MEDITATION: The Thin Hour

Once, while sharing about his own prayer life, a well known preacher mentioned a practice which over time became quite helpful for my own prayer life.
He told his audience how every morning, shortly after he had woken up, in that time when he  is still slumbering for the last few minutes before actually getting up, he usually just quietly rests in the Biblical promise of God’s constant love and everlasting presence.

The preacher had a name for this early moment with his Creator – he called it his thin hour.

The thin hour is that moment when the boundary between the earthly and the so called heavenly, the visible and the invisible, that of which we are immediately conscious and that which is mysteriously obscure, but also present,  falls away – when the reality of God becomes more transparent and tangible and we are able, in faith,  to quietly rest in God’s  presence; to embrace God promise that He is indeed “Abba”,  our Father and Mother,  who is always with us – with us when we go to sleep, but also when we wake up in the morning.

In his beautiful book on prayer Richard Foster acknowledges this kind of prayer. He calls it the prayer of the heart, or the so called Abba-prayer.  According to him this is a very intimate kind of prayer.  We usually pray this prayer when we as children of God have become tired of our own efforts to please God, or when sin and sorrow again cast their shadows of doubt and misery over us.

The prayer of the heart happens when we, in the words of Psalm 131, have calmed and quieted our soul and like a child peacefully rests at its mother’s breast.  In this thin, intimate hour we commit ourselves anew to God’s loving care  – we allow God to gently hold us so that when we finally get up to tackle a new day, even when the day lies dark and threatening before us, we may know that we are being cared for and being carried.

So why not try this thin hour when you wake up again tomorrow morning?

Carel Anthonissen

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