A Praying Life: Connecting with God in a Distracting World

by Paul E. Miller

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.

Look how different Isaiah’s pilgrimage is from the five stages of grief. Instead of withdrawing (Stage 1: Denial), Isaiah boldly moves into God’s presence, asking for help. Instead lashing out at God (Stage 2: Anger), he unashamedly holds God to his word. Instead of manipulating (Stage 3: Bargaining), he tells God directly what he wants and why he wants it. Instead of getting lost in his sorrow (Stage 4: Depression), he expresses his sorrow freely to God. And finally, instead of resignation (Stage 5: Acceptance), he tirelessly brings his request to God. The prophet never stops asking because he never stops believing. His asking changes tone, and his reasons change, but...

Are laments disrespectful? Isn’t it wrong for Isaiah to say, “O LORD, why do you make us wander from your ways and harden our heart?” (63:17). My answer: That’s the wrong question. The question is, “What is on your heart?”

God delights in welcoming messy, broken hearts.

lament is faith. A complaint is rebellion.

Second, a lament submits.

Finally, laments almost always circle back to faith. As we saw in Isaiah’s lament, a lament is a journey through different moods and arguments that usually settles on a quiet faith.

To summarize: Good lamenting is appropriate; it goes somewhere; it is simple and honest. Bad lamenting is magnified, endless; it is complicated by bitterness, self-pity, escapes, and denial.[2]

I know that anxiety fuels good lamenting. I watch her grope toward a living God who hears and acts. But she wavers. Will he hear her? Will he act? So I pray for Jill’s faith—and mine, too. We battle together to believe.

Like Isaiah, Jesus believes his Father can act, wants to act, and will act. But now he waits.

Likewise, Jesus’ ambiguity with us creates the space not only for him to emerge but us as well. If the miracle comes too quickly, there is no room for discovery, for relationship. With both this woman and us, Jesus is engaged in a divine romance, wooing us to himself.

Nothing wrong with warm fuzzies, but relationships are far richer and more complex.

God permitted a difficult situation in both of their lives, and then he lingered at the edge. Not in the center, at the edge. If he were at the center, if they had had regular visions of him, they would not have developed the faith to have a real relationship with him. God would have been a magic prayer machine, not a friend and lover.

When God seems silent and our prayers go unanswered, the overwhelming temptation is to leave the story—to walk out of the desert and attempt to create a normal life. But when we persist in a spiritual vacuum, when we hang in there during ambiguity, we get to know God. In fact, that is how intimacy grows in all close relationships.

Many of us wish God were more visible. We think that if we could see him better or know what is going on, then faith would come more easily. But if Jesus dominated the space and overwhelmed our vision, we would not be able to relate to him. Everyone who had a clear-eyed vision of God in the Bible fell down as if he were dead. It’s hard to relate to pure light.

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;

The praying life is inseparable from obeying, loving, waiting, and suffering.

if the experience becomes an end in itself, then God becomes an object for my pleasure.

No Story Story Bitter Waiting Angry Watching Aimless Wondering Cynical Praying Controlling Submitting Hopeless Hoping Thankless Thankful Blaming Repenting

How boring life would be if prayer worked like magic. There’d be no relationship with God, no victory over little pockets of evil.

To live in our Father’s story, remember these three things: Don’t demand that the story go your way. (In other words, surrender completely.) Look for the Storyteller. Look for his hand, and then pray in light of what you are seeing. (In other words, develop an eye for Jesus.) Stay in the story. Don’t shut down when it goes the wrong way.

When the story isn’t going your way, ask yourself, What is God doing? Be on the lookout for strange gifts.

He will be silent when we want him to fill in the blanks of the story we are creating. But with his own stories, the ones we live in, he is seldom silent.

To see the Storyteller we need to slow down our interior life and watch. We need to be imbedded in the Word to experience the Storyteller’s mind and pick up the cadence of his voice. We need to be alert for the story, for the Storyteller’s voice speaking into the details of our lives. The story God weaves is neither weird nor floaty. It always involves bowing before his majesty with the pieces of our lives.

When confronted with suffering that won’t go away or with even a minor problem, we instinctively focus on what is missing, such as the lost coats and the betrayal in Joseph’s story, not on the Master’s hand.

Often when you think everything has gone wrong, it’s just that you’re in the middle of a story. If you watch the stories God is weaving in your life, you, like Joseph, will begin to see the patterns. You’ll become a poet, sensitive to your Father’s voice.

Some writers suggest that God focuses simply on us knowing him. That is just another version of the despair chart (see chapter 21). He is also concerned about our situation.

He is, after all, the God of hope.

IF YOU WAIT, YOUR HEAVENLY FATHER WILL PICK YOU UP, CARRY YOU OUT INTO THE NIGHT, AND MAKE YOUR LIFE SPARKLE. HE WANTS TO DAZZLE YOU WITH THE WONDER OF HIS LOVE.

What the heck! Since we’re still at ground zero, we might as well ask for the sky!

I wanted success; he wanted authenticity.