I Guess I Haven't Learned That Yet: Discovering New Ways of Living When the Old Ways Stop Working

by Shauna Niequist

Prayer is like yoga for our insides. My number one favorite kind of yoga is the kind that’s mostly breathing and lying down. But my second favorite kind is when you’re in a pose that’s really demanding, and for just a few seconds you trust your body and you trust your breath and your body becomes able in that moment to do things it wasn’t able to do before. It’s an amazing feeling. This is the sacred, interior version of that. When we pray for people with whom we have difficult or painful relationships, God works lovingly and powerfully inside us, rebuilding and restoring us, shaping us into the kind of people who forgive and repair and give second chances—the kind of people we all want to be but can’t always get there on our own. This is what prayer can do. This is what God can do.