Practicing

If you've never read this book. GET IT... read it. Drink it in, swish it about in your mouth, taste it against the Word, then swallow every drop. Absolutely awesome. "It will change your life." Hate to sound like a New York Time's book reviewer here but it really is a "must-read" if you seek to follow Christ.

The Practice of the Presence of God with Spiritual Maxims

by Brother Lawrence

I'll spare you my blather and give a few quotes:

• "Having found in many books different methods of going to God, and divers practices of the spiritual life, I thought this would serve rather to puzzle me than facilitate what I sought after, which was nothing but how to become wholly God's. This made me resolve to give the all for the all; so after having given myself wholly to God, that He might take away my sin, I renounced, for the Love of Him, everything that was not He, and I began to live as if there was none but He and I in the world."

• "I have quitted all forms of devotion and set prayers but those to which my state obliges me. And I make it my business only to perservere in His holy presence, wherein I keep myself by a single attention, and a general fond regard to God, which I may call an actual presence of God; or, to speak better, an habitual, silent, and secret conversation of the soul with God, which often causes me joys and raptures inwardly, and sometimes also outwardly, so great that I am forced to use means to moderate them and prevent their appearance to others."

• "I say again, let us enter into ourselves. The time presses, there is no room for delay; our souls are at stake. I believe you have taken such effectual measures that you will not be surprised. I commend you for it, it is the one thing neccesary. We must, nevertheless, always work at it, because not to advance in the spiritual life is to go back. But those who have the gale of the Holy Spirit go forward even in sleep. If the vessel of our soul is still tossed with winds and storms, let us awake theLord, who reposes it, and He will quickly calm the sea."

• "I engaged in a religious life only for the love of God, and I have endeavoured to act only for Him; whatever becomes of me, whether I be lost or saved, I will always continue to act purely for the love of God. I shall have this good at least, that till death I shall have done all that is in me to love him."

"At any moment and in any circumstance, the soul that seeks God may find Him, and practice the presence of God."