The quiet in the loud

Today was an ordinary day in mid-June in central Texas: sunny and hot and still.  It was also my day to mow the rather large lawn at my church.  Dayspring Baptist Church is housed on a beautifully rolling piece of property.  It isn't far from a main highway and yet somehow, whether graced with a blessing of stillness and serenity or shielded by the tall Texan trees that separate its grounds from the busyness of the highway, this landscape is always quiet.

The stillness and the quiet of Dayspring's property are not merely physical.  There is an ethereal stillness and an otherworldly tranquility that is infused within the physicality of this place.  An ancient, or better yet, a timeless sanctity abounds here, as if the hills and the trees, the buildings made of stone and the iron bells, the roadrunners and the wild turkeys, the grasses and the flowers all exist in perpetual genuflection before an eternal Presence that knows them and calls them each by name.

In this place, one knows what it is to pray unceasingly; the Presence of the divine Spirit that lays thick in this "thin place"-- this place where the curtain of hiddenness that conceals the superabundance of Beauty that forms all reality is pulled back-- compels prayer.  In this place, prayer becomes as natural as inhalation; prayer becomes the simple language of one's breath.