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Parking Lot for Distractions

August 19, 2010 by Sybil Macbeth 1 Comment Leave a Comment

Whenever I pray in color or pray in any other way, distractions come. Maybe other people are not so prone to these outbreaks of attention loss; but I like to think I’m not alone in this dilemma.

In my prayer drawings/doodles, I now include the distractions as part of the picture. Down at the right-hand corner of the paper, I have a list of words. Whenever a recurring thought pops into my head, I write it in the parking lot for distractions–an expression my friend Kathy coined to name the box designed for my verbal prayer intrusions. Most of the time the list includes things like: buy basil, pay the power bill, write an article, send a birthday card to ________….

Last Sunday at a workshop I co-facilitated outside of Seattle, I led participants through a Praying in Color exercise. We were all drawing and praying on our pieces of paper for people we had named aloud. I drew at an easel in front of the whole group. During the prayer time, ideas of things I wanted to share with workshop participants about Praying in Color popped into my head. I wrote them in the parking lot. Because I wrote them down I could let them go and continue to pray.

Then I became aware of another distraction. This one wasn’t about the workshop or some practical task I needed to do. I was having an open bout of resentment. It had nothing to do with anything related to the day or the workshop. It was unfinished feelings about a recent experience in my life. I didn’t want to ignore the resentment, but I didn’t have the time to deal with it. I needed to be present for the workshop. So I wrote the word RESENTMENT in capital letters in the parking lot. Unlike some of the practical things in my parking lot, it’s not some task I can complete and check off at the end of a prayer time. But it is something I want to address head-on. Writing down the word RESENTMENT will keep it from sneaking up on me unbidden. With some long-term therapy with God I will deal with it.

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Filed Under: Praying in Color Tagged With: Praying in Color, resentment

Who’s in My Bed?

April 14, 2010 by Sybil Macbeth Leave a Comment

One way I test my spiritual well-being is to notice how many people have crawled into bed with me at the end of the day. If it’s just my husband Andy I’m in pretty good shape. But if the phantasms of many others are clinging onto me and taking up precious psychic room under the covers, I’m in trouble.

Worries about his night shift as a cop in a bad part of the city allow my adult son to jump in the bed. The person who said something hurtful to me on Sunday morning at church hogs the blankets. The ubiquitous thought, “What would my family think,” opens the door for my parents and other relatives to vie for a place on the mattress. When my worries, resentments, and obsessions morph into human form and want to share the queen-sized bed, my sacred place of loving and rest becomes the scene of a massive pillow-fight.

My task is to try to leave everyone but my husband and God outside the bedroom door. Even if I say prayers in bed, I want them to be prayers of letting go and not clinging. Some nights I have to work hard to throw all of the scrabbling bedmates out of my head, out of my bed, out of the room, and into the hands of God.

There may be a new hallway nighttime ritual in the making here—an order to the interlopers: “Sit, Down, Stay,” a slam of the bedroom door, and a prayer committing the unwanted guests and my thoughts into God’s care. “Guide us waking, O Lord, and guard us sleeping; that awake we may watch with Christ, and asleep we may rest in peace.” (An Order for Compline, Book of Common Prayer,The Church Hymnal Corporation, New York, 1979, p. 134)

Sybil MacBeth ©2010

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Filed Under: Praying in Color Tagged With: bedtime, obsession, prayer, resentment

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