Wave Frequency

03/31/14 • -1 min

Road to Healing – Lenten Journey 2014
Day 29:
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It was only a few weeks ago that we began our Lenten Journey. We began in a hospital room, listening to the news describe a faith-healer who had lost his life to a poisonous snake. It wasn’t supposed to happen like that. His prayers were for a healing and yet he died.

Does God hear our prayers? It is a common question. What prompts us to ask this question is that our wishes – our requests – have not been answered to our liking. That is, we pray to God with certain expectations and when we don’t receive the answer we were hoping for, we believe that our prayers are not being heard.
In the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7) Jesus speaks about prayer in this manner, “When you are praying, do not heap up empty phrases ... for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.”
If this is the case, then there is something wrong in our definition of a prayer. Traditionally we’ve been told that prayer is a conversation with God. Conversation implies speaking and listening. There is no such thing as a one-way conversation. You give and receive. But Jesus says that our Father knows what our wants are before we ask! Therefore, there is another function to prayer and that is that it is also a prayer with the self! God knows our wants and our needs, but many times we do not know them! As strange as that sounds, it’s true. Prayer means speaking and listening and in listening the inner self is awakened to its needs.
During this Road to Healing, we’ve been engaged in prayer and meditation. The reason for this practice is so that our inner self is tuned into its needs and its growth. Think of the hundreds and thousands of radio signals that are travelling through the airwaves right now – some are captured by your radio and played through speakers, others are captured by your phone, your neighbor’s phone, your friend’s phone and heard in the earpiece. Other signals are heard on the police band or on airplane frequency. So when you tune-in a radio to a certain frequency, what you’re really doing is tuning-out all the other frequencies. Imagine what a mess it would be if a radio didn’t have a dial and picked up every radio wave that was traveling through the air! It would be chaotic! In the same manner, when we tune-in to our needs and our desires, we’re really filtering-out all the things that are not our concern, that are not pertinent to our own situation.
To use our healing metaphor, if you go into a hospital to have your right leg operated on, you certainly don’t expect the surgeon to cut up your left leg! If you have a tummy-ache, you don’t need to look at remedies for itchy-scalp. When your marriage is on the rocks, X-raying your teeth is unnecessary. In other words, our prayer life is not about telling God what our needs are – but telling our self that our remedy is on a frequency that we need to tune-in to and hear.
The healing that we are looking for is from within and without. This week we begin a new cycle on this Road. Be prepared.
Let us pray,
Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Your will be done,on earth as it is in heaven.Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And do not bring us to the time of trial, but rescue us from the evil one. Amen.
This is Fr. Vazken inviting you to join me again tomorrow as we continue on the Road to Healing.
Produced by Suzie Shatarevyan for epostle.net
Photo: Sequoia Flower (c)2002 Fr. Vazken Movsesian
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Prayer & Fasting

Road to Healing – Lenten Journey 2014
Day 27:
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They thought they could do it. They were charged by Jesus to heal the sick, so when a man

brought his son to the Disciples for a healing it was just a matter of following procedures. But this time, something was off. They were unable to heal the boy.

The story is picked up in the Gospel of Matthew (in chapter 17). The man brought his son to Jesus for a healing complaining that the Disciples were unable to remove the evil from his son. Jesus heals the boy by extracting the disease and illness from his body. The Disciples had tried but failed. They wanted to know why they were unable to expel the disease from the boy?

Jesus explains, “Because of the littleness of your faith; for truly I say to you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible to you. But this kind does not go out except by prayer and fasting.”

It is to the two conditions of faith – the catalysts of the faith in action, so to speak – prayer and fasting on which we focus today.

We have the power within us to bring about the changes necessary to move mountains, that is, to make the seemingly impossible truly possible. Healing disease and illness, amending our lifestyle, altering our course and direction, mending the holes in our relationships and living in harmony are all attainable. The mustard seed is of such small size and proportion. When faith is there, it’s there. The quality control on faith, so to speak, is governed by prayer and fasting.

The parable of the “Unrighteous Judge” in the Gospel of Luke (chapter 18) is a rather bizarre story of a powerless woman who brings down the politically potent and ruthless magistrate by being persistent. The story is so off that it warrants a note of intention by the author so that there’s no misunderstanding by the reader: “And Jesus spoke this parable about their need to always pray and not to lose heart.”

Faith is yours. You have it. You’re on this journey, aren’t you? The need for prayer and fasting are matters of discipline. They are the necessary tools by which faith stays alive, that is, faith does not stay dormant and useless, but alive and active. It might be easy to think of it in scientific terms of potential and kinetic energy. Our faith is stored (potential), waiting to move the mountains in our life. When we pray and fast, the energy is pushed into motion, so that it manifests in the actions of our life.

Prayer is the conversation you have with God and yourself. Fasting is the cleansing and the discipline of body so that mind and soul find a place within the whole. The seemingly impossible is made possible because faith is now activated in your life.

We pray today,
Lord, open my heart to your love. Open my mind to your wisdom. Open my body to your healing. I acknowledge the faith that is planted in my spirit. Push it to the brink of my soul so that it moves into every part of my body to become the action of my life, to bring about complete recovery of my ills, peace and harmony to my spirit and the world. Amen.

This is Fr. Vazken inviting you to join me again tomorrow as we continue on the Road to Healing.

Photo: Soul (c) 2011 Fr. Vazken Movsesian
Produced by Suzie Shatarevyan for http://epostle.net

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Humor

Road to Healing – Lenten Journey 2014
Day 30:
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“Fire! The house across the street is on fire! Quick come and look out the window.” Young Anna ran from her bedroom to the front room of the house and stared out into the street. No smoke, no flames. And then, in a devilish manner her father proclaimed, “April Fools!”

It was a dirty trick to play on a young kid, especially my mother. But all is fair in love, in war and on April Fools’ Day. My mother remembers that prank to this day. And though she might have missed a heart beat on that day, now, 70 years later, she tells the story of the prank with a big smile on her face. In fact, it’s now become part of the family folklore to play the “Grandpa April Fools’ Prank” on the First.
April Fools is a lighthearted “feast.” Obviously, there’s no holiday or national mandate to celebrate it, but in many cultures people stop to have a mischievous go at fooling people. In fact, companies even get into the spirit with pranks that are sometimes so believable they attract a following. For instance, in 1998 Burger King published a full page ad in USA Today announcing a new item on their menu: The Left-Handed Whopper. They claimed it was designed for the 32 million left-handed Americans. The twist? The burger included all the same ingredients as the original Whopper but the condiments were rotated 180 degrees! Thousands of customers went into restaurants to request the new sandwich, while many others requested the “right handed” version!
As a kid, when I thought of my grandfather playing the fire-trick on my mom as well as his entire family, I never really understood how could a grown man do this? After all, this was grandpa and pranks are for kids. But as I grew older, I was more intrigued that he engaged in this type of humor considering he was a genocide survivor. Only 20 years earlier, he had seen the devastation of his country, family and home. He built a new life on the ashes of devastation, hardship and despair. And yet... when it came time to play, he could play with the best. He smiled and laughed. As a kid, I remember his contagious laugh as I sat in his lap and watched the 3 Stooges on TV.
Humor is so important to a healthy lifestyle and a necessary ingredient to healing. Sometimes our hardships are so great that we think we may never laugh or smile again. I think of the generations which witnessed the most absurd and heinous of all crimes, genocide, and yet they are able to rebound with a smile and a laugh. In that humor they found a new beginning – the possibility to hope and dream again.
Children come into this world believing and hoping. It is for this reason they smile and laugh. Today is the day to connect to that primal hope and faith. Don’t look too far, it’s inside of you. No matter how bad things get, find some time to smile and laugh. And if you can, laugh out loud!
Today’s mediation is on humor. Think of anything that makes you smile or makes you laugh. If it’s difficult, close your eyes and revert to a good time in your life. Perhaps you can remember the first time you met your child and tears came down your face because of joy! Think of a play or a movie, let it be primitively absurd, slapstick, or sophisticatedly jocular, witty. Let it induce a smile on your face. Now hold it right there. Hold the thought and your smile. Did you feel that? For that moment, as brief as it was, nothing else really mattered. Now understand that the change was your doing. You decided and you brought about an end to your pain and a joy to your heart.
This is Fr. Vazken, assuring you that today’s message was not an April Fools’ joke, and to be certain, join me again tomorrow as we continue on the Road to Healing.
Produced by Suzie Shatarevyan for epostle.net
Get A Lenten Journey with Fr. Vazken delivered by email
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