Directions for Daily Communion with God
can help without them.
9. When you are going journeys, wait on God; put yourselves under his protection, commit yourselves to his care, and depend upon him to give his angels a charge concerning you, to bear you up in their arms when you move, and to pitch their tents about you where you rest. See how much you are indebted to the goodness of his providence, for all the comforts and conveniences you are surrounded with in your travels. It is he that has cast our lot in a land where we wander not in the wilderness, as in the deserts of Arabia, but have safe and beaten roads; and that through the terrors of war, the high ways are not unoccupied; to him we owe it, that the inferior creatures are serviceable to us, and that our going out and coming in are preserved, that when we are abroad we are not in banishment, but have liberty to come home again; and when we are at home we are not under confinement, but have liberty to go abroad.
We must therefore have our eyes up to God at our setting out, Lord go along with me where I go; under his shelter we must travel, confiding in his care of us, and encouraging ourselves with that in all the dangers we meet with; and in our return must own his goodness; all our bones must say, Lord who is like unto thee, for he keepeth all our bones, not one of them is broken.
10. When we retire into solitude, to be alone, walking in the fields, or alone reposing ourselves in our closets, still we must be waiting on God; still we must keep up our communion with him, when we are communing with our own hearts. When we are alone, we must not be alone, but the Father must be with us, and we with him. We shall find temptations even in solitude, which we have need to guard against; Satan set upon our Saviour, when he was alone in a wilderness; but there also we have opportunity, if we but know how to improve it, for that devout, that divine contemplation, which is the best conversation, so that we may never be less alone than when alone. If when we sit alone and keep silence, withdrawn from business and conversation, we have but the art, I should say the heart to fill up those vacant minutes with pious meditations of God and divine things, we then gather up the fragments of time which remain, that nothing may be lost, and so are we found waiting on God all the day.