A Praying Life: Connecting with God in a Distracting World

by Paul E. Miller

If we didn’t know what a good father was, we couldn’t critique our own.

In my Presbyterian heritage, everything was balanced—our emotions, our reactions, and our theology. Jill’s lament was anything but balanced. It was raw and uneven.

Lol

That’s what makes laments so messy. They bring together two things (reality and promise) that recoil from one another. A lament connects two “hot” wires—God’s promise and the problem.

To love is to lament, to let your heart be broken by something.

Cynicism moves you away from God; laments push you into his presence.

To lament means to grieve.

A lament connects God’s past promise with my present chaos, hoping for a better future.

That’s what a lament does: It takes hold of God.

First, God is sovereign. He can do something.

Second, God is love. He is for me. He wants to do something.

God is a covenant-keeping God. He is bound by his own word. H...

Paul so inhabited the gospel that he wanted to be the gospel for his fellow Jews.

What is so striking about biblical laments is that God almost never critiques them.[1] He delights in hearing our messy hearts.

First, a lament is directed toward God.

Second, a lament submits.

Finally, laments almost always circle back to faith.

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.

Faith and relationship are interwoven in dance.

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.

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

He is, after all, the God of hope.

Praying was inseparable from working, planning, and good old-fashioned begging.

Imbedded in the idea of prayer is a richly textured view of the world where all of life is organized around invisible bonds or covenants that knit us together. Instead of a fixed world, we live in our Father’s world, a world built for divine relationships between people where, because of the Good News, tragedies become comedies and hope is born.

The bottom line is we don’t write down our prayer requests because we don’t take prayer seriously. We don’t think it works.

But if you have a disability, nothing flows, especially in the beginning.

Prayer is asking God to incarnate, to get dirty in your life.

If Satan’s basic game plan is pride, seeking to draw us into his life of arrogance, then God’s basic game plan is humility, drawing us into the life of his Son.

First, I wrote the prayer down.

Then I watched for God to work while I prayed.

Finally, God provided an opportunity where I “worked” t...

planting,

waiting,

working again at the...

First, it seldom occurs to us to plant the seed of thoughtful praying because we think pe...

Second, if we do pray, we don’t wa...

Finally, we don’t recognize the harvest when it comes.

Suffering opens the door to love. Suffering reaps a harvest of real change.

First, my question and the subsequent answer were immersed in reflections on God’s Word.

Second, the answer surprised me.

1. “Word Only”—Going Wrong by Not Listening

If we focus exclusively on God’s written Word when looking for God’s activity in our lives but don’t watch and pray, we’ll miss the unfolding story of his work.

If we believe Scripture only applies to people in general, then we can miss how God intimately personalizes his counsel to us as individuals.

God is continually speaking to each of us, but not just through our intuition. Seeing God’s activity in the details of our lives enhances the application of God’s Word.

We need the sharp-edged, absolute character of the Word and the intuitive, personal leading of the Spirit. The Word provides the structure, the vocabulary. The Spirit personalizes it to our life. Keeping the Word and the Spirit together guards us from the danger of God-talk becoming a cover for our own desires and the danger of lives isolated from God.

The means of communication is secondary to a surrendered heart. Our responsibility is to cultivate a listening heart in the midst of the noise from our own hearts and from the world, not to mention the Devil.

The discovery of self in relationship to God leads to a lifestyle of repentance.

You don’t have to write well to keep a prayer journal, nor do you have to be consistent. It is just a written version of childlike praying, except more organized. Begin with what’s on your heart, what’s bugging you, what you are thankful for. If you are real before God, then everything else flows.

Love without being able to pray feels depressing and frustrating, like trying to tie a knot with gloves on. I would be powerless to do the other person any real good. People are far too complicated; the world is far too evil; and my own heart is too off center to be able to love adequately without praying.

We need time to be with our Father every day because every day our hearts and the hearts of those around us are overgrown with weeds.