Dear Lighthouse Trails:
This is in response to your lead article on March 19, 2012: HOW LIGHTHOUSE TRAILS BEGAN – Part One: “It was a dark and stormy night.”
You don’t know us, as our ministry is not as well publicized as yours, but we identify with your work and calling. We depend on you guys in exposing these errors, and in your lead article today about how Lighthouse Trails got started—and we emphasize with your angst. Especially in this paragraph quoted below, though we deal mainly with a subject different from “contemplative prayer”:
You write: “We thought that if we could warn some of the more influential leaders (like Rick Warren), they would be so happy to be warned, they would probably go out and write their own books warning about (CD note: our subject of calling is different) contemplative prayer, and we could just go back to our “normal” lives and leave this kind of thing up to them.”
This happens to us almost on a daily basis in our ministry. When this happens, we take courage from the (entire) book of Habakkuk, and from the verse in Jeremiah below:
First, from the King James: “Thou hast run with the footmen, and they have wearied thee, then how canst thou contend with horses? and if in the land of peace, wherein thou trusteth, they wearied thee, then how wilt thou do in the swelling of Jordan?”
And then from the NASB: “If you have run with footmen and they have tired you out, Then how can you compete with horses? If you fall down in a land of peace, How will you do in the thicket of the Jordan?”
Though jousting with our own leaders (whom we see as the footmen) , we have not yet met the enemy, but fully believe that we are being prepared to do so. In our case, as you report in yours, the Lord is “…using the simple to confound the wise,” and thus we enjoy a fellowship with you guys though we don’t know you personally. This is just meant to encourage, and affirm the Lord’s encouragement to Elijah, when he complained about the actions of Jezebel: (Romans 11:4 referring to Elijah’s cry of discouragement in OT) ’ And what was God’s answer to him? “I have reserved for myself seven thousand who have not bowed the knee to Baal.” )
We have seen the contemplative issues come up in the Church at large (and have read your reports), but we have only recently seen the corroding effects of contemplative prayer in our intimate local circle—people who have mentored us, and people with whom we would trust our very lives!” So scary. Keep up the good work.
This must be the “fellowship of the saints”???
Many blessings, C_____
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