Prayer

by Philip Yancey

Medical students wait through ten years and more of training before setting up a practice. Parents wait for years in hopes that the prodigal will return. Waiting is not the goal, but may be a necessary stage in attaining the goal. We wait for what is worth waiting for, and in the process learn patience.

Who needs our love more than those who are consumed with hatred? Through prayer we stand beside our enemies and plead to God on their behalf. (In the Gospels, the demon-possessed never asked Jesus for a cure; they were incapable. Instead, other people brought them to Jesus.)

Jesus likened prayer to a child approaching the Father. A child who crawls into her father’s lap with a fantasy Christmas list may not get everything she desires. But the very fact that she crawled into his lap, making known her deepest desires, helps cement the bond of love the father cherishes above all else. We do far better to act like a trusting child, presenting foolish requests and letting the Father make judgments, than to fret in advance over appropriate petitions.

devout Jews practice reciting at least one hundred blessings every day, and in Orthodox neighborhoods you can actually hear the low murmurs of praise in the background. The Talmud spells out blessings for hearing thunder or seeing lightning, for the variety of tastes, for sunrise and sunset, for fragrances, for trees and lakes and mountains. One of my favorites expresses gratitude to God “who makes the creatures so very different.”

Only in prayer can we learn to love God with heart, mind, and soul. Love God with all your heart, Jesus said. Listen to your life: to its passion, its dreams and disappointments, its tedium as well as its drama. It came to you as a gift and each day, too, unravels as a gift. God wants an invitation to share in its every detail.

To adore but not seek to fathom — perhaps in those words lies a clue to loving God with all my soul. So often I line up my prayers like the closing arguments of an attorney, in an attempt to fathom. Why are some people blessed and some cursed? Why does God permit so much evil and violence? How can I trust what I do not see? What is the meaning of life? By bringing us into the presence of God, and giving us a glimpse of the view from above, prayer radically changes how we experience life.

all time is in the hands of his Father. And that too is why peace and not unrest goes out from him. For God’s faithfulness already spans the world like a rainbow: he does not need to build it; he needs only to walk beneath it.”