“‘Hineni’ is a pure, astonished, unguarded affirmation given before all the facts are known. It is a spontaneous, unequivocal commitment promising: ‘I am here,’ where and as you found me, fully attentive, focused, all in. And even more, ‘I am here’ — all of me, with all that I am and all that I can be.” — Nina Beth Cardin
Lately, I’ve been stretched thin, like a workout band pulled too taut and held there, straining at its limit for too many days. My mind runs ahead of my body; then, exhausted, falls behind it, as my hands anxiously flitter over fields of tasks too numerous for me to hold. I am running too far, too fast, too frenzied to attend to any one thing with my full presence.
This is not the Beautiful Way I’m meant to live. Nor is it yours.
I love David when he says, “I run the path of your commands.” He meant in one sense the path of God’s law, but he is touching something much deeper here than simple obedience. He is talking about intimacy … about withness. When he says “the path of your commands,” he means, I think, the path of God’s presence, the Hineni of God and me, astonishing in the sheer glory of its aliveness, its every moment an eternal now. For, as David writes elsewhere:
“One thing I have asked from the Lord, that I shall seek: That I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, To behold the beauty of the Lord and to meditate in His temple.”
Life is meant to be lived with God, not for God. But the demands of our days swirl like a whirlwind around our heads, and I for one am far too easily swept up in the futile panic to snatch them all from the air before they hit the ground.
Our culture cloaks this madness behind words like hustle, or ambition, or productivity. But I don’t believe that kind of striving is the Divine path any of us are meant to follow. On that path lies a wild, free dance, a Wu Wei of enter-play where Spirit is the lead and I relax into the follow. It is a whitewater river thundering down the mountainside, yet fully at rest in gravity’s embrace. It is the song being sung by the Singer, the story being written by the unseen hand of God. It is a lovers’ embrace, where two become one, and out of that union new life is born, each of them bursting in the light of the eternal now.
Anything less, or other than this, is sleepwalking. Done too long, it is death. There are a million ways to survive this life, but only one way to truly live it: one simple moment at a time, at rest in the Presence that created you, and is still creating you right now.
A prayer for when you feel overwhelmed:
Eternal Loving Presence, my God, from Whom I come and to Whom I am returning … I surrender everything. I let go my frantic thoughts. I open my grasping hands, and allow them to fall limp, relaxing into yours. I renounce my striving, and choose to be fully present to my life as it is right now … rest over struggle, trust over fear, presence over control. Great Spirit, I am right here.
Henini …