A Praying Life: Connecting with God in a Distracting World

by Paul E. Miller

Oddly enough, many people struggle to learn how to pray because they are focusing on praying, not on God. Making prayer the center is like making conversation the center of a family mealtime. In prayer, focusing on the conversation is like trying to drive while looking at the windshield instead of through it. It freezes us, making us unsure of where to go. Conversation is only the vehicle through which we experience one another. Consequently, prayer is not the center of this book. Getting to know a person, God, is the center.

You don’t experience God; you get to know him. You submit to him. You enjoy him. He is, after all, a person.

You can’t have a good story without tension and conflict, without things going wrong. Unanswered prayers create some of the tensions in the story God is weaving in our lives. When we realize this, we want to know what God is doing. What pattern is God weaving?

Learning to pray doesn’t offer us a less busy life; it offers us a less busy heart.

life. A needy heart is a praying heart. Dependency is the heartbeat of prayer.

Don’t try to get the prayer right; just tell God where you are and what’s on your mind. That’s what little children do. They come as they are, runny noses and all.

Remember, the point of Christianity isn’t to learn a lot of truths so you don’t need God anymore. We don’t learn God in the abstract. We are drawn into his life.

You don’t create intimacy; you make room for it. This is true whether you are talking about your spouse, your friend, or God. You need space to be together. Efficiency, multitasking, and busyness all kill intimacy. In short, you can’t get to know God on the fly. If Jesus has to pull away from people and noise in order to pray, then it makes sense that we need to as well.

Praying out loud can be helpful because it keeps you from getting lost in your head. It makes your thoughts concrete. But it is more than technique; it is also a statement of faith. You are audibly declaring your belief in a God who is alive.

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.

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.

“Asking in Jesus’ name” isn’t another thing I have to get right so my prayers are perfect. It is one more gift of God because my prayers are so imperfect.

Abiding feels elusive, like a spiritual pipe dream. Abiding is anything but disconnected from life. It is the way life should be done, in partnership with God.

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.

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. You’ve thrown in the towel.

This is a small subcategory of Hebrew lamenting, but by far most laments are not prayers of surrender, grieving what cannot be changed, but a call to arms. They are the spiritual warfare equivalent of “going nuclear”: You have no other option, so you reach for your most powerful weapon—your ability to cry out to the living God for help.

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.

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.

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