Kitty Crenshaw's Blog, page 36

Use Your Suffering

Betty Skinner, the inspiration for The Hidden Life Awakened, discusses using our suffering to end our suffering: "View it as a gift and not as a threat—as a hand reaching out, pressing you down to find a place where you can stand without fear, without anxiety, without guilt and shame."

January 15, 2018

Wait in your pain and keep watch for the Light. ~ Betty Skinner

The Cost of Discipleship

The Cost of Discipleship was one of those books that deeply influenced Betty and gave her courage in her darkest days. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a young German theologian, wrote it in the 1930s to examine the intense struggle and serious implications of true belief in Christ. In the decades that followed, he was active in resisting the rise of Nazis in Germany, and in rejecting the Fuhrer as head of the Church. Jesus, not Adolf Hitler was the head.  Just a few weeks before the end of the war, Bonhoeffer was hanged by the Nazis in Flossenburg prison camp by direct order from Hitler. Eric Metaxas’ biography, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, retells Bonhoeffer’s final moments, which had been witnessed and shared years later by the camp doctor:

“Through the half-open door in one room of the huts I saw Pastor Bonhoeffer, before taking off his prison garb, kneeling on the floor praying fervently to his God. I was most deeply moved by the way this lovable man prayed, so devout and so certain that God heard his prayer. At the place of execution, he again said a short prayer and then climber the steps to the gallows, brave and composed. His death ensued after a few seconds. In the almost fifty years that I worked as a doctor, I have hardly ever seen a man die so submissively to the will of God.”

In this most famous of his books, young Bonhoeffer wrote:

“But Jesus is no draughtsman of political blueprints, he is the one who vanquished evil through suffering… The passion of Christ is the victory of divine love over the powers of evil, and therefore it is the only supportable basis for Christian obedience. Once again, Jesus calls those who follow him to share his passion. How can we convince the world by our preaching and passion when we shrink from that passion in our own lives? On the cross Jesus fulfilled the law he himself established and thus graciously keeps his disciples in the fellowship of his suffering. The cross is the only power in the world which proves that suffering love can avenge and vanquish evil.”

Years later, influenced by Bonhoeffer’s words, Betty wrote the following, which is recounted in The Hidden Life Awakened:

“If we can see our suffering as sharing, in a small way, in Christ’s passion—His willingness to surrender in trust to that which He was called to live—we too will be graced with the strength to embrace it and learn from it.

“The way of trust lies through Gethsemane and Holy Saturday. We move from Good Friday to Easter Sunday, omitting Holy Saturday—the tomb. Every phase of our Lord’s life and every aspect of His death speaks to us, if we will open to it. Divine obedience was lived out at the Last Supper, accepted at Gethsemane, accomplished on the cross, and perfected alone in the darkness of the tomb.”

January 8, 2018

The freedom to love and be loved is often discovered in the darkness, so it is important to befriend it. ~Betty Skinner

On Retreat: January 2018

Our prayer is that “On Retreat” will help you break from habituated patterns of mind and frantic activity, make more space for God, and step into a new way of seeing, believing, and abiding.  Each retreat will focus on a healthy body, a serene mind, and a powerful spirit. Your devoted guide will be modern day Christian mystic, Betty Skinner.

Affirming the Hope Hidden Within You,

~Cathy and Kitty

Waiting
A Healthy Body

Hydrate: Drink a little water with lemon or green tea to begin.

Move: Do a few simple stretching exercises to energize your body.

Rest: Silently integrate the inner peace of your stretching practice for a few minutes.

A Serene Mind

Begin this portion of your time with God by sitting with a warm cup of coffee or tea or water in a comfortable chair in a quiet place. Light a candle as a symbol of God’s presence with you.

Opening Prayer

Let Betty’s lovely Centering Prayer quiet and refocus your mind. Read it on page 53 of the book The Hidden Life: Awakened or listen to Betty read by visiting the video page for the prayer.

A Reflection from Betty

“Waiting is one of the most difficult pieces of a deep, inner spiritual journey. We want to outrun God, but our growth depends on consciously letting go of our fear and allowing our circumstances the space to teach us what God intends. This is hard because so much of our waiting is filled with anxiety and our own expectations of what should happen. Thus, it subtly becomes a way of trying to control the future as well as a way of setting us up for disappointment, discouragement, and despair. As long as we are still waiting in fear and anxiety, we will not experience growth. We will stay stuck because when we are fearful, we are disconnected from the Source. We are not trusting that whatever God brings will be exactly what we need. It is important to understand that waiting is not passive and fearful but active and open ended. Active waiting is always a movement from something to something more. The secret of waiting is to be always alert, always waiting with hope, trusting that something new has been awakened within us; a work in us has begun. Open-ended waiting is filled with radical hope, trusting God’s perfect love to cast out our fear, knowing that all shall be well.” The Hidden Life Awakened

Silence is God’s language, and it gently draws us to our depth.
Further Reflection

The new year is a time when we make resolutions to get more done, to accomplish a new vision, and to achieve more success, but what we really need to do is slow down, open our minds and hearts to the gifts around us, and wait.

When God seems silent, and the vision is not unfolding the way you expected, will you refuse the ferocious fear whispering in your head that God may not really care or be powerful enough to help you accomplish it, and you probably don’t deserve it anyway? Will you quell the panic that is making you run into busyness and fixing, and allow this difficult time to take you where you have always wanted to go; deeper into trust? This is God’s discipline not displeasure. Your hopes are being purified not disappointed. Keep your heart open, stay alert for the Spirit’s whisperings, and wait with pregnant expectation for what God will surely reveal.

A Powerful Spirit

Spend a little time now, letting the Living Word speak to your heart.

Divine Reading

Psalm 130

Isaiah 40:31, Romans 5:3-5, 2 Corinthians 10:5

Rest Quietly with God

Use your imagination to visualize Jesus sitting there with you.

Reflective Writing

Journal any thought that arises without censoring as a child would. This is the indwelling Spirit speaking truth to you. Trust this for now.

Just One Thing

Each day this week, will you take a minute to read and ponder this passage from Revelations of Divine Love by Julian of Norwich, a fourteenth-century Christian mystic and mentor to Betty? Perhaps write it on a card to keep close.

“And thus God teaches us to pray, and to trust intensely that we shall receive what we ask for, for He looks at us with love and wills to make us the partner of His good deed. For this reason, He stirs us to make the prayer that it delights Him to grant.”

Slow down, open your mind and heart to the gifts around you, and wait.

A New Year’s Letter from Betty

Oh God, gentle first Truth, move in my heart.

Illuminate each dark corner

where webs of self still hide.

Show me Whose I am that I might know who I am.

Then re-create me, dress me in Yourself

whose virtue is love,

whose knowledge is truth,

whose beauty is creation.

As we journey together into a new year, a new beginning, hand in hand, heart to heart, all in Christ, I want to offer this meditation to you from the Source as a source of nourishment, hope, encouragement and love.

This meditation speaks of God as Truth Who, when I answer the call to return Home, will begin to bring me to an ever-deepening aware- ness of my chosenness and the gradual realization that I need no longer take my identity from the world, but rather from this Voice within who calls me His Beloved. I belong to Him; I am His ( Whose I am).

In the process of glimpsing this Truth of Whose I am, our eyes are opened to who I am, not in a temporal, worldly sense, but rather in an eternal sense. If Truth, then, is calling me Home and Truth loves me enough to reveal to me my false self (knowledge of my sin), then Truth will enable me to begin my work of detaching myself from the false self and attaching myself more and more to Truth, the true self, the Christ self. Thus, Truth recreates and liberates me. Remember what Jesus said in John 8:32, “You shall know the Truth and the Truth shall set you free.” This is a promise, but as a covenant people, we must keep our part of the covenant. We must do our work. Our work is living consistently the dynamic of knowledge and love, knowledge (who I am) and Love (whose I am).

I pray that the Holy Spirit will speak to your heart as you read these words. They come in obedience with the longing always that you might begin to taste the joy, the freedom, the peace of Jesus.

In the warmth of His recreative Love,

I remain your faithful friend.

~Betty

Rubber Band Books

God graciously taught Betty through the books He brought into her life over the years. Every summer she would take one to the mountain with her and read it over and over and over until she could grasp what God was saying to her through them.

Year after year, I sat there and pondered all that God was teaching me. I sat there in the heat, in the sunshine, in the cold, or in the rain. It didn’t matter.

Like a mother marking her child’s growth on a wall, Betty marked her growth within the pages of these books. They finally got so torn and tattered by love, she had to start holding them together with a rubber band . . . and so they came to be known as her Rubber Band books.

Here is a sampling with one quote from the many she highlighted in each book:

Centering Prayer by Basil Pennington:

If we dare to forget ourselves for the sake of our brothers and sisters, and to share ourselves, to lay down our lives, that the Lord himself will fill up what is wanting. He will make up for all our insufficiencies. He will make our words bearers of life.

Contemplative Prayer by Thomas Merton:

God works in us while we rest in Him.

Gift From the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindberg:

Only when one is connected to one’s core is one connected to others, I am beginning to discover. And, for me, the core, the inner spring, can best be refound through solitude.

Interior Castle by St. Teresa of Avila:

And this love, daughters, must not be wrought in our imagination but must be proved by works. Yet do not suppose God has any need of our works; what He needs is the resoluteness of our will.

Merton’s Palace of Nowhere by James Finley:

There is only one problem on which all my existence, my peace, my happiness depend: to discover myself in discovering God. If I find Him I will find myself and if I find my true self I will find Him.

My Utmost for His Highest by Oswald Chambers:

If I can stay in the middle of the turmoil calm and unperplexed, that is the end of the purpose of God. God is not working towards a particular finished; His end is the process—that I see Him walking on the waves, no shore in sight, no success, no goal, just the absolute certainty that it is all right because I see Him walking on the sea. It is the process, not the end, which is glorifying to God.

Revelations of Divine Love by Juliana of Norwich:

Then our good, kind Lord Jesus said, “If you are satisfied, I am satisfied. It is a joy, a bliss, an endless delight to me that I ever suffered the passion for you, and if I could suffer more, I would.”

Show Me the Way by Henri Nouwen:

The mystery of the spiritual life is that Jesus desires to meet us in the seclusion of our own heart, to make His love known to us there, to free us from our fears and to make our own deepest self known to us. In the privacy of our heart, therefore, we can learn not only to know Jesus but, through Jesus, ourselves as well.

The Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer:

The cross is the only power in the world which proves that suffering love can avenge and vanquish evil.

The Greatest Thing in the World by Henry Drummond:

And the one eternal lesson for us all is how better can we love.

The Imitation of Christ by Thomas `A Kempis:

The noble love of Jesus perfectly printed in the soul maketh a man to do great things, and stirreth him always to desire perfection, growing more and more in grace and goodness.

The Knowledge of the Holy by A.W. Tozer:

How completely satisfying to turn from our limitations to a God Who has none. Eternal years lie in His heart. For Him time does not pass, it remains; and those who are in Christ share with Him all the riches of limitless time and endless years.

The Practice of the Presence of God by Brother Lawrence:

I know that for a right practice of it the heart must be empty of all other things, because God will possess the heart alone; and as He cannot possess it alone without emptying it of all besides, so neither can He act there, and do what He pleases, unless it be left vacant to Him.

The Way of the Heart by Henri Nouwen:

Silence is above all a quality of the heart that can stay with us even in our conversation with others. It is a portable cell that we carry with us wherever we go. From it we speak to those in need and to it we return after our words have borne fruit.

This Sunrise of Wonder by Michael Mayne:

All I have tried to say so far about mystery and transcendence stems from my deep belief that the whole world is sacramental and the whole creation marked with the signature of its Creator, and that the only way to find the holy is in the ordinary; that the ordinary is far more extraordinary than we think.

Walking by Henry David Thoreau:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

December 25, 2017

It is difficult for us to grasp the truth that Jesus came not to astonish us with the great power and high visibility of God, but rather to show us the way of hiddenness and humility. ~ Betty Skinner

Advent: Week Four

Oh, Jesus, precious Shepherd

What will You say to me this Christmas?

What have You prepared for me at Your Nativity?

Will the noise of temporal things

silence the Heavenly Host,

the angelic song of praise,

the Infant cry of glory that bids me come,

that longs to claim me, to rename me

Chosen, Blessed, Beloved?

Will the clutter, the glitter of the world, blind me?

Will I fail to find You in lowliness in the crib?

You, Holy Child of God,

You, His Gift of unending birth,

of everlasting joy, of peace on earth.

Oh, Jesus, precious Shepherd, this Christmas

Help me to find You.

Enable me to hear You.

Give me Your Gift.

Be born anew each instant

in the manger of my heart.

                        ~BWS

My Utmost For His Highest

A friend had given Oswald Chamber’s My Utmost for His Highest to Betty for Christmas. She sat in the bay window of her home turning the little book over and over, just looking at it and feeling the soft leather. The gift touched her deeply. It was the first time since her father had given her a saddle so many years ago that anyone had affirmed her for who she was and what she was interested in.

She read it without understanding much but always gleaned a little bit. It became her daily spiritual nurture. Chambers’ words kept bringing her back to believing Jesus rather than believing her beliefs about Him.

The following is from Chamber’s January 4 entry in My Utmost for His Highest, and describes where Betty was when she was introduced to the book. Betty had spent so many years striving to follow Jesus, not realizing that, like Peter, she needed to know herself and her own capabilities before she could become a disciple.

January 4

“Why Can I Not Follow You Now?”

“Peter said to Him, Lord, why can I not follow You now?” John 13:37

There are times when you can’t understand why you cannot do what you want to do. When God brings a time of waiting, and appears to be unresponsive, don’t fill it with busyness, just wait. The time for waiting may come to teach you the meaning of sanctification—to be set apart from sin and made holy—or it may come after the process of sanctification has begun to teach you what service means. Never run before God gives you His direction. If you have the slightest doubt, then He is not guiding. Whenever there is doubt—wait.

At first you may see clearly what God’s will is—the severance of a friendship, the breaking off of a business relationship, or something else you feel is distinctly God’s will for you to do. But never act on the impulse of that feeling. If you do, you will cause difficult situations to arise which will take years to untangle. Wait for God’s timing and He will do it without any heartache or disappointment. When it is a question of the providential will of God, wait for God to move.

Peter did not wait for God. He predicted in his own mind where the test would come, and it came where he did not expect it. “I will lay down my life for Your sake.” Peter’s statement was honest but ignorant. “Jesus answered him,’…the rooster shall not crow till you have denied Me three times'”(13:38) This was said with a deeper knowledge of Peter than Peter had of himself. He could not follow Jesus because he did not know himself or his own capabilities well enough. Natural devotion may be enough to attract us to Jesus, to make us feel His irresistible charm, but it will never make us disciples. Natural devotion will deny Jesus, always falling short of what it means to truly follow Him.