Seasons.

"Have you nothing to pray for? Let us suggest the Church, the ministry, your own soul, your children, your relations, your neighbours, your country, and the cause of God and truth throughout the world. Let us examine ourselves on this important matter. Do we engage with lukewarmness in private devotion? Is the fire of devotion burning dimly in our hearts? Do the chariot wheels drag heavily? If so, let us be alarmed at this sign of decay. Let us go with weeping, and ask for the Spirit of grace and of supplications. Let us set apart special seasons for extraordinary prayer. For if this fire should be smothered beneath the ashes of a worldly conformity, it will dim the fire on the family altar, and lessen our influence both in the Church and in the world."

It's wedding season, indeed. Wedding season is always a perplexing one for me. One where efforts put forth are at their most ardent, while it often seems that such a season is the most tiresome for my soul.

Weddings are intended to represent the pinnacle of human love. The moment in which two souls are binded together by the promises they offer to another. They are celebrations of the people we have come to know as friends and compatriots. Somewhere apart from all the regalia of what to bring, proper manners and ediquitte is the connection that is unseen, a deeper underpinning and sense we have for another to see joy be realized into the people that we have come to love. Our outpourings for our beloved friends always seem to include, tears, hugs, and assorted expressions of live. These expressions are not manifestations of the actions themselves, rather, they are borne from a joy and love into which our souls simply can no longer contain.

Do we ever feel that sort of joy in our private devotions? Are our outpourings of joy ever analogous to what we pray for and receive from God? Or do our purposes and our rules for conduct obscure the present Joy that constantly exist in the revelations of the Holy Spirit.

The incompleteness of our nature maintains that when we are far from the spirit and far from his presence, that indeed we should weep. But it is not only brokenness that should cause us to weep, rather, the joy of being near Christ must produce the same. So in so much as we have a season of joy for the newness of love, we must have the same season for the birth of new prayers. You must not let the macinisims of worldly conformity falsify and confirm our flesh to it's ends, rather, we must recognize the joy that is ever present in the spirit.