# Letting go Day 3 > Come to Stillness: Take a few minutes to allow your mind and heart to be still before God. ### Opening Prayer: *Take, Lord, and receive all that I am and have. You’ve given it all to me; I give it all back to you. Do with me as you want. Just give me your love and your grace and that’s enough. ~St. Ignatius* #### Psalm for the Week: Psalm 130 #### My Soul Waits for the Lord #### A Song of Ascents. *130 Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord! 2 O Lord, hear my voice!Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my pleas for mercy!3 If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand? 4 But with you there is forgiveness, that you may be feared.* *5 I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I hope;6 my soul waits for the Lord more than watchmen for the morning, more than watchmen for the morning.7 O Israel, hope in the Lord! For with the Lord there is steadfast love, and with him is plentiful redemption.8 And he will redeem Israel from all his iniquities.* #### Scripture for the Day: Mark 8:31-38 #### Jesus Foretells His Death and Resurrection *31 And he began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes and be killed, and after three days rise again. 32 And he said this plainly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. 33 But turning and seeing his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man.”* *34 And calling the crowd to him with his disciples, he said to them, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. 35 For whoever would save his life[a] will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel's will save it. 36 For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? 37 For what can a man give in return for his soul? 38 For whoever is ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him will the Son of Man also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.”* #### Reading for Reflection: *As long as I am plagued by doubts about my self-worth, I keep looking for gratification from people around me and yield quickly to any type of pain, mental or physical. But when I can slowly detach myself from this need for human affirmation and discover that it is in relationship with Jesus that I find my true self, an unconditional surrender to him becomes not only possible but even the only desire, and pain inflicted by people will not touch me in the center. When my self is anchored not in people but in God, I will have a much greater resistance against pain. (The Genesee Diary by Henri J. M. Nouwen)* *Only prayer allows us to hear another voice, to respond to the larger possibilities, to find a way out of our need to order and control. Then the questions that seem to shape our identity will not matter so much: Who says good things about me? Who doesn’t? Who is my friend? My enemy? How many like me? As we make God the center of our lives, our sense of who we are will depend less on what others think of or say about us. We will cease being prisoners of the interpersonal. (Turn My Mourning Into Dancing by Henri J.M. Nouwen)* #### Reflection and Listening: silent and written #### Prayer: for the church, for others, for myself #### Song for the Week: I Lift My Hands *I lift my hands to the coming King* *To the great I Am, to you I sing* *For you’re the One that reigns within my heart* *I will serve no foreign gods,* *nor any other treasure* *For you are my heart’s desire,* *your Spirit without measure* *Unto you I will bring my sacrifice* ### Closing Prayer: *Lord God, be the delight of our hearts, even as we are the delight of yours. And help us to leave behind all thoughts, actions, and attitudes that do not reflect the beauty of that delight. May everything else pale in comparison with the passion we have to be truly yours. In the name of Jesus. Amen. (JLB)*