{"id":6988,"date":"2019-05-18T08:18:30","date_gmt":"2019-05-18T12:18:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/notstrictlyspiritual.com\/?p=6988"},"modified":"2022-04-25T21:04:17","modified_gmt":"2022-04-26T01:04:17","slug":"god-alone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/notstrictlyspiritual.com\/give-us-this-day\/god-alone\/","title":{"rendered":"God Alone"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<p><em>For those of you who, like me, may be struggling in our Church these day, I thought I would share my <a href=\"https:\/\/giveusthisday.org\/Digital\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Give Us This Day (opens in a new tab)\">Give Us This Day<\/a> reflection from two weeks ago. <\/em><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<p>I don\u2019t know why it always surprises me when I open up the daily Scriptures and find a reading that speaks right to my heart, as though God placed it there just for me. And so it was that at a time when I was struggling with some of the more human elements of Church, the underbelly of faith, I came to today\u2019s reading from Acts. \u201cWe must obey God rather than men,\u201d the apostles remind us, even as they faced persecution for \u201cthe sake of the name.\u201d While we may not have to deal with direct persecution in our daily lives, we often face revelations and realizations that can be as dangerous to our spiritual lives as the Sanhedrin\u2019s threats were to the apostles\u2019 physical lives. Despair and doubt, if allowed to fester, are destructive forces to be sure.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<p>But, if we obey God rather than men, it changes the dynamic. God alone. That is what we must hang our hopes on. Anything or anyone else is bound to be flawed, bound to disappoint, and in the process, likely to shake our faith and scar our souls at some point. So how to obey God first and only when we live in a human world? Prayer. Always prayer. When we are so hurt that we can\u2019t even say the prayers of our Church, we can say the prayers of our heart. Speak to God one-on-one, face-to-face, and let God heal your fractured soul.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<p><em>Mary DeTurris Poust, \u201cGod Alone,\u201d from the May 2019 issue of\u00a0Give Us This Day <a href=\"http:\/\/www.giveusthisday.org\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\" (opens in a new tab)\">www.giveusthisday.org<\/a>\u00a0(Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2019). Used with permission<\/em><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<p>Photo by\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/unsplash.com\/photos\/iIWF5HJstGY?utm_source=unsplash&amp;utm_medium=referral&amp;utm_content=creditCopyText\">Aaron Burden<\/a>\u00a0on\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/unsplash.com\/search\/photos\/god-alone?utm_source=unsplash&amp;utm_medium=referral&amp;utm_content=creditCopyText\">Unsplash<\/a><\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For those of you who, like me, may be struggling in our Church these day, I thought I would share my Give Us This Day reflection from two weeks ago. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":6989,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[528],"tags":[88,80,391,348,598,324],"class_list":["post-6988","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-give-us-this-day","tag-church","tag-faith","tag-give-us-this-day","tag-sex-abuse","tag-spiritual-reflections","tag-struggle"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v25.6 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>God Alone &#8211; Not Strictly Spiritual<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/notstrictlyspiritual.com\/give-us-this-day\/god-alone\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"God Alone &#8211; Not Strictly Spiritual\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"For those of you who, like me, may be struggling in our Church these day, I thought I would share my Give Us This Day reflection from two weeks ago. 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