It's all so quiet. Shh! Shhhhhhhh!

Listen to that... That, my friends, is the sound of my sanity returning.  That is the sound of three children going to school and one to preschool.  And do you know what? The baby smiled.  A totally unprovoked smile (well, actually he farted and thought it was funny).  That means that the baby may finally be recovering from the horrors of THE BUG.  I have no idea how my big boy recovered from the horror of THE BUG in record time but I'm putting it down to prayer.  Lots and lots of prayer.

So what did I do with my new-found peace and (almost) quiet? Did I clean the house? Nope.  Did I tackle laundry mountain? Nope.  Did I sit and eat chocolate? Nope.  Well, actually, yes, I did.  But not until I had done three other special things for Lent.

I fasted
I went to mid-week Holy Communion at church
I meditated

One of these has been known to happen before (the church one, every so often I sneak in with the baby for a Thursday service), the other two would make my mother fall off her perch if she knew (hi mum xxx).

Let me explain.  I don't do fasting or meditating.  They are both Spiritual things that other people do.  And yet,it is Lent so in the spirit of creating space for God I decided to try both and find out what the Spiritual experience was like.

I was a lightweight when it came to fasting and only skipped breakfast.  In my defense, I am still breastfeeding the baby and unwell so my decision was as much about being sensible as it was about being hungry.  Did fasting do anything to help my journey with God today? Yes, I think it did.  I had already decided that whenever I felt a hunger pang, I would pray.  I was pretty hungry so lots of praying happened.

But what about the meditation? Well, here's the thing.  We live pretty close to a large Buddhist community and they regularly run meditation workshops.  I have a number of friends who are interested in meditation and so I wanted to find out what the big deal was.  I'm also really intrigued by the brain science surrounding meditation.  So, I have decided to try meditation as a spiritual practice over the course of Lent.

There are a few things that I need to make clear at this point:

I will not be 'emptying my mind'
I will not be sitting cross-legged and saying 'ommmmm'
I will be trying a number of different Christian meditation practices
I will let you know how it is going every so often

I'm not going to explain these choices today, I'll save that for another post.  But today's experiment - how did it go?????

I may possibly have spent a little while examining the insides of my eyelids.  Sorry.  I feel like I've let the team down.  I was pretty tired having spent much of last night coughing, then writing a sermon, then coughing quite a lot more.

 I was supposed to pray a 'mantra' over and over again for 30 minutes.  I thought that I could try 10 minutes.  I managed to say the suggested mantra three times before I decided that I needed to change it.  The suggested mantra was 'maranatha' which is Aramaic for 'The Lord has come' or 'Come Lord' depending on how you translate it.  It felt ridiculous repeating a foreign word that scholars can't even agree on how it should be translated and this annoyed me (you can probably see why my meditation attempt failed today) so I ended up repeating 'Come Holy Spirit' instead.  Why did I say that? Well, for me, it is familiar, comfortable and safe.  I know that if I ask the Holy Spirit to come, I am not inviting any other spirits to fill my mind and body.  I'm not up for risking that.  I've seen the fall out from friends who have played with ouija boards.  Anyway, I digress.  After being filled with the sense of peace that the Holy Spirit brings, I fell asleep.  It was great! Exactly what I needed.

Maybe my first meditation experiment wasn't such a failure after all?