Buttonholes

I don’t know how to sew on a button, but give me needle and enough thread and I will figure out a way to reattach the button – albeit in beastly fashion. Perhaps more difficult than adding a button is making a buttonhole – creating a space through which a button can enter.

God is like a button, for many of us. He is something (sadly a “thing,” not appropriately a Person) that we hope to add to our life or to sew back on when life becomes tattered and worn. But God is not a religion or something for me to lash to my life where and when I think He should be. My God-stitching is beastly – overly verbose prayers, self-righteous acts, attention-grabbing service.

Perhaps you, too, have wondered how to sew God back onto your life, but there is something else equally as difficult – and vital: We must make a buttonhole. Create a space silent enough for God’s whisper to enter. How can we expect to bring life together – like two halves of a jacket – if buttons have no buttonholes?

I regularly ask for “more of God” – as if He were only partially present. But what I need to pray for and create are holes: silent slits in time through which God can slip into my life. Creating a buttonhole of silence is so much more than merely “cutting open a slot” in my schedule; it requires disciplined stitches surrounding the space to keep it from unraveling into a mind-wandering, Godless hole.

I’m learning that prayer involves less “begging for more of God;” instead, simply opening myself to His Presence.