Trust Your Experience

"In recent years I seem to hear God say, 'Put your books away. Be with me. Trust your experience. There are no experts in prayer, only people who have been faithful to the ache.' I reflecton this with both anxiety and joy. Why shouldn'tour experiences be filled with God? Who do we think it is who is breathing in us? Where do we think this ache has come from? And has it ever crossed our minds that God, too, has a deep yearning for us? This is the only message I've been receiving in prayer these days: 'Forget the experts for a while. Trust your own experience.'
Trusting our own experience is not nearly as easy as it sounds. We have not been brought up to trust our own experience; we have been encouraged to listen to 'the ones who know.'...You are a dwelling place for the Source of AllLIfe. You are an offspring of the One who said, 'I Am who Am.' If the One who gave you birth lives within you, surely you can find some resources there in your sacred Center. An expert lives within you. An expert breathes out of you. Are you able to be still enough to become intimate with the One who lives within? This is the only expert you will ever meet. Your life is entwined with the God who gave you birth. Frail dust, remember, you are splendor!"

( A Tree Full of Angels, Macrina Wiederkehr)

We live in an "expert saturated" culture. We leave it up to the "experts" to handle all the tough issues of life. To be sure, there are those that are trained to help us through tough times and help us see issues that we might never see on our own. But, we also lose sight of the fact that our present experience can often be our best teacher and our most reliable guide. Present with our experience is the Living Teacher - the Living Christ.

We delegate our spiritual journey and our spiritual work to others. We delegate it to them and expect them to do it for us and simply give us a report - we want them to "get back to us." We delegate it to authors, pastors, priests, teachers, government officials, kings, queens, governors, and presidents. We delegate our growth, understanding, and realities to the "experts".

Friends, an "expert" lives within - an expert called "your experience" guided and informed the the Living God who resided within us all and is the source of our experience. Trust your experience!