Today’s Prayer to Passage will be from the book ‘The Four Agreements’ by Don Miguel Ruiz.

Today I pray, “Dear God,  I know there are supposed to be deserts in life.  Times when we feel that You are not here, that You’ve foresaken us, or that You are absent so that we may grow in our fondess to Your good-natured affinity for us.  Even when all seems lost, I know You are still here.  And I am still, knowing that You are God.  Thank you for Your enduring Love.  Amen.”

I held the closed book in my hands, concentrating on my prayer, and opened the book to this passage on page 111:

“You spend the day wrapped up in your emotions.  You have no energy to keep going, and you just want to walk away from everything.
Every day we awake with a certain amount of mental, emotional, and physical energy that we spend throughout the day. If we allow our emotions to deplete our energy, we have no energy to change our lives or to give to others.
The way you see the world will depend on the emotions you are feeling. When you are angry, everything around you is wrong, nothing is right. You blame everything including the weather; whether it’s raining or the sun is shining, nothing pleases you. When you are sad, everything around you is sad and makes you cry. You see the trees and you feel sad; you see the rain and everything looks so sad. Perhaps you feel vulnerable and have a need to protect yourself because you don’t know in what moment someone will attack you. This is because you see the world with the eyes of fear!
Imagine that the human mind is the same as your skin. You can touch healthy skin and it feels wonderful. Now imagine you have an injury and the skin gets cut and infected. If you touch the infected skin, it is going to hurt, so you cover and try to protect the skin. You will not enjoy being touched because it hurts.
Now imagine that all humans have this skin disease. Nobody can touch each other because it is going to hurt. Everyone has wounds on their skins, so the infection is seen as normal, the pain is also considered normal; we believe we are supposed to be that way.
Can you imagine how we would behave with each other if all the humans in the world had this skin disease? Of course we would hardly ever hug each other because it would be too painful. So we would need to create a lot of distance between us.
The human mind is exactly like this description of infected skin. Every human has an emotional body completely covered with infected wounds. Each wound is infected with emotional poison — the poison of all the emotions that make us suffer, such as hate, anger, envy, and sadness. An action of injustice opens a wound in the mind and we react with emotional poison because of the concepts and beliefs we have about injustice and what is fair. The mind is so wounded and full of poison by the process of domestication, that everyone describes the wounded mind as normal. This is considered normal, but I can tell you it is not normal.”
—DON MIGUEL RUIZ

I needed to be reminded that the sadness and emptiness and sense of loss is that of a wounded mind. I needed this book today. The Four Agreements reframes my focus, and I do feel God speak to me through the wisdom presented upon its pages. God speaks to us every day in many various mediums. There is no shortage of communication that would separate us from God. It is normal for God to speak to us, always. What ends up in a desert, searching, is our listening.