DID YOU KNOW?
V.C. Kitchen said, “Before I started having a quiet time every morning, I used to sit down and instead make an elaborate plan for that day’s work.” On his list there would be jobs that had to be completed, people that had to be seen, phone calls that he had to make, and letters that he had to write.
Nowadays, however, he says that: I now simply ask God’s guidance for the day. He strikes from my list the jobs, visits, calls and letters that would afterwards have proved unnecessary or untimely while, at the same time, He reminds me of matters I myself had not considered.
He also fills my day to a nicety—laying out just enough work for me to finish in an easy natural stride without fuss or strain.
By doing this, Kitchen says, he now receives supernatural aid every day, not through using some magical Ouija Board, peering into a crystal ball or using tarot cards, but through simply developing his God-consciousness. The reason why he could not do this at first, he discovered, was because he still had to make a full surrender. He had to quit trying to be the captain of his own soul. He had to quit trying to do everything by will power and clever strategies. As long as he was doing that, he was still trying to supply all the power himself.
And he still continued doing that for a while, he said, after he first joined the Oxford Group, “even after I learned that power for moral growth would have to come from God.” But gradually he learned to trust God (what the Apostle Paul called saving faith), and once he was willing to let go and let God take care of things, he received all the guidance and power that he needed to live a full, rich, productive and satisfying life. “Show me your glory.”
One way we learn to feel God’s immediate presence is through practicing a quiet time every day. But there are other ways to feel God’s presence. There is an important passage in the Old Testament, in Isaiah 6:3, in which the prophet Isaiah described his vision in Solomon’s temple. He saw the mighty throne of God, and seraphim with six wings flying abut the throne and singing continually: Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of His glory.” This passage gets repeated, with various adaptations, in a vast number of Jewish and Christian liturgies it is so central to developing full God-consciousness. The entire universe, and everything in it, is filled with the divine glory. We can learn to feel God’s majesty and power in and behind all the things of nature.
Kitchen says that he used to think that a beautiful sunset, for example, was just that, nothing more, some splendid colors that caused him to feel a certain kind of aesthetic pleasure if he looked at it. The sky, ocean, the trees and mountains, and the animals and birds were simply that and nothing more.
But then he started to see them as the works of a mighty Creator, and begun to realize that this was God’s hand at work which he was looking at. He says that he learned to see, with the poet Wadsworth, a divine presence everywhere and in all things.
A presence that disturbs me with joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense of sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thoughts
And rolls through all things.
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