Using God's word to slay the jabberwocky that is satan...

Using God's word to slay the jabberwocky that is satan...

Michelle M Guppy


Saturday, February 17, 2024

Lent: A Season of Prayer: Day 4

I have been going through the book, "A Treasury of Prayer" the best of E.M. Bounds -- as our class is taking an in depth look at prayer....

For these 40 days of Lent I will be focusing on one of the definitions of prayer, from his book, and others we are studying as part of our class.

I really love this one - as it relates to my Catholic, of sorts, background.... 
"Prayer is not a mere habit, riveted by custom and memory, something which must be gone through with its value depending upon the decency and perfection of the performance."

Again, I share here my views in sincerity -- but the times I can remember being in a Catholic church or even Sunday School --- I never once remembered "praying" or even "prayer".  

The rote repetition and the symbolism and the kneeling, standing, reciting, and even perhaps if some of that was considered praying -- was not for me.   My personality is more river rapids, that style of religion, of prayer, more of a dam.   And I suppose why I never really had much of a "Prayer-life" or "Christianity" that I remember until well in adulthood.  

If that's how it had to be done.

I know some in my family "Prayed the Rosary" - but that was a private thing -- I don't ever remember a group prayer, family prayer, anyone asking me to pray for them or how they could pray for me.

Not that they perhaps never did -- but as far back as I can remember, I do not honestly recall anything about prayer-life.  

Once I attended a church in adulthood - that's when I began to learn about prayer.  Praying in groups, praying during offering, the value of time spent with God, in prayer.

Once I had my son, Brandon, I truly understood prayer, that communion, that talking with God.

I was free to be the river rapids that I am -- God simply the banks to my river - trying hard to 'keep her contained when she flooded!'   

And oh how I have flooded over the years!  Which makes me all the more in love with God for how HE is there to hold me back.  Not scold me for overflowing, not saying I'm too fast, too slow, not clear enough, too murky.  No, God simply has shown me how HE is the banks to my river -- holding me tight and letting me be me.

My prayers have been written, shouted, screamed, cried, sobbed, and silent.

My prayers have thanked God, loved God, hated God, cursed God.

I've come to God as a Princess, a pagan, a peasant.

My prayer performance most often merely worthy of a participation medal than an Oscar.

And that's ok.

It's the doing that counts.

The honesty, openness, transparency, rawness.

Perhaps the best prayers I've ever prayed are the ones I never prayed, but that others have on my behalf simply because I was too broken to pray.

Which is why it is so important to allow others to pray for you, with you.

As I wish to do for this Lent...

This Season of Prayer.


Friday, February 16, 2024

Lent: A Season of Prayer: Day 3

 Lent:  A Season of Prayer:  Day 3

I think one of the most life-changing views of prayer for me came from Ann Voskamp.   Her book One Thousand Gifts has been a big inspiration -- HUGE.

Prayer is all around us in the thanking God for the ordinary, the mundane, the extraordinary.

The practice of counting it all as joy has been a challenge of hers that I have accepted.

As I type this, I'm on #923 gifts of eucharisteo - of thanksgiving, grace, mercy, joy.

That is 923 prayers of seeing God at work all around me, and in seeking his purpose in the things I would not necessarily count as joy.........

From her book:

Prayer, to be prayer, to have any power to change anything, must first speak thanks.  In every situation, by prayer & petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.  Prayer without ceasing is only possible in a life of continual thanks.

Daniel 6:10
Daniel prayed three times a day giving thanks to his God...

Daniel was only a man of prayer because he was a man of thanks, and the only way to become a woman of prayer is to be a woman of thanks....

Counting those gifts daily - that momentary time to stop and reflect in prayer for the good all around me despite the not-so-good of circumstances I must live with -- has given me a freedom I have not felt in ages.

It has given me a HOPEISM that heals.......perhaps not my son...........yet.......

But me.

Thursday, February 15, 2024

Lent: A Season of Prayer: Day 1

 On this 1st day of Lent Prayer -- I want to begin with what I knew prayer wasn't.  

I admit, I haven't really thought much about the definitions of prayer --- what it means at its core.  

But I feel I had a sense of what it wasn't.

To me, that was a genie lamp.  Where you go to where it sits on the shelf and rub it furiously and ask the genie, God, to grant your wish.  And that being the only time you go to the lamp.  In an emergency. When you think of it.  When you need something.

God does answer our "emergency" prayers in desperation.  He hears them.  That is true.  And if it is His will, in His time, that prayer will be answered in some way.  He will either move that mountain, or move you.

But it's the relationship he wants.  He desires.  That coming to Him daily.  Moment by moment.  He doesn't want to be put on a shelf and dusted occasionally, rubbed furiously when needed. 

He wants that daily cultivation.  

The moment by moment pursuit.

He wants center stage of your heart, soul, mind.

I bought a genie lamp to set on my desk for that reminder.

That prayer is a day by day, hour by hour, step by step, moment by moment drawing near to him in the good, the bad, the ugly.

The crazy, the mad, the wonderful.


Lent: A Season of Prayer: Day 2

A Season of Lent

40 Days of Prayer

Day 2

Last night as I was reading my Lent Devotional ---- again, I don't participate in Lent as part of any religion -- I do it because Lent, in Old English and Latin --- means "Spring" and "fortieth". It's a time to reflect on where Jesus walked in the Garden of Gethsemane, fasting and praying for forty days in his journey to Resurrection Sunday!

I never knew that about the "Spring" and "fortieth" until reading in this current devotional. It made me smile because I love Spring gardening season, and for me it typically does start on Ash Wednesday and lasts until Easter! That's my "40 Days in the Wilderness" as I whip my "Garden of Gethsemane" into shape.

How are you spending this Spring Season of Lent?
You'll find me in my wilderness, aka my "Where HOPEISM Blooms" gardens.

Anyway - a definition of prayer I thought of as I read my Lent Devotional by A.W. Tozer -- one of my favorite authors in the Christian realm --- is how prayer is a way we clear the wilderness of our mind of weeds so that our faith, our garden, can grow.

What imagery there!

When I don't tend to my garden, it becomes overgrown with invasive weeds that I don't want or need, if left unchecked - those weeds, that satan, will choke out the flowers and vegetables I do want and need!

If our prayer life isn't cultivated daily, if left to itself and neglected of being weeded of bad thoughts, actions, desires, complacency, --- it becomes overgrown with satan's snares that choke out all the good, the thankfulness, gratitude, joy.  It becomes dead and brittle.  A barren wilderness!  

Again, what imagery as a definition of prayer!

It makes me all the more fervent in pulling those weeds, those negative thoughts and actions, out of my garden -- er, mind.

I want to clear the garden of the bad, cultivate that soil to make room for the good.

And as any farmer or gardener knows -- that is a DAILY PROCESS. 

It will not be "once and done".

It is a daily habit - pulling weeds, cultivating that soil so the good can grow, and thrive.

A.W. Tozer puts it this way:
The bias of nature is toward the wilderness, never toward the fruitful field.  To the alert Christian this fact will be more than an observation of interest to farmers; it will be a parable, an object lesson setting forth a law that runs through all the regions of our fallen world...  We cannot escape the law that would persuade all things to remain wild or to return to a wild state after a period of cultivation.  What is true of the field is true also of the soul, if we are but wise enough to see it."

That is what this journey through Lent is to me for these 40 days.  That weeding, that cultivating, that taking the time to tend to things that make my garden grow!

My Faith, my pursuit of Christ, my HOPEISM.


The truth is that no spiritual experience, however revolutionary, can exempt us from temptation; and what is temptation but the effort of the wilderness to encroach upon our new-cleared fields? - A.W. Tozer

How often am I tempted to stay in bed and not get up and pursue prayer?   Simply being a born-again-believer with my fresh copy of that 'fire insurance' does not mean my fields will never need to be cultivated - weeded from satan's snares! 

The purified heart is obnoxious to the devil and to all the forces of the lost world.  They will not rest until they have won back what they have lost.  The jungle will creep in and seek to swallow up the tiny areas that have been made free by the power of the Holy Ghost.  Only watchfulness and constant prayer can preserve those moral gains won for us through the operations of God's grace.  The neglected heart will soon be a heart overrun with worldly thoughts.  The neglected life will soon become a moral chaos.  The creeping wilderness will soon take over that church that trusts in its own strength and forgets to watch and pray. - A.W. Tozer

I sit here stunned at that. 

Humbled by it.  

Inspired to weed more fervently.

Determined to pray more faithfully.