Week of Guided Prayer: Day 2
Sorry these posts are so late! I'll try to write them up as quickly as I can.
It's the second day (well, evening) of this week, and so far, the experiences have been really quite intense. Spending two 15 minute sessions a day in prayer or quiet contemplation has been surprisingly difficult to do, and even more challenging has been getting into the right mindset - stopping endlessly worrying about the next thing I have do, setting no demands on myself and asking for nothing from God, achieving nothing of note in a period of time and being OK with that. I never thought of myself as someone 'caught up in the rat race' and yet this week has taught me that I am far more driven and competitive than I realized.
When I'm not feeling awkward, bored or like I should be doing something else, I've been able to feel things coming at me, I assume from God. I've learnt a great number of important things this week, but today I was focused on my desire to be more tender-hearted. The concept of tenderness kept appearing in various ways throughout my day, and I found myself thinking about how I could change my life in order to be more caring and loving towards other people. While I do love my friends and family and do things to show them I care, I still often feel like my love for them is almost academic or theoretical - I don't feel that I express it as humanly as I could do. There's an added component to my thinking about tenderness, which is an increasing feeling that I should show care to people in my community who are marginalized or disadvantaged. I have been thinking about joining in with student-run initiatives to help e.g. the elderly or homeless for a while now, but my prayer during this week has prompted me to think more carefully and seriously about this.
A final aspect of my thinking on tenderness that deserves a mention is my thoughts on what makes a good doctor. This is something which often concerns me - I try and work out which qualities are best and how I can best reflect that in my work, but it's difficult in part because I don't know what is best. During my prayer today, I tried asking God about this, and a story came to mind that a friend (who has been a patient in hospital) told me a while ago. She said that the doctor who stood out the most in her mind was someone who went above and beyond their duties to sit down and have an honest talk about some personal issues in my friend's life that were really troubling her. What patients say about what makes a good doctor is perhaps more important than anything, and this story stuck out in my mind because it highlights that the things that make a good doctor (as, perhaps, the things which make a good person!) are not always what we expect.
It's the second day (well, evening) of this week, and so far, the experiences have been really quite intense. Spending two 15 minute sessions a day in prayer or quiet contemplation has been surprisingly difficult to do, and even more challenging has been getting into the right mindset - stopping endlessly worrying about the next thing I have do, setting no demands on myself and asking for nothing from God, achieving nothing of note in a period of time and being OK with that. I never thought of myself as someone 'caught up in the rat race' and yet this week has taught me that I am far more driven and competitive than I realized.
When I'm not feeling awkward, bored or like I should be doing something else, I've been able to feel things coming at me, I assume from God. I've learnt a great number of important things this week, but today I was focused on my desire to be more tender-hearted. The concept of tenderness kept appearing in various ways throughout my day, and I found myself thinking about how I could change my life in order to be more caring and loving towards other people. While I do love my friends and family and do things to show them I care, I still often feel like my love for them is almost academic or theoretical - I don't feel that I express it as humanly as I could do. There's an added component to my thinking about tenderness, which is an increasing feeling that I should show care to people in my community who are marginalized or disadvantaged. I have been thinking about joining in with student-run initiatives to help e.g. the elderly or homeless for a while now, but my prayer during this week has prompted me to think more carefully and seriously about this.
A final aspect of my thinking on tenderness that deserves a mention is my thoughts on what makes a good doctor. This is something which often concerns me - I try and work out which qualities are best and how I can best reflect that in my work, but it's difficult in part because I don't know what is best. During my prayer today, I tried asking God about this, and a story came to mind that a friend (who has been a patient in hospital) told me a while ago. She said that the doctor who stood out the most in her mind was someone who went above and beyond their duties to sit down and have an honest talk about some personal issues in my friend's life that were really troubling her. What patients say about what makes a good doctor is perhaps more important than anything, and this story stuck out in my mind because it highlights that the things that make a good doctor (as, perhaps, the things which make a good person!) are not always what we expect.
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