Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Still Praying in the Wilderness and Other Essays for the Spiritually Thirsty
    Still Praying in the Wilderness and Other Essays for the Spiritually Thirsty
    Still Praying in the Wilderness and Other Essays for the Spiritually Thirsty
    Ebook100 pages1 hour

    Still Praying in the Wilderness and Other Essays for the Spiritually Thirsty

    By Rachel Starr Thomson

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    "I offer these essays as a window into my journey, believing that this window may prove to be a mirror—that what you read here will speak to you in your own circumstances. My prayer is that in your thirst, you might find something here to drink." from the Introduction

     

    Honest, lyrical, and intensely personal, this collection of essays by Rachel Starr Thomson address surrender and endurance and weakness and transcendence and spiritual depression. They're about a lifetime of Bible study, about struggles with legalism and self-condemnation, about finding grace. And they're about the power and creativity of God who is always working, shaping, and calling--the God who gives living water to all who thirst.

     

    Rachel Starr Thomson is the author of over twenty books who seeks to reveal Jesus through the power of words. Rachel lives in Southern Ontario, where she writes, studies, and drinks a lot of coffee.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLittle Dozen Press
    Release dateDec 12, 2015
    ISBN9781927658123
    Still Praying in the Wilderness and Other Essays for the Spiritually Thirsty
    Author

    Rachel Starr Thomson

    Rachel Starr Thomson is in love with Jesus and convinced the gospel will change the world. Rachel is a woman of many talents and even more interests: she’s a writer, editor, indie publisher, singer, speaker, Bible study teacher, and world traveler. The author of the Seventh World Trilogy, The Oneness Cycle, and many other books, she also tours North America and other parts of the world as a speaker and spoken-word artist with 1:11 Ministries. Adventures in the Kingdom launched in 2015 as a way to bring together Rachel’s explorations, in fiction and nonfiction, of what it means to live all of life in the kingdom of God. Rachel lives in the beautiful Niagara Region of southern Ontario, just down the river from the Falls. She drinks far too much coffee and tea, daydreams of visiting Florida all winter, and hikes the Bruce Trail when she gets a few minutes. A homeschool graduate from a highly creative and entrepreneurial family, she believes we’d all be much better off if we pitched our television sets out the nearest window. LIFE AND WORK (BRIEFLY) Rachel began writing on scrap paper sometime around grade 1. Her stories revolved around jungle animals and sometimes pirates (they were actual rats . . . she doesn’t remember if the pun was intended). Back then she also illustrated her own work, a habit she left behind with the scrap paper. Rachel’s first novel, a humorous romp called Theodore Pharris Saves the Universe, was written when she was 13, followed within a year by the more serious adventure story Reap the Whirlwind. Around that time, she had a life-changing encounter with God. The next several years were spent getting to know God, developing a new love for the Scriptures, and discovering a passion for ministry through working with a local ministry with international reach, Sommer Haven Ranch International. Although Rachel was raised in a strong Christian home, where discipleship was as much a part of homeschooling as academics, these years were pivotal in making her faith her own. At age 17, Rachel started writing again, this time penning the essays that became Letters to a Samuel Generation and Heart to Heart: Meeting With God in the Lord’s Prayer. In 2001, Rachel returned to fiction, writing what would become her bestselling novel and then a bestselling series–Worlds Unseen, book 1 of The Seventh World Trilogy. A classic fantasy adventure marked by Rachel’s lyrical style, Worlds Unseen encapsulates much of what makes Rachel’s writing unique: fantasy settings with one foot in the real world; adventure stories that explore depths of spiritual truth; and a knack for opening readers’ eyes anew to the beauty of their own world–and of themselves. In 2003, Rachel began freelance editing, a side job that soon blossomed into a full-time career. Four years later, in 2007, she co-founded Soli Deo Gloria Ballet with Carolyn Currey, an arts ministry that in 2015 would be renamed as 1:11 Ministries. To a team of dancers and singers, Rachel brought the power of words, writing and delivering original narrations, spoken-word poetry, and songs for over a dozen productions. The team has ministered coast-to-coast in Canada as well as in the United States and internationally. Rachel began publishing her own work under the auspices of Little Dozen Press in 2007, but it was in 2011, with the e-book revolution in full swing, that writing became a true priority again. Since that time Rachel has published many of her older never-published titles and written two new fiction series, The Oneness Cycle and The Prophet Trilogy. Over 30 of Rachel’s novels, short stories, and nonfiction works are now available in digital editions. Many are available in paperback as well, with more released regularly. The God she fell in love with as a teenager has remained the focus of Rachel’s life, work, and speaking.

    Read more from Rachel Starr Thomson

    Related to Still Praying in the Wilderness and Other Essays for the Spiritually Thirsty

    Related ebooks

    Christianity For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Power Of Three

      Jun 20, 2023

      Power Of Three
      7 min read

    • Article

      You Talkin’ To Me?

      Jul 26, 2022

      You Talkin’ To Me?
      3 min read

    • Article

      Music

      Oct 16, 2023

      IDLES are soon to release a new album TANGK. In this exclusive piece, singer and songwriter Joe Talbot writes about what’s at the heart of their new music “I feel our nation’s turning away from love… moving into a wilderness of spirit so intense we

      3 min read

    • Article

      The Spirit Of SOUL PRIDE

      Jun 9, 2022

      The Spirit Of SOUL PRIDE
      5 min read

    • Article

      Riz Ahmed

      Nov 20, 2020

      This year, you released an album (The Long Goodbye), co-created one film (Mogul Mowgli) and starred in another (Sound of Metal). Is there a common thread tying these projects together? The idea of apocalyptic events being the start of something is qu

      2 min read

    • Article

      Riz Ahmed

      Nov 20, 2020

      This year, you released an album (The Long Goodbye), co-created one film (Mogul Mowgli) and starred in another (Sound of Metal). Is there a common thread tying these projects together? The idea of apocalyptic events being the start of something is qu

      2 min read

    • Article

      Dream Big, Pray Big!

      May 27, 2020

      Dream Big, Pray Big!
      5 min read

    • Article

      Chelsea Wolfe

      Feb 4, 2020

      Chelsea Wolfe
      5 min read

    • Article

      Building Dreams

      Apr 28, 2020

      Building Dreams
      6 min read

    • Article

      Okkervil River

      Sep 12, 2016

      Okkervil River
      9 min read

    • Article

      Sir Kenneth Branagh

      Jan 17, 2022

      Sir Kenneth Branagh
      5 min read

    • Article

      Maria Brink

      Nov 9, 2023

      Maria Brink
      5 min read

    • Article

      Drama Queen

      Jun 1, 2019

      Drama Queen
      7 min read

    • Article

      Swimming Upstream

      May 21, 2019

      Swimming Upstream
      5 min read

    • Article

      Everywhere Around Us

      Sep 23, 2023

      Everywhere Around Us
      5 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Still Praying in the Wilderness and Other Essays for the Spiritually Thirsty

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Still Praying in the Wilderness and Other Essays for the Spiritually Thirsty - Rachel Starr Thomson

      Introduction

      IN MY EARLY YEARS AS a freelance writer, I had the privilege of writing for Boundless, a webzine for young adults. When that season closed, I had written a boatload of essays which are being republished in a series of short books like this one.

      I wrote a lot about practical discipleship and life issues, like education or finances. But sometimes I just got to write from and about the heart—and that’s where this collection stems from.

      The essays in this book come from an intensely personal place. They’re about surrender and endurance and weakness and transcendence and spiritual depression. They’re about a lifetime of Bible study, about struggles with legalism and self-condemnation, about finding grace. And they’re about the power and creativity of God who is always working, shaping, and calling. The God who gives living water to all who thirst.

      I offer them as a window into my journey, believing that this window may prove to be a mirror—that what you read here will speak to you in your own circumstances.

      My prayer is that in your thirst, you might find something here to drink.

      Rachel Starr Thomson

      The God Backstage

      OF ALL THE THRILLS in the world, few compare with that instant when all the lights go dim, the crowd hushes, and for a breathless moment the theatre hovers between the face of the deep and Let there be light.

      As a child, few things enchanted me more than a live performance. It’s an enchantment that hasn’t left me, and when I settle into a theatre seat and welcome the darkness before creation springs forth, I can hardly contain my anticipation.

      May 5, 2009, was an especially significant experience for me. The theatre was a school auditorium in Port Colborne, a small town in the Niagara area of Ontario, where I help run a performing arts ministry called Soli Deo Gloria Ballet. The performance was Hiding Place, a ballet based on Corrie Ten Boom’s true story of suffering, hope and forgiveness in the Holocaust. The group was Ballet Magnificat! Omega, thirteen young women who are not just dancers, but ministers of the gospel.

      The evening meant so much to me because I’d had such a large role in helping it happen—ever since my fellow Soli Deo director Carolyn Currey and I had visited Ballet Magnificat’s Mississippi headquarters in February and decided to host a performance, every day had been awash in planning, promotion, and prayer for the Hiding Place.

      May 4 arrived, bringing dancers with it; four stayed at our house while the other nine were picked up by other hosts or driven to host homes in the area. We ate and fellowshipped together, made last-minute phone calls, and almost felt the clock as it ticked down the hours.

      And finally it all happened. I helped set up, ran around talking to volunteers and handling last-second emergencies, joined the dancers in prayer, welcomed a nearly packed-out house, and settled into my seat in the centre of the theatre.

      Lights out. Hush.

      Let there be light.

      The performance was beautiful, as I knew it would be. Artistic, moving, powerful. An offering of creativity, skill, and story, given to the Creator of creativity, skill, and story. When the audience rose to their feet in applause at the end, my heart was bursting for the glory of the moment.

      But the moment, of course, is such a small part of the whole. Isn’t that always true? We think of life in terms of these grand moments, of the finished ballet or the symphony or the film or the drama, of the wedding or the birth, of the victory won or the miracle consummated. We mark time in anniversaries and commit to remember significant days forever.

      Assuredly God is in all these moments of glory. We sit back and drink them in; stand and applaud when they are over. But just as assuredly God is there in every mundane moment, in every inglorious hour. He is the God of the drama and the Lord of the dance. But he is also the God backstage.

      If I look closely, I think I will find there is great holiness in moments I call mundane.

      The audience that packed the theatre on May 5 saw an amazing show. But I saw one more amazing. I met the performers the night before, talked with them and enjoyed their company. The afternoon of the ballet, I helped drive them to the theatre, and I watched as they unloaded their trailers of equipment and worked together to transform a bare stage into a town in Holland, a concentration camp in Germany, a peace conference in Munich, and a place of worship for us all. I ran stage lights while Erin, Omega’s tour director, called out directions from her perch atop a ladder, making sure all was in order. I watched the dancers take class before the doors of the theatre opened and made sure they got enough trail mix, Diet Coke, and protein to hold them all up through the day.

      I didn’t see the work as Ballet Magnificat’s costume makers designed and sewed their costumes, as dancers put props together, as the choreographer chose music and created the ballet in the first place. I didn’t see the years of guidance and doubt, struggles and small miracles while God brought each dancer to Mississippi and led them into the company, or the years before that, when these girls from the southern states and the northern ones, from Poland and Germany and Canada, grew up and trained and decided they wanted to dance. I wasn’t there when God called each one out of darkness to serve his Son, or when he used experiences in their lives to sanctify and mold their hearts. I wasn’t there even before that, when he created each one in her mother’s womb, when he placed in them the physical ability to move as they do, when he placed in their souls the passion and commitment to do something so challenging and so beautiful, when he stamped his image into each child intricately woven in the depths of the earth (Psalm 139:15).

      I wasn’t there. I didn’t see that. All I saw was a few moments of glory. Everything else that led up to those moments was the handiwork of the God backstage—the God who specializes in intricate details that make up glorious wholes.

      Evidence of that God is absolutely everywhere, challenging me to recognize him, to live every moment with an awareness of his purpose, to trust to the final work of the Master.

      I look sometimes at my hands. They fascinate me. Four long fingers, each one perfectly hinged to give me grip and flexibility, and one opposable thumb—such a rare and strange thing in the abundance of earthly life forms. My fingers type thousands of words every day, sometimes close to one hundred of them per minute, but I never have to look at the keys—the muscles under my skin control my fingers automatically, following memories programmed into them by my brain. My nails need cutting again, as they have never in all my life ceased to grow, and the ends of my left fingers are calloused where they protect themselves from steel guitar strings. For the last ten years my skin has slowly been erasing the scars on my fingers and

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1