Praying Like Monks, Living Like Fools: An Invitation to the Wonder and Mystery of Prayer

by Tyler Staton

Prayer can’t be mastered. Prayer always means submission. To pray is to willingly put ourselves in the unguarded, exposed position. There is no climb. There is no control. There is no mastery. There is only humility and hope. To pray is to risk being naive, to risk believing, to risk playing the fool. To pray is to risk trusting someone who might let you down. To pray is to get our hopes up. And we’ve learned to avoid that. So we avoid prayer.

Prayer means the risk of facing silence where we’re addicted to noise.

We’ve avoided becoming naive, but we’ve done it at the cost of becoming overwhelmed.

we lower the bar of expectation and power in prayer.

the tendency for many of us is to pray safe, calculated prayers that insulate us from both disappointment and freedom.

Jesus hasn’t revealed a God we can perfectly understand, but he has revealed a God we can perfectly trust. Trust is the certainty that the listening God hears and cares.

“Who one believes God to be is most accurately revealed not in any credo but in the way one speaks to God when no one else is listening.”

Your inner life is not a mirror image of your environment. If anything, the opposite is true. We create an environment that mirrors our inner life.

To turn our fast lives into stillness and our busy minds into solitude is an act of rebellion against the curse that runs through our veins.

When we live in constant noise, we forget our mortality,

Many confuse stillness with waiting for revelation. Sometimes revelation does come, and it’s marvelous. But that’s not the purpose of stillness. The purpose is consent.

there’s no such thing as a habit or priority that doesn’t happen consistently.

His predisposition toward you is generosity.

Everything that comes from the Lord’s Prayer after this first movement is an overflow of the name of God being hallowed in the heart of the praying person.

Spiritual maturity means more confession, not less.

not a church without sin, but a church without secrets.

The very parts of our stories we most want to edit, or erase altogether, become the very parts of our stories we’d never take back and never stop telling.

By his wounds we are healed,25 and by our wounds the healing is shared.

We dream of a God who brings heaven to earth; God dreams of praying people to share heaven with.

Prayer is the furnace that fuels mission.

Intimacy in prayer is the way to lasting fruitfulness.

Fruitfulness is the collateral gain of that intimacy.

Prayer is a journey that starts with need and ends in relationship.

“Prayer enlarges the heart until it is capable of containing God’s gift of himself. Ask and seek, and your heart will grow big enough to receive him and keep him as your own,”

fidelity is the soil that love grows in.”

The church’s underground atheism in our time is that we will busy ourselves with almost anything except prayer.

It is not objective proof of God’s existence that we want but the experience of God’s presence.