The Ragamuffin Gospel: Good News for the Bedraggled, Beat-Up, and Burnt Out

by Brennan Manning

Next, try this simple exercise in faith: Gently close your eyes and assume any position that is comfortable so long as you keep your spine straight—standing, sitting, kneeling or lying on your back with your knees bent. Imagine Jesus glancing at you either the way He glanced at the apostle John in the Upper Room when, in an incredible gesture of intimacy, he laid his head on Jesus’ chest; or the way He looked at the sinful woman washing His feet with her tears and drying them with her hair. For ten minutes pray over and over the first strophe of Psalm 23: “Yahweh is my shepherd, I lack nothing.” For the next ten minutes pray over this passage from Hosea and wherever you see the word Israel, replace it with your own name: When Israel was a child I loved him, out of Egypt I called my son. Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk, who took them in my arms; I drew them with human cords, with bands of love; I fostered them like one who raises an infant to his cheeks; Yet, though I stooped to feed my child,