Wellbeing

Proverbs 4:20-22 

Dear friend, listen well to my words;
    tune your ears to my voice.
Keep my message in plain view at all times.
    Concentrate! Learn it by heart!
Those who discover these words live, really live;
    body and soul, they’re bursting with health.

What is your prescription for a good life, a life of fullness, inner satisfaction and health?

Here, in this verse from proverbs we find a prescription to be followed. I recall an lovely elderly lady who, when speaking of the medication that she had been prescribed said, “That she must have a signpost inside her that directed each dose to the right place in her body to do its work.”

A number of folk have through the years, recited their own prescription for living, here are just a few.

“Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it." — Charles R. Swindoll

“Change your thoughts, and you change your world.”— Norman Vincent Peale

"It always seems impossible until it's done." — Nelson Mandela

“"If you cannot do great things, do small things in a great way." — Napoleon Hill

"If opportunity doesn't knock, build a door." — Milton Berle

But just like a prescription, it is not the reading of it that brings about the result in our lives, it is following its instructions.

On a walking pilgrimage to Assisi in Italy, the writer Patricia Hampl began to make a list in answer to the question, What is prayer? She wrote down a few words. Praise. Gratitude. Begging/pleading/cutting deals. Fruitless whining and pulling. Focus. And then the list broke off, for she discovered that prayer only seems like an act of language: “Fundamentally it is a position, a placement of oneself.”

She went on to discover that “prayer as focus is not a way of limiting what can be seen; it is a habit of attention brought to bear on all that is.” Ah, a habit of attention. Be still. In that focus, all else comes into focus. In that rift in my routine, the universe falls into alignment.

God our Father,
only You can give meaning and purpose to life.
Let Your Word, rich as it is,
pierce deeply into our hearts
and change our lives,
so that we may know life at its best,
and learn to live for You and for others.
Through Christ our Lord.

Amen.