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

by Tyler Staton

Then, in a series of events, some very surprising things happened in my family’s life. If I could let my skeptical, intellectual guard down for a moment, I genuinely felt like someone had not just heard my prayers but was responding to them. I was having an experience of God’s presence in my life that felt real, dynamic, and unpredictable. And it was wonderful.

prayer was just one way of describing the mystery and wonder of a human living in dynamic communion with God.

Is prayer really necessary? If God is all-powerful, that means he accomplishes what he wants, when he wants, right? So why does he need me to ask?

Most of us get about knee-deep in the Christian life, discover that the water feels fine, and stop there. We never swim in the depths of the divine intimacy Jesus won for us. This book is an invitation to swim.

There is a tragic disconnect between the sacred and the secular in today’s Christianity that has led to an unbiblical divorce between a “spiritual life” (made up of activities like Scripture reading, prayer, and—if you’re going for extra credit—tithing) and a “normal life” (made up of basically everything else).

Prayer is not a soft place to lay our heads or a workout routine for burning spiritual fat. It’s a wild, unpredictable adventure that only those brave enough to strip themselves of artificial identities, get the wind completely knocked out of them a time or two, and see beauty in mystery will ever take. Proceed with caution. Prayer is not for the faint of heart.

It only takes a moment to turn an everyday place into holy ground.

there was also the Spirit of the living God bending history in loving response to the prayed mumblings of a kid.

simply because he finds this kid in all of his insecurity, awkwardness, and adolescent nervousness to be irresistibly lovable. That’s ludicrous, or it’s breathtaking.

One of the more frustrating aspects of Scripture is that it rarely reads like Ikea instructions. If God would just lay it out, step-by-step, then I’d do it. But for some reason, he’s determined to speak in stories, analogies, and riddles.

Right here, it’s laid out step-by-step, but generally speaking, we don’t follow the steps. Do not be anxious about anything. Pray about everything. But most Christ followers spend far more hours turning over anxious thoughts than surrendering them in prayer. If it’s right there, so plain and clear, why not take God up on such a satisfying exchange?

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.

Prayer means the risk of facing silence where we’re addicted to noise. It’s the risk of facing a God we’ve mastered talking about, singing about, reading about, and learning about. It means risking real interaction with that God, and the longer we’ve gotten used to settling for the noise around God, the higher the stakes.

When we’ve got that much to lose, prayer might be scarier than the avoidance of never being alone with God.

You and I have been groomed by a post-Enlightenment story of deconstruction that doesn’t trust God anymore but has plenty of reasons not to trust people either.

Instead, even in the church, our prayers don’t exchange overwhelmed lives for transcendent peace. 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.

Trust is confidence in the character of God.

Before we can have faith that God will answer a given request, we simply have to learn to trust the character of the God we’re talking to.

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. 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.

God is looking for relationship, not well-prepared speeches spoken from perfect motives.

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.

“Your power in prayer will flow from the certainty that the One who made you likes you, he is not scowling at you, he is on your side … Unless our mission and our acts of mercy, our intercession, petition, confession, and spiritual warfare begin and end in the knowledge of the Father’s love, we will act and pray out of desperation, determination, and duty instead of revelation, expectation, and joy.”19

Knowledge is hearsay. It’s memorizing the facts. Discovery requires personal experience.

When it comes to prayer, you can read all the classics, study the revival stories, and treasure up every biblical insight. You can memorize the facts. Or you can live daily in relationship with God through prayer, insist on processing the extraordinary, the devastating, and all the mundanity in the middle with the eagerly listening Father. Guess which method is more effective? Prayer is learned by discovery.

Pray as you can, and somewhere along the way, you will make the most important discovery of your life—the love the Father has for you.

Show up, and keep showing up. That’s the one nonnegotiable when it comes to prayer.

And that invitation is for...

you’ll spend eternity in the presence of God and never reach the end of him.

You’ll never lose a sense of wonder at his goodness, never grow bored in his presence, and never have him all figured out. There is discovery ad infinitum in this divine relationship. Pray as you can.

But in a world that for the most part rejects him, ignores him, and chooses any distraction over him, imagine how much it must bless the heart of the Father to hear, “I want to be with you. I choose you, God, over every other option.”

Prayer is about presence before it’s about anything else.

Owen was introducing CJ to the stillness and wonder from which all prayer emerges.

“Prayer is the act of seeing reality from God’s point of view.”

Take a vacation. Stop playing God over your own life for a moment. Release control. Return to the created order.

In the vast expanse, who is this God who would concern himself with the likes of me? The great scandal and most important work of prayer is simply to let ourselves be loved by God.

So a prayer like “Let me know how fleeting my life is” is not self-deprecating or depressive; it’s self-aware victory. 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 you see how great God is and how fragile and fleeting you are, you equally see how profoundly you matter. The Creator has time for you.

Be still. Remember who God is. Remember who you are. Then do your best to live without getting the order mixed up.

But that’s not the purpose of stillness. The purpose is consent. It is the daily practice of consenting to the work of God’s Spirit, which is deeper than understanding or words.

Give God the first word, and let spoken prayer follow as a response.

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.

Jesus did nothing to diminish the reverence, nothing to minimize the power of God. Jesus made that powerful God knowable.

We live without sacredness, yawning at the very words that made the disciples gasp. Our world is a million miles from theirs. Our hearts, though, are the same.

That’s because the biblical use of the word saint has nothing to do with human competence and everything to do with divine grace.

To call someone a saint is not to necessarily call them good; it is only to name them as someone who has experienced the goodness of God.