My heart feels such a strong yearning for union with God that it is an actual stirring in the heart within my chest, a physical response mirroring my spirit’s deep longing . . .

I am drawn to the description of the Quaker approach
to worship:
   ‘WORSHIP, according to the ancient practice of the Religious Society of Friends, is entirely without any human direction or supervision. A group of devout persons come together and sit down quietly with no prearrangement, each seeking to have an immediate sense of divine leading and to know at first hand the presense of the Living Christ. It is not wholly accurate to say that such a Meeting is held on the basis of Silence; it is more accurate to say that it is held on the basis of ‘Holy Obedience.’ Those who enter such a Meeting can harm in two specific ways: first, by an advance determination to speak; and second, by advance determination to keep silent. The only way in which a worshipper can help such a Meeting is by an advance determination to try to be responsive in listening to the still small voice and doing whatever may be commanded. Such a Meeting is always a high venture of Faith and it is to this venture we invite you this hour.”

(The People Called Quakers, D. Elton Trueblood ©1966, Harper and Row edition 1966, Friends United Press edition, 1971)

To feel neither the constraint of not speaking nor the pressure of having to speak . . . it seems my human nature is not comfortable with “undefined time” and I tend to feel the need to schedule and have itineraries and know there is some person responsible for the flow of the time we spend together.

To be still and to allow that stillness to permeate my being . . . to fix the eyes of my heart on Jesus . . . to quell the activity of my mind . . . to hold without anxiety to my listening heart . . . to allow trust in God to flow as peace in me . . . to be open to an expression of that God presence, verbal or not . . . to allow the discomfort of total surrender to be washed away into that unfathomable depth that is God who draws me and longs for
relationship with me . . . amazing and totally unimaginable!