No Idea: Entrusting Your Journey to a God Who Knows

by Greg Garrett

One of the great challenges of the spirituality of prayer is to see all life as a gift, both those things we want and those things we would rather not have received.

Petition is our listing of requests, but it is more than just a list of things we want, like the letters we used to write Santa. In this naming, we are supposed to recognize that we depend on God for everything we receive.

“Father, I know that anything is possible for You. Please take this cup away so I don’t have to drink from it. But whatever happens, let Your will be done—not Mine” (Mark 14:36, The Voice).

Prayer also includes intercession, our prayers for the life of the world. In my tradition, we pray for those who seek God or serve God and the nations and leaders of the world that they may seek peace and work for justice, those who suffer, those who are in any need, the dead in Christ, and so on.

the Desert Fathers, those spiritual pioneers who moved into the deserts of Palestine and Egypt because they felt that Christianity had become too cultural, too strongly linked with the ruling powers, felt that “the principal discipline of the serious Christian is the acquisition of a heart: ‘Acquire a heart and you shall be saved,’ we are told. But the acquisition of a heart is a lifelong process—it requires work, lifelong effort.”2

but prayer should be a pattern, a part of this hard work of acquiring a Christlike heart, an activity that shapes us into people who will do God’s work in the world.

And when I do—when I consciously set aside time to be in conversation with God, to seek God regularly, I notice that I feel more in touch, and more involved with the world I’m getting ready to enter—God’s world. I don’t pray for miracles. I ask for God’s presence. And I’m pretty confident that I have it, all the time.

I don’t remember the first time we talked about whether I might be called to ordained ministry in the Episcopal Church, but I do know it followed closely enough on my worst times, that I thought—and maybe even said—“Oh, I think that would be a disaster. How can I minister to other people when I’m still half-broken myself?”

It was a group of people who fought with and helped one another, who loved and worshipped God together—the best set of friends I’d ever known, and I was proud to be with them as we all tried to figure out our callings.

What would it be like to bless and offer those sacred gifts from God to the communities I serve? What would it be like for the things I do as teacher and preacher and retreat leader to be claimed by the Church by the rite of ordination?

As Semisonic sang in “Closing Time,” “Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.”1

The only real ending for stories is death, I guess, although maybe that’s not much of an ending either. First, since it’s inevitable, it doesn’t have much dramatic oomph to it—as I’m always telling my fiction and screenwriting students, don’t rely on death to be the climax of your stories. Dying isn’t interesting. It’s what we do while we’re dying that matters.

I’d guess—people of faith believe that death is not the end of their essence, that their souls or whatever part of us God created to be immortal will continue on in some existence of which we have grasped only the very dimmest aspects.

But impatience is anathema to real discernment. Things take as long as they take, and we are operating on God’s time not human time. As Frank Griswold said at St. David’s this past weekend, “Our lives move in fits and starts, and that is how God works.” And since we discern in community, we are never on our own timetables, whatever we might hope.

honestly, we are always waiting to hear. When God is moving in the world and in our lives, we are always listening for how that movement will eventually move us, and even when we feel like we’ve come to a crossroads, dealt with it, and passed beyond it, there are always other crossroads ahead.

If those things come as the will of God discerned in community, I will joyfully accept the responsibilities that go with them, and I will—as I do now as a layperson—do my best to represent the Church, which saved my life, and that can—I am a witness—save others.

You can’t lead people by telling them what to do; you have to do it with them, and if you want people to be willing to ask hard questions of themselves, to love one another, to build a safe place, you have to model it for them, do it with them.

Because too many times we wait to do what we’re supposed to be doing because we think the time isn’t right, because some life milestone hasn’t shown up yet. We wait our whole lives for the right time to live—and if we’re not careful, we might look up and find ourselves out of chances.