It has been said that when Martin Luther was too busy to pray, he added an hour to his schedule to accommodate it. He didn't trust his personal gauge of priorities and anxiety. His practice underscores the idea that connecting spiritually can bring us a sense of peace. During prayer, despite the stress in and around us, we are reconnected with and grounded in God, who can help us handle our stress and take on our burdens. If we do not reconnect with God, stress can run us over like a Mack truck.

Conversely, when we are spiritually unwell, we're vulnerable to stress. Stress gets to us, and so we feel separated from God. The psalmist in Psalm 22 voices that feeling: “My God, my God why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me? . . . I cry by day but you do not answer” (v. 14).

But as we know, God never abandons us. That feeling of separation is due to our inattention to our relationship with God, or our doing things that hurt our relationship with God. During these times, life becomes disorienting. Stressful. We feel afraid. We begin to close up and build walls for self-protection. But instead of protecting ourselves, when we close up and shut things out, we are shutting ourselves off. We don’t recognize the valuable and necessary resources in other people and in helpful practices. This shut-off feeling is like a room that's closed off over the summer — it becomes musty and dusty and dry, uncomfortable even for bugs.

In the beginning, God created us to have relationships. Genesis 2:7 says, “then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.”

God breathed into humanity, inspired us, and gave us the Holy Spirit. This is how we are meant to live, in a whole and balanced life. By keeping the Holy Spirit alive in us, we are renewed when we devote time and energy to our spiritual lives.

Picture a kitchen sponge: What happens when a sponge is dried out? It is inflexible, unuseable, hard. If you try to bend it, it cracks, breaks, crumbles.

And so it is with our spirit. As goes our spirit, so goes the temple it is housed in. If our spirit gets dried out from lack of immersion in the Spirit, we get stressed. Our dry spirit cannot handle what comes our way. Under pressure, we crack or crumble.

Now imagine soaking that kitchen sponge in water. What happens? It softens and becomes flexible and useful. When you press on a soaked sponge, water comes out. Similarly, this inbreathing of God’s Spirit does us good, just like a sponge soaked in fresh, clean water. Under pressure, the spiritually connected release God’s love.

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