How to Pray and The Best Way to Work {Friday on the Farm}

A life could really be full of all the best things:

Worried-full for nothing, thank-full for everything, prayer-full in all things.

When all 8 of us work up the kitchen garden together, Caleb says we should start a business of all things dandelions because that’s what we’ve got one first rate crop of.

“Dandelion salad.” He’s sitting in the dirt, enumerating possibilities, tossing weeds over his shoulder. “Dandelion tea. Fried Dandelion Blossoms. Dandelion wine.” The boy thinks in entrepreneurial start-ups.

“But Caleb.” Shalom’s looks up from her own squirmish with a stubborn one.

“We don’t even drink wine.”

The Farmer, kneeled over a spinach row, chuckles.

Hope’s waved a white flag over the stinging nettles. She sits quiet on the other side of the irises, daydreaming. Shalom parades about with this monster tap root she’s wrenched from the earth. Her smile is bigger. Malakai’s laying down watching the clouds.

Joshua swings a hoe over his shoulder and announces with this ridiculous grin, “I’m a garden gnome.”

“You just need an orange hat.” Caleb teases. “Or maybe Smurf blue?”

Joshua statuesque shoulders crumble in laughter.

“Okay, folks.” The Farmer calls over his shoulder, trying to rally the troops. “Everyone up off their seats. You can’t get much done that way…. You’ll work best if you are kneeling.”

And I close my eyes.

I’d work best if I’m kneeling… like an adoration.

“True, whole prayer is nothing but love,” offered St. Augustine. Is the only reason we don’t really pray is because we really don’t love? If one’s not praying regularly, it’s only because something else is regularly loved more than God.

Sometimes weeds go deep. I wrestle mine and there’s a taproot: Prayer becomes what we live when we want to get hold of God, not just get a hold of what we want. Yes. I want to parade happy too.

And real prayer isn’t about changing God’s mind but about finding God’s heart — and letting His heart change my mind.

Is this why God urges us to pray without ceasing? We need to pray without ceasing — because it’s the only way to live in communion. Without prayer, how can our life and His will have anything in common? Without prayer, we have nothing in common with God. Without prayer — we have no fellowship, no relationship, no worship. But when we enter into prayer, He enters into our thoughts and then we have much in common and the conversation never ends and we have our heart’s real desire — communion with Christ.

The sun breaks through, warms the back of Caleb’s neck as he plants his seeds, Caleb bent and best.

“I know of no better thermometer to your spiritual temperature than this: the measure of the intensity of your prayer,” Spurgeon said.

Levi, he stands up at the end of his row of spinach.

And it makes me smile —

how he doesn’t brush the dirt off his knees.

 

 

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