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

by Tyler Staton

They simply drag God into our overwhelmed lives, and the only way we can make him fit is to shrink him down to a reduced size. We keep on praying, but we lower the bar of expectation and power in prayer.

Constantly overwhelmed lives should drive us to prayer at its purest and rawest, but 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. I trust the God who, even when he doesn’t make the suffering go away, wears the suffering alongside me. Trusting the God revealed in Jesus means silence is real, but it’s not forever.

13 When it comes to prayer, God isn’t grading essays; he’s talking to children. So if God can delight in prayers as dysfunctional as the ones we find wedged into the middle of the Bible, he can handle yours too without you cleaning them up first. If the Bible tells us anything about how to pray, it says that God much prefers the rough draft full of rants and typos to the polished, edited version. C. S. Lewis said of prayer, “We must lay before Him what is in us, not what ought to be in us.”