A Praying Life: Connecting with God in a Distracting World

by Paul E. Miller

Oddly enough, it took God to show us how not to be godlike. Jesus was the first person who didn’t seek independence. He wanted to be in continuous contact with his heavenly Father. In fact, he humbled himself to death on the cross, becoming anxious so we could be free from anxiety. Now the Spirit brings the humility of Jesus into our hearts. No longer do we have to be little gods, controlling everything. Instead, we cling to our Father in the face of chaos by continuously praying. Because we know we don’t have control, we cry out for grace.

We become anxious when we take a godlike stance, occupying ourselves with things too great for us. We return to sanity by becoming like little children, resting on our mothers. One of the unique things about continuous praying is that it is its own answer to prayer. As you pray Psalm 131, your heart becomes quiet. You rest, not because there is magic in the words but because your eyes are no longer raised too high.

I did not do this in obedience to any prescribed rule. It seemed natural. I thought of God as an everywhere-present Being, full of kindness and love, who would not be offended if children talked to him. I knew he cared for sparrows. I was as cheerful and happy as the birds and acted as they did.

Your heart can become a prayer factory because, like Jesus, you are completely dependent. You needed God ten minutes ago; you need him now. Instead of hunting for the perfect spiritual state to lift you above the chaos, pray in the chaos. As your heart or your circumstances generate problems, keep generating prayer. You will find that the chaos lessens.

When you pray continuously, moments when you are prone to anxiety can become invitations to drift into prayer.

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. Instead of trying to be out front, designing your life, you realize you are inside God’s drama. As you wait, you begin to see him work, and your life begins to sparkle with wonder. You are learning to trust again.

If I get an answer to prayer, sometimes I’ll think, It would have happened anyway. Other times I’ll try to pray but wonder if it makes any difference.

Cynicism and defeated weariness have this in common: They both question the active goodness of God on our behalf. Left unchallenged, their low-level doubt opens the door for bigger doubt. They’ve lost their childlike spirit and thus are unable to move toward their heavenly Father.

Behind the spirit of the age lies an unseen, personal evil presence, a spirit. If Satan can’t stop you from praying, then he will try to rob the fruit of praying by dulling your soul. Satan cannot create, but he can corrupt.

Satan is suggesting that God’s motives are cynical. In essence, he tells them, “God has not been honest about the tree in the middle of the garden. The command not to eat from the tree isn’t for your protection; God wants to protect himself from rivals. He’s jealous. He is projecting an image of caring for you, but he really has an agenda to protect himself. God has two faces.” Satan seductively gives Adam and Eve the inside track—here is what is really going on behind closed doors. Such is the deadly intimacy that gossip offers.

A praying life is just the opposite. It engages evil. It doesn’t take no for an answer. The psalmist was in God’s face, hoping, dreaming, asking. Prayer is feisty. Cynicism, on the other hand, merely critiques. It is passive, cocooning itself from the passions of the great cosmic battle we are engaged in. It is without hope.

As my friend Cathie reflected on why this is true in her own life, she observed, “I make the jump from optimism to darkness so quickly because I am not grounded in a deep, abiding faith that God is in the matter, no matter what the matter is. I am looking for pleasant results, not deeper realities.”

In naive optimism we don’t need to pray because everything is under control, everything is possible. In cynicism we can’t pray because everything is out of control, little is possible.

We can’t remain neutral with evil. We either give up and distance ourselves, or we learn to walk with the Shepherd. There is no middle ground.

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. Some days it’s difficult to get out of our pajamas.

shapes our responses to the world, and we find ourselves demanding a pain-free, problem-free life. Our can-do attitude is turning into relentless self-centeredness.

The overwhelming temptation when faced with evil is to become a wolf, to become cynical and lose your sheeplike spirit. Jesus tells us to instead be warm but wary—warm like a dove but wary like a serpent.

Jesus keeps in tension wariness about evil with a robust confidence in the goodness of his Father. He continues, “Beware of men” (10:17); then in the next breath he warms our hearts to our Father’s love, saying, “Fear not, therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows” (10:31). Since your Father is intimately involved with the death of even one sparrow, won’t he watch over your life? You don’t have to distance yourself with an ironic, critical stance. You don’t have to shut down your heart in the face of evil. You can engage it.

The feel of a praying life is cautious optimism—caution because of the Fall, optimism because of redemption.

“I love it! I am not called to put on rose-colored glasses and see everything in life as pretty and good and uplifting. Rather, I am called to trust that God sees what I see. In fact, he sees beyond what I see. He sees the whole story and is completely trustworthy to be at work on a grand scale, in the minutiae, and even in my own life.”

Jesus does not answer his mockers because his ear is tuned to his Father. Like a wise serpent, he says nothing. Like a harmless dove, he does nothing. Even as his Father turns his back on him, Jesus trusts. Faced with the storm of life, he tightens his grip on his Father. Jesus’ childlike faith delighted his Father, and on Easter morning his Father acted on Jesus’ dead body, bringing him to life. He trusted in God; God delivered him. Evil did not have the last word. Hope was born.

He is not a healing machine—he touches people’s hearts, healing their souls before he heals their bodies. Hope begins with the heart of God. As you grasp what the Father’s heart is like, how he loves to give, then prayer will begin to feel completely natural to you.

Paul and the writer of Hebrews were bursting with the goodness of God. It spilled out of their hearts.

Some of God’s last words in the Bible are, “Behold, I make all things new” (Revelation 21:5, KJV). When you pray, you are touching the hopeful heart of God. When you know that, prayer becomes an adventure.

Instead of critiquing others’ stories, watch the story our Father is weaving.

Alan Jacobs, in his biography of C. S. Lewis, reflected that “those who will never be fooled can never be delighted, because without self-forgetfulness there can be no delight.”[1] Lewis was able to write such captivating children’s stories because he never lost his childlike spirit of wonder. The cynic is never fooled, so he is never delighted.

Both the child and the cynic walk through the valley of the shadow of death. The cynic focuses on the darkness; the child focuses on the Shepherd.

Cynicism feels more like bondage to me now. Jesus sets me free to love by showing me the dark, self-serving agenda I cling to in my cynicism. I am well aware that the journey is far from over, but I am learning to live in hope. I just need more practice.”

The Shepherd’s presence in the dark valley is so immediate, so powerful, that cynicism simply vanishes.

We are left obsessing over our wants in the valley of the shadow of death, paralyzed by fear in the presence of our enemies. No wonder so many are so cynical. With the Good Shepherd gone, we are alone in a world of evil.

In the darkness, Jesus doesn’t analyze what he doesn’t know. He clings to what he knows.

Prayer wasn’t self-discipline; it was desperation.

Now years later, I still begin my prayer times by reflecting on the Shepherd’s care. I drift through the previous day and watch God at work. Nothing undercuts cynicism more than a spirit of thankfulness. You begin to realize that your whole life is a gift. Thankfulness isn’t a matter of forcing yourself to see the happy side of life. That would be like returning to naive optimism. Thanking God restores the natural order of our dependence on God. It enables us to see life as it really is.

Cynicism looks reality in the face, calls it phony, and prides itself on its insight as it pulls back. Thanksgiving looks reality in the face and rejoices at God’s care. It replaces a bitter spirit with a generous one.

In the face of Adam and Eve’s evil, God takes up needle and thread and patiently sews fine leather clothing for them (see Genesis 3:21). He covers their divided, hiding selves with love. The same God permits his Son to be stripped naked so we could be clothed. God is not cynical in the face of evil. He loves.

You cannot go on “seeing through” things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. . . . If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To “see through” all things is the same as not to see.[2]

My heart gets out of tune with God, but life goes on. So I continue to perform and say Christian things, but they are just words. I talk about Jesus without the presence of Jesus. There is a disconnect between what I present and who I am.

All sin involves a splitting of the personality—what James calls being “double-minded” (4:8). If we become proud, we have an inflated sense of self that has lost touch with who we really are.

Repentance brings the split personality together and thus restores integrity to the life.

David has been off by himself, separated from the current of unbelief dominating his culture, developing a rich walk with the Shepherd. David’s obscurity has protected him from the cynical spirit of the age. His public faith and private practice are in harmony. His normal is experiencing God’s presence in the valley of the shadow of death, where he has killed both lions and bears with his sling. Goliath just looks like a big bear. The result? Israel’s unbelief feels odd, out of place.

Satan accuses God of cynical motivations, when in fact Satan cynically twists God’s commands to his own ends. Cynicism is the seed for Adam and Eve’s rebellion against God, and it is the seed for our own personal rebellions. While attempting to unmask evil, the cynic creates it.

David brushes aside Eliab’s cynicism and ends up with Saul’s blessing and armor. He quickly realizes that he can’t fight in Saul’s armor. He can’t be something he is not. He is a shepherd, not a warrior. His inner and outer lives need to match. He is authentic.

The good news is that by following Jesus we don’t have to be captured by the spirit of the age. We don’t have to be defined by our culture. Like Paul in Philippi, we can sing in jail (see Acts 16:25). Like David, we can calmly pick up five smooth stones when faced with overwhelming odds.

She replied, “Jesus is everything to me. I talk to him all the time.” I was floored, partly by the freshness and simplicity of her faith but mainly by the unusual patience that displayed her faith. My frantic busyness was a sharp contrast to her quiet waiting in prayer. She reflected the spirit of prayer. I reflected the spirit of human self-sufficiency.

Cynicism looks in the wrong direction. It looks for the cracks in Christianity instead of looking for the presence of Jesus. It is an orientation of the heart. The sixth cure for cynicism, then, is this: develop an eye for Jesus.

Ministry itself can create a mask of performance, the projection of success. Everyone wants to be a winner. In contrast, Jesus never used his power to show off. He used his power for love. So he wasn’t immediately noticeable. Humility makes you disappear, which is why we avoid it. 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?” I hunted for the difference between what others would normally be like and what they had become through the presence of Jesus. The presence of Jesus, the only truly authentic person who ever lived, would reveal itself in the restoration of authenticity in people. I’d see Christians whose inner and outer lives matched.

Jesus was everywhere, transforming that mundane morning—caring and apologizing (Jim), studying and obeying (the men), witnessing and befriending (the attendant), suffering and laughing (Jill), forgiving and not gossiping (Mom). Each of these people was living out his or her faith without a mask. With a little conscious reflection, it is easy to see the beauty of Jesus.

Instead of focusing on other people’s lack of integrity, on their split personalities, we need to focus on how Jesus is reshaping the church to be more like himself. We need to view the body of Christ with grace.

Paul delights in the influence of Jesus on people’s lives. It is at the heart of his praying. He doesn’t have a generalized spirit of thanksgiving; he is thankful for “you.” Even with the messed-up Corinthian church, Paul is thankful: “I give thanks to my God always for you” (1 Corinthians 1:4). Then he addresses their permitting of incest, suing one another in court, and getting drunk at the Lord’s Supper! Because he keeps his eye on the present work of Jesus, Paul is not overcome by evil but overcomes evil with good. Goodness infests Paul’s prayer life. He is living out the gospel. Even as God has...

Christians aren’t superior, but our Savior is.