INTERCESSION

 April 7, 2008  Just As I Am

Everybody's experience will be different because we are all different and we have different memories and different life experiences.  Our main goal is to repair our cushion of love for each other, so that we can not only can be free ourselves, but we can set others free as well - free to trust, free to open up, free to share experiences, free to really be family.  Becoming family is the real deep meaning of Church, of community.  It is God's family.  This will be a time for us to express things that we have not been able to express before, maybe even ventilate some things, if that is what is needed.  That is part of the process.  There are five stages.  We will go through the different stages at a different time.  To ventilate is important because if we do not, then we are not going to hear the Lord because there is too much going on within us.

We want to allow Jesus to be Jesus and take us wherever He wants to take us.  And we want to make this journey together.  A couple of reasons that we really want the sharing sessions is first of all to have these areas in ourselves touched by the healing love of Jesus.  But we want to pair off, one on one, with a partner so that we have the experience of praying for another.  They can pray for us, because that takes us into our intercessory gift.    That is where our real power is.  It is in intercession. 

We can go through life just getting me, myself and I healed, which is great, but it is easier if I can help somebody else get healed through my intercessory prayer power and be the recipient of your intercessory prayer power.  This is an intercessory way of getting healings much more quickly.  Intercession I think has this kind of power because we are not thinking of ourselves. We enter into that pain or that situation of someone else. 
As we begin to experience this deeper fulfillment in our groups, remember that though this  is simple, and there will be simple ways to pray,  we are complicated and we have layers and layers and layers.  There will be feelings of loneliness that surface. There will be negative aspects that will come up in our own lives and in the lives of the people with whom we are praying.  These are all feelings that have been repressed somewhere at the heart level, which is very much the child level. 

We can look at each other and see beautiful people.  That might be all we see.  We might not see the rejection  hidden deep in the heart; we might not see that pain in the heart.  We might not see what that person sees about themselves. 

Jesus, when He looks at us, He sees beautiful people too.  But He can see beyond that.  He can see the rejection. He can see the lies we are hanging on to, the deception, the darkness.  He can see anything and everything negative that we have ever experienced.  He can see all the hurts. He knows them all.  He knows all the moments of loneliness in our life.  He can see all the times of fear.  It could be a simple little thing, like as a child I fell out of bed.  That can be pretty fearful to a little child if there was no one there to help you get back in bed.  Or maybe I went to sleep one night and next morning I woke up and mommy and daddy were not there.  That is happening quite often today with children. He sees all that.  He sees all the times we have been lied to, by parents, all the times that we have had promises broken.  He sees all the things that we may have been accused of unjustly, or the guilt feelings we have carried for years.  He sees every single moment of our life and yet Jesus loves us in spite of it - that beautiful unconditional love for each of us.     I remember there used to be a saint that said, "Lord, make me a saint in spite of myself."  It was Saint Claude de Colombiere. Jesus doesn't love us in spite of ourselves.  He loves us because of ourselves.  He sees who we really are.

In the book of Genesis we watch God creating His entire universe and everything upon earth and it keeps saying "And He made this and He saw that it was good, and then this and He saw it was good." But then when He made man in His image and His likeness, the Scripture says, "He saw that it was very good."  We have to remember that God sees us as we really are and we are very, very good.  It does not mean that He does not want us to get through these problems.  It does not mean that He does not want to touch and heal our pain, our hurt, deep in our desire for Him.  It   means that He wants us to open our hearts, so that we can be fully who we really are, His little children, made in the image and likeness of the entire Trinity and that we can come to see ourselves, and others also, as very, very good.  Unless this happens, I do not think we can live out the new commandment to truly love one another as He has loved us, because He loves us without any conditions, just as we are. 
Excerpt from Mother Nadine's, "Introduction to Inner Healing," Omaha, 2004