What is parachutes?

Host: What is parachutes?

Rev. Joseph McCloskey: In my definitions of -- the period we call the particular line of scripture that you are going to be praying about. The parachute is -- it belongs to the preparation for prayer that I wouldn't just simply go into prayer court that I would have a fall back. So in the type of prayer I am describing, the preparation is the motored plane that pulls the glider up into the heavens.

Now, your prayer begins at the point that you drop the tow line. Hence you glide along on the columns of the spirit as it were, the wind that has it's different columns that will lift you up and if you loose the columns you have to look for a up draft to keep you flying and in your gliders since you don't have any control over how high you are how low you are. You have to find -- but can't really be seen but. In a sense you know where God can be found, because you, he never go into prayer without your own history of prayer. In the places that have come alive to you and prayer become the parachutes if you will. They keep you up, keep you flying. But every now and then that can be a fire engine or the fire alarm goes all off for something like that. Something that's shocking and you can loose complete sense of being with God because if the fire alarm is going or off, that means that some kid has pulled the fire alarm or there is a real problem and that problem has my name on it, is the father of the problem, am I going to something about the problem. So each of the ways that we look at what's happening in our lives is both a place, it's a parachute because we are bringing the preparation for prayer, to the moment of prayer that we are in. And it's a parachute because there is something where it has richness for me that I know I don't believe to see it clearly. So I am focusing my glasses or I am putting in my hearing aids and turning up the volumes so that I could hear better but all the ways that you prepare yourself to hear the Lord are the parachute, that you can fall back on before you end the prayer. Now in beginning when someone is learning how to pray, they will spend all their time with their parachutes over there, what they call-- they also call them the points of prayer and I would have three points to hang my head. The sentence implies that you have to cover those points, whereas when I am trying to share with people, when I am trying to teach prayer. You see you don't have to be in any particular place, that the Lord is wherever speaking to us by wherever we are, but I bring to the point that I am discovering myself in the presence of the Lord. I bring myself to that point with the richness of who I am in that moment? 1