When My Heart Stands Watch

There are seasons when something shifts inside me, almost imperceptibly at first. A restlessness rises from a place deeper than thought. Familiar patterns no longer anchor me. Prayer becomes an ache rather than a comfort. And I realize that God is drawing me toward a silence I have avoided and longed for in equal measure.

In those moments, I know I must begin to listen differently.

Not with my mind, but with my life.

A rule of discernment has become, for me, a way of listening.

A way of placing my heart before God without excuses,

without noise,

without distraction.

It is simple, painfully simple,

and yet it has begun to reveal more than I expected.

Fasting loosens something in me.

A small hunger in the morning pulls my soul upward,

toward a desire I can barely name.

It says to God, “I want You more than I want comfort.”

And somehow, without drama or effort,

it awakens a clarity that had been sleeping under the surface of my days.

Praying the Psalms each day steadies me.

They are not texts I recite,

but a language that slowly rewrites the interior geography of my heart.

Sometimes the words strike like arrows.

Sometimes they pass over me like wind.

But they shape me all the same,

the way water shapes stone.

And then there is the Jesus Prayer,

quiet, rhythmic, unceasing.

It gathers me.

It gathers my thoughts from their wandering

and draws them down into the place where God waits.

It teaches me that prayer is not many words

but steady presence.

Yet it is the vigil that has changed me the most.

When I rise in the night,

while the world sleeps and all is dark,

my heart stands exposed.

There is no hiding.

No pretense.

Only me, the silence, and God.

In that hour, I see the truth of myself more clearly.

The struggles I bury in daylight come forward.

The fears I ignore turn their faces toward me.

But so does grace.

A grace that does not crush me,

but steadies me.

Elder Aimilianos said that when a person keeps vigil,

Heaven bends down to meet him.

I have tasted that.

Not in visions or consolations,

but in a quiet knowing,

a shift in the air of my soul that says,

“God is near.

Be still.”

This rule, fasting, psalmody, Jesus Prayer, vigil,

has become less a discipline and more a way of breathing.

It gathers my scattered life.

It gives shape to my seeking.

It allows God to sift my heart

the way wheat is sifted on the threshing floor.

During the Philip’s Fast, or Great Lent,

or any season that feels like a threshold,

this rule becomes a companion.

It teaches me to walk slowly.

To walk honestly.

To walk humbly.

I do not keep it perfectly.

Often I fail.

Often I grow tired.

Often I fall asleep in prayer

or lose the thread of my intention.

But every time I begin again,

God receives the beginning as if it were everything.

Discernment, I have learned,

is not about figuring out answers.

It is about becoming quiet enough

that God can speak into the silence.

And keeping this rule is simply how I make room for Him.

How I open the door.

How I step back so He may enter.

In truth, the rule does not reveal God’s will,

it reveals God.

And once He is revealed,

everything else becomes clear enough.

So I keep watch.

I fast lightly.

I pray slowly.

I rise in the night.

I fail and begin again.

I walk into the silence and wait.

And in that waiting,

in that hidden labor,

I have begun to hear a whisper rising from the depths:

“Do not be afraid.

I am here.

The fire you fear is the fire that will save you.”