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by
Tyler Staton
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January 26 - February 3, 2025
Prayer invites you to learn to listen to God before speaking, to ask like a child in your old age, to scream your questions in an angry tirade, to undress yourself in vulnerable confession, and to be loved—completely and totally loved, in spite of everything.
Scripture teaches, “Don’t be anxious. Just pray.” Maybe we don’t because prayer comes with plenty of reasons to be anxious. Prayer itself makes us anxious because it uncovers fears we can ignore as long as we don’t engage deeply, thoughtfully, vulnerably with God.
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.
Faith is the assurance of what we hope for.7 Trust is confidence in the character of God.
Trust allows us to say, “I don’t understand what God is doing right now, but I trust that God is good.”
Jesus hasn’t revealed a God we can perfectly understand, but he has revealed a God we can perfectly trust.
meaning some of the psalms are technically heretical. So why would those prayers be included in the Bible? Because they’re honest. That’s what makes these psalms exemplary. God is looking for relationship, not well-prepared speeches spoken from perfect motives.
C. S. Lewis said of prayer, “We must lay before Him what is in us, not what ought to be in us.”14
The most straightforward response is to talk to God about what’s on your mind. That’s it! You talk to God like a friend. You vent. You ask. You laugh. You listen. You unload. You just talk. You don’t try to sound more holy or pure or spiritual than you are. Prayer isn’t a noble monologue; it’s a free-flowing conversation, and the only way to get prayer wrong is to try to get it right.
Most often, when this famous passage is referenced, it starts with the command to rid oneself of anxiety: “Do not be anxious about anything.” But the passage doesn’t start there. Preceding the imperative is a statement of fact: “The Lord is near.”
The deep fear that robs our prayers of power is the lie that the Lord isn’t near.
Knowledge is hearsay. It’s memorizing the facts. Discovery requires personal experience.
Prayer is more practice than theory, so let me offer a starting place, with a phrase borrowed from Dom John Chapman: “Pray as you can, and don’t try to pray as you can’t.”25 If you can’t pray for an hour, great. Don’t try. It’ll feel like an eternity. Pray for a minute. “Pray as you can, and don’t try to pray as you can’t.”
Prayer is about presence before it’s about anything else. Prayer doesn’t begin with outcomes. Prayer is the free choice to be with the Father, to prefer his company.
Prayer doesn’t begin with us; it begins with God. It doesn’t start with speaking; it starts with seeing. As Philip Yancey writes, “Prayer is the act of seeing reality from God’s point of view.”1
As of 1370, when people started managing their time artificially, time shifted from being a limit governing our lives to a resource used according to our individual agendas.
A Senate subcommittee in 1967 jointly predicted that by 1985, the average American would work twenty-two hours a week for twenty-seven weeks a year because of all the leisure time this new technology would free up.6
Technology has continued to advance and save us time. They got that part right. What they misjudged was how we’d use it.
Richard Foster writes, “In contemporary society our Adversary [a biblical title for the devil] majors in three things: noise, hurry, and crowds.
In the fall of humanity, we mastered the art of hurry. “And so we end up as good people, but as people who are not very deep: not bad, just busy; not immoral, just distracted; not lacking in soul, just preoccupied; not disdaining depth, just never doing the things to get us there,” says Ronald Rolheiser.18
we’ve found a way to darken the stars, a way to pretend that all we see here on the ground is all there is.
all prone to drown out our view of God, to keep moving, to go about our lives as though we are the center.
Jesus was intentional and interruptible. There’s a word for that posture: unhurried. Hurry is the great enemy of the spiritual life. Why? Because hurry kills love. Hurry hides behind anger, agitation, and self-centeredness, blinding our eyes to the truth that we are God’s beloved and she is sister, he is brother.
Codependent people don’t truly love each other. They’re using each other. Each needs the other to feel okay.
Be still. Remember who God is. Remember who you are. Then do your best to live without getting the order mixed up. That’ll be enough. That’s where you start changing, and as a result, the world around you starts changing too.
That'll preach!
Practice silence as a sacrificial offering to God. It’s that simple. It’s about giving something of yourself to God, not getting something from God.
In that turn of phrase, Jesus lays a threefold foundation for prayer: Remember who God is. Remember who you are. Remember who we are to each other.
Protestants typically call Jesus’ exemplary prayer “the Lord’s Prayer,” while Catholics simply name it the “Our Father.” I wonder if Catholics are onto something.
When she imagined God as something less than “Father,” she in turn imagined herself as something less than “daughter.” Adoration given to God is always given back to us.
When we call God our Father, we are equally remembering that we are completely, uniquely loved. Until we know that love, nothing can truly be right within us, but after that simple revelation, something becomes irrevocably right within us at the deepest level.
When our trust in God is fractured, so is our intimacy with one another.
“If I am not in touch with my own belovedness, then I cannot touch the sacredness of others.”16
“Our Father” is a reminder of God’s intimacy; “hallowed” is a reminder of his separateness, his majesty, his incomprehensible greatness.
Biblically, we are commanded to “remember” more frequently than to “obey,” “do,” “not do,” “go,” or even “pray.” Remember. Because in the long journey of the spiritual life, we tend to forget.
In his seminal work titled Orthodoxy, G. K. Chesterton called “sin” the only part of Christian theology that can really be proved.4
The hang-up is, and has always been, trusting the God we believe exists.
Eugene Peterson defines it, “Sin is a refused relationship with God that spills over into a wrong relationship with others.”11
The good news is that you are loved—loved right now without qualification or restriction, loved unconditionally for who you are, loved in a way you can’t lose. The bad news is that you find it very hard to believe that and even harder to experience it.
to try to become in your own eyes what you already are in God’s.
God didn’t lower the standard of holiness. He found a way to make us holy that isn’t dependent on our performance. Grace wins.
We live deepest from the gut, not the head.
The Greek word translated in the NIV as “empathize” is the compound word sympatheo.
The Genesis conflict is threefold: (1) You have a spiritual enemy; (2) the weapon of that enemy is deception; and (3) the effect of that deception is paralysis.
The Swiss theologian Karl Barth once said, “To clasp the hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world.”20
love Diego, and his needs exceed my capacity, so what fills the space between love and humility? Prayer.
The assumption of spirituality is that always God is doing something before I know it. So the task is not to get God to do something I think needs to be done, but to become aware of what God is doing so that I can respond to it and participate and take delight in it. Eugene Peterson, The Contemplative Pastor
the middle voice. “I take advice.” The middle voice means, “I am an active participant, but the action did not begin with me. I am joining the action of another.”
This is a story about God. He is the lead, at the center of every scene. I am the Lord’s servant. And that, as it turns out, is more than enough for me.
“May Your Word to Me Be Fulfilled” The second statement is one of vocation and participation.
