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It’s hard enough for many of us to make an honest request to a friend we trust for something we truly need. But when the request gets labeled “praying” and the friend is termed “God,” things often get very tangled up.
You’ve known people who feel guilty because their quantity of prayer fails to meet some presumed standard. Maybe you are one of those people.
Few of us have Ashley’s courage to articulate the quiet cynicism or spiritual weariness that develops in us when heartfelt prayer goes unanswered. We keep our doubts hidden even from ourselves because we don’t want to sound like bad Christians.
And if we believe that God can talk to us in prayer, how do we distinguish our thoughts from his thoughts? Prayer is confusing. We vaguely know that the Holy Spirit is somehow involved, but we are never sure how or when a spirit will show up or what that even means.
A praying life feels like our family mealtimes because prayer is all about relationship. It’s intimate and hints at eternity. We don’t think about communication or words but about whom we are talking with. Prayer is simply the medium through which we experience and connect to God.
Oddly enough, many people struggle to learn how to pray because they are focusing on praying, not on God.
Likewise, if I suffer, I learn how to pray. As I learn how to pray, I learn how to endure suffering. This intertwining applies to every aspect of the Christian life.
If God is sovereign, then he is in control of all the details of my life. If he is loving, then he is going to be shaping the details of my life for my good. If he is all-wise, then he’s not going to do everything I want because I don’t know what I need. If he is patient, then he is going to take time to do all this. When we put all these things together—God’s sovereignty, love, wisdom, and patience—we have a divine story.
To ask God for change confronts us with our doubt about whether prayer makes any difference.
Because my Father controls everything, I can ask, and he will listen and act. Since I am his child, change is possible—and hope is born.
Learning to pray doesn’t offer us a less busy life; it offers us a less busy heart. In the midst of outer busyness we can develop an inner quiet.
Jesus wants us to be without pretense when we come to him in prayer. Instead, we often try to be something we aren’t.
We begin by concentrating on God, but almost immediately our minds wander off in a dozen different directions. The problems of the day push out our well-intentioned resolve to be spiritual.
When we slow down to pray, we are immediately confronted with how unspiritual we are, with how difficult it is to concentrate on God.
Jesus does not say, “Come to me, all you who have learned how to concentrate in prayer, whose minds no longer wander, and I will give you rest.” No, Jesus opens his arms to his needy children and says, “Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28, NASB).
The only way to come to God is by taking off any spiritual mask. The real you has to meet the real God. He is a person.
So, instead of being frozen by your self-preoccupation, talk with God about your worries. Tell him where you are weary. If you don’t begin with where you are, then where you are will sneak in the back door. Your mind will wander to where you are weary.
The very things we try to get rid of—our weariness, our distractedness, our messiness—are what get us in the front door!
If you remove prayer from the welcoming heart of God (as much teaching on the Lord’s Prayer does), prayer becomes a legalistic chore.
Pray about what your mind is wandering to. Maybe it is something that is important to you. Maybe the Spirit is nudging you to think about something else.
When you know that you (like Jesus) can’t do life on your own, then prayer makes complete sense.
If you are not praying, then you are quietly confident that time, money, and talent are all you need in life. You’ll always be a little too tired, a little too busy. But if, like Jesus, you realize you can’t do life on your own, then no matter how busy, no matter how tired you are, you will find the time to pray.
Time in prayer makes you even more dependent on God because you don’t have as much time to get things done. Every minute spent in prayer is one less minute where you can be doing something “productive.” So the act of praying means that you have to rely more on God.
If we think we can do life on our own, we will not take prayer seriously. Our failure to pray will always feel like something else—a lack of discipline or too many obligations.
A praying life isn’t simply a morning prayer time; it is about slipping into prayer at odd hours of the day, not because we are disciplined but because we are in touch with our own poverty of spirit, realizing that we can’t even walk through a mall or our neighborhood without the help of the Spirit of Jesus.
When you stop trying to control your life and instead allow your anxieties and problems to bring you to God in prayer, you shift from worry to watching. You watch God weave his patterns in the story of your life.
Without the Good Shepherd, we are alone in a meaningless story. Weariness and fear leave us feeling overwhelmed, unable to move. Cynicism leaves us doubting, unable to dream. The combination shuts down our hearts, and we just show up for life, going through the motions.
The Shepherd’s presence in the dark valley is so immediate, so powerful, that cynicism simply vanishes. There is no room for an ironic disengagement when you are fighting for your life. As you cling to the Shepherd, the fog of cynicism lifts.
In order to see Jesus, I would have to look lower. I would have to look at people simply, as a child does. I began to ask myself, “Where did I see Jesus today?”
Likewise, we can feel Solomon’s wonder in his prayer of dedication for the temple as he contemplates the infinite God dwelling personally with us. “Will God indeed dwell with man on the earth? Behold, heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you, how much less this house that I have built!” (2 Chronicles 6:18). Because God is both infinite and personal, he will “[listen] to the cry and to the prayer that your servant prays” (6:19).
Majesty and humility are such an odd fit. This is one reason we struggle with prayer. We just don’t think God could be concerned with the puny details of our lives. We either believe he’s too big or that we’re not that important. No wonder Jesus told us to be like little children! Little children are not daunted by the size of their parents. They come, regardless.
Overspiritualizing prayer suppresses our natural desire that our house not be burning. When we stop being ourselves with God, we are no longer in real conversation with God.
What do I lose when I have a praying life? Control. Independence. What do I gain? Friendship with God. A quiet heart. The living work of God in the hearts of those I love.
Things such as integrity, beauty, hope, and love are all in the same category as prayer. You can tell their presence and even describe them, but you can’t define them, simply because they are too close to God’s image.
Oddly enough, we can also use prayer to keep God distant. We do that by only talking to God and not to mature believers. I can demonstrate that easily. Which is easier, confessing impure thoughts to a mature friend or to God? The friend is tougher. That feels real. We need to ask the body of Christ, Jesus’ physical presence on earth, the same questions we ask God.
Until we see how strong our own will is, we can’t understand the second petition of the Lord’s Prayer—“your will be done” (Matthew 6:10).
You’ve learned how to put God at the center. Everywhere you look, people are so caught up with stuff. Now Jesus taps you on the shoulder and says, “Stop judging. When you see someone else’s sin, instead of using that information to correct them, use that information to humble yourself by first finding the beam in your own eye.”
During a particularly hard time in my life, I remember realizing God is my fortress doesn’t mean that God is giving me a fortress. It means he is the fortress (see Psalm 62:2). Except for God, I am completely alone. I wasn’t sure I liked that.
One of the first things I noticed as I prayed for Emily was that I became more aware of her as a person.
Most of us isolate prayer from the rest of what God is doing in our lives, but God doesn’t work that way. Prayer doesn’t exist in some rarified spiritual world; it is part of the warp and woof of our lives. Praying itself becomes a story.
Until we become convinced we can’t change our child’s heart, we will not take prayer seriously.
When we don’t receive what we pray for or desire, it doesn’t mean that God isn’t acting on our behalf. Rather, he’s weaving his story.
There is no such thing as a lament-free life. In fact, if your life is lament-free, you aren’t loving well. To love is to lament, to let your heart be broken by something.
We live in a deeply broken world. If the pieces of our world aren’t breaking your heart and you aren’t in God’s face about them, then you’re becoming quietly cynical.
When you lament, you live simultaneously in the past, present, and future. A lament connects God’s past promise with my present chaos, hoping for a better future.
Isaiah’s faith drives this lament. He believes three things about God: First, God is sovereign. He can do something. Second, God is love. He is for me. He wants to do something. And finally, God is a covenant-keeping God. He is bound by his own word. He will do something. Isaiah’s faith feeds off the character of God.
Finally, laments almost always circle back to faith.
As we finish lamenting, we are quiet. There is nothing more to say or do. Like Mary at the feet of Jesus, we’ve done what we could (Mark 14:8). We follow in the footsteps of our Lord, who prayed through the great lament psalms of Israel as he slowly died:
When we suffer, we long for God to speak clearly, to tell us the end of the story and, most of all, to show himself. But if he showed himself fully and immediately, if he answered all the questions, we’d never grow; we’d never emerge from our chrysalis because we’d be forever dependent.
When the story isn’t going your way, ask yourself, What is God doing? Be on the lookout for strange gifts. God loves to surprise us with babies in swaddling clothes lying in mangers.
