The choices we make with our attention reveal who and what shapes our identity, who and what we worship. Attention on Jesus helps us experience being loved by Him...this is at the heart of starting to pray to Him. Praying with attention on Jesus, His loving us, motivates us to choose His love, His way at a crossroad. Each time we choose Jesus, our identity from selfish moves closer to God's beloved.

Our busy lives challenge attention shifting to God. So we ask Him to help us! He wants to help us pay attention to Love! When we shift attention to Him, our praying changes. Instead of attention on our pain, problems and what we want from God, our attention focuses on His presence. Focusing on God's presence during prayer gets us experiencing being loved. Being loved is what changes our identity because our attention on God begins worship.

When we look with attention on Jesus, we can face truth about Him and ourselves more honestly as we are being loved by Him. This closer movement toward God helps us choose His way for us. God's way brings us to life, love, and truth...moment by moment over time as we as we talk with Him. Then how can we want anything more than to choose His way for us more and more.

Rest at the crossroads praying with attention on Jesus.

Rest praying is life changing!

Moment by moment, be transformed by Love.

Pain is a crossroad each one of us faces, moment by moment, every day. Pain is operating no matter which decision we make. The familiar road in the limbic system part of our brains that avoids pain, runs, hides or pretends pain away, leads to death. The unfamiliar road of facing and walking through pain with Jesus leads to life.

The truth is, there is no easy way. Pain ignored grows more pain. Pain faced is an endurance work. Walking through pain with Jesus is hard work. But it's also the work that brings us to rest. Rest is the trust we grow in Jesus as we let Him transform our pain for us.

The Bible tells us each of us has a darkness in us that Jesus wants to transform for us with His light. Changing our darkness into His light is a developmental process. He wants to go into the far reaches of deeper, darker spaces to free parts of our mind stuck in pain. He won't stop until He completely frees us! Jesus love grows love in us so that we can love Him back, love ourselves and love each other.

Genesis 3 tells us the origin story of pain for the human race. It started with mistrust of God's goodness. Pain ignored just grows more pain. Pain directs us to live our lives based on lies instead of truth. We can change this by inviting the Holy Spirit to bring us to truth. He can free us from our bondage lies that manufacture into busyness. We choose busyness as one of our “go to” methods to avoid our pain. We can be freed to rest from these lies producing pain and start living in truth with the Spirit.