of the day, my day would somehow be a bit less painful to get through.
So, I kept at it, but somewhere inside of me, I stopped believing that God heard me. That maybe, I’m just not that important to him.
However, at PER, I found the courage to pick up my pen and draw my reflections, even though I struggled a lot with accepting my imperfections in my art. During one of these prayer sessions, I heard God asking me: “What do you want me to do for you?”
Honestly, that question caught me quite off guard – “Haven’t I already told you many times over? I want you to change my family situation; I want an answer for my vocation - which road do I take, God?” But as I sat there the question kept coming - “What do you want me to do for you?” And as I looked over all the doodles I had done, one thing was clear – God, I want nothing but to be in your embrace.
As I reached out in my desperation for God in that moment, in my sinfulness and shame, He - the Son of God who was innocent and yet suffered on that cross out of love for us, reached down to me, and pulled me close to him in a tight embrace. Time stopped, and there was nothing else that mattered then but Christ, the bridegroom of my soul, looking into my eyes with his loving gaze, and saying to me, “I love you, my beloved one...I love you. I love you. I love you. Come, give your heart to me, just as I desire to give you mine.”
My experience at PER brought me to a deeper intimacy with God in my prayer life, something which I had struggled so hard with before. I also came to a realisation that when we are told to embrace our crosses, how often do we not realise that Christ is there on that cross too and is embracing us? Ultimately, he doesn’t want us to worry about how unworthy or unclean we may be, or even how we are struggling to embrace the crosses he has given us. All he asks for is our trust, to spend time with him in prayer and allow him to comfort us wherever we are, revelling in the understanding that we are carried in his arms, who will never let us go through all the highs and lows of life alone.
So come, my brothers and sisters out there- come and experience His embrace this YPER 😃 "
