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

by Tyler Staton

“Prayer is our humble answer to the inconceivable surprise of living.”3 We pray. We can’t help it. 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.

It’s always the common places that turn out to be holy, isn’t it? A burning bush in that same familiar field where Moses punched the clock every day for forty years. The sitting room where Esther presented her request to the king. The upstairs windowsill where Daniel rested his elbows while he defiantly prayed against royal law. The depressed old barn of a poor farmer on the outskirts of Bethlehem. The beach that Peter had docked at since he was a boy. The duplex on a seedy street in Jerusalem where the wind started blowing inside. It only takes a moment to turn an everyday place into holy ground.

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.

“Intercession is impossible until we allow the things that break God’s heart to break our hearts as well.”

“God is more of a friend than a formula.”18

Spend a few minutes praying for specific needs and wants in your life. I challenge you, especially, to ask for that which you think is too small to bring to God—the work meeting you’re really hoping goes well, the need you barely believe God will meet, the email reply you keep checking your inbox for, the house you just put an offer on, or the rent check for which you don’t have enough in your bank account to write. Ask vulnerably, with enough specificity that God has the chance to disappoint you or surprise you. Ask boldly, with enough empowerment that you wonder if you’re allowed to be this forward with God.

N. T. Wright writes, “The Christian vocation is to be in prayer, in the Spirit, at the place the world is in pain.”15 Proximity to pain lends credibility and power to our prayers.

life, and the tears we cry become the foundation of a better world. We are promised that a day is coming when the Father himself will wipe away every tear from our eyes. But until then, we live on an in-between promise: “I will not let a single one of your tears be wasted.”13

“Pain and suffering have the capacity to deepen you and transform you, but they also have the capacity to destroy you. I realized that this pain I carried was destroying me.”

Will the pain, suffering, and needs that intrude on our own stories harden our hearts, or will they soften our souls? How does the very pain that is eating us alive become an agent of deep transformation? We have to invite God—the very One who broke our trust—into the muck with us. We invite the One we are labeling “perpetrator” to be our healer. It’s the most courageous of all choices.

Parker Palmer: “The deeper our faith, the more doubt we must endure; the deeper our hope, the more prone we are to despair; the deeper our love, the more pain its loss will bring: these are a few of the paradoxes we must hold as human beings. If we refuse to hold them in the hopes of living without doubt, despair, and pain, we also find ourselves living without hope, faith, and love.”

C. S. Lewis names this choice as the great defiance from which redemption springs: “Our [Satan and his minions] cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.”17

1. Say It Like You Mean It Don’t begin with grit or faith. Start with disappointment, naming your pain and need to God.

2. Listen for the Question Invite God to show you the question beneath your disappointments. You’ll know you’re

3. Ask God to Meet You in the Question

“Prayer does not mean much when we undertake it only as an attempt to influence God, or as a search for a spiritual fallout shelter, or as an offering of comfort in stress-filled times,” writes Henri Nouwen. “Prayer is the act by which we divest ourselves of all false belongings and become free to belong to God and God alone.”

John Mark Comer, “If you want to experience the life of Jesus, you have to adopt the lifestyle of Jesus.”

prayer of Amos: “O Lord, do that in our days. Do that here. Do that through us. Raise up David’s tabernacle in my time and place.”