Why do we tend to remove the mystery out of prayer? I guess I could rightly ask why do we remove the mystery out of anything? The truth is that prayer is not some sort of philosophical phenomenon we need to solve in order to get God to give us the answers we want. Prayer is more than a barter system with God. Or at least I hope it is.
The craziness about prayer is that the God who creates, sustains and saves listens to us. In fact, he begs us to come to him. If you really think about it, it sounds as though one would have to be outrageously naive to believe such a thing. “How can God listen to all the people in the world at one time?” “And what kind of a God wants to hear from his creation?” We can answer questions by saying that God is “big” and God is “loving,” but is it not still a bit mysterious?
I’m not sure our questions about prayer are going to end, but that’s ok. Let’s embrace the mystery of it. And I guess I should note that when I write of prayer as being a “mystery” I’m not talking of some spooky or mystically weird type of experience. What I mean is that we are not going to figure it all out. Therefore, our questions of it should not inhibit our praying. Perhaps they might lead us to pray more.
So when it comes to prayer and our continued questions about it, I hope we keep in mind a a few things. First, I hope we never lose the wonder of it. To be beckoned to approach God with confidence (Hebrews 4:16) as we are told ask, seek, and knock (Matthew 7:7) should at times, lead us to a stance of awe. Oh how sweet the hour of prayer “that calls me from a world of care, and bids me at my Father’s throne.”
Second, we need to realize that prayer is more than just spouting words. It is about being in the presence of God. The Psalmist writes: One thing I ask from the Lord, this only do I seek: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze on the beauty of the Lord and to seek him in his temple (Psalm 27:4). To be in the presence of God is that which we must cherish. It is that which we must linger. We must not let our world of speed and obsessive productivity rob us of our need to sit at the feet of Jesus.
Finally, we need to keep in mind that praying is about being honest before God and to God. On an episode of Pete Enns podcast, he interviewed Sarah Bessey about prayer and her book on the subject. One comment stood out to me. Sarah said, “There was something about the honesty and the rawness and even the anger and the joyousness and the earthiness of prayer that I saw in the psalms that I didn’t really see in a whole lot of places around me.” I’m afraid many of us are like Sarah and have not been shown that we can come to God and speak openly and plainly about life’s ups and downs.
One more thing: If there is an area in my life that I feel undisciplined in, it is prayer. Perhaps you might feel the same. And yet as I think about why I feel this way, I wonder if it’s because I have viewed prayer as only a morning ritual to complete a daily “quiet time” instead of a relational presence I embrace as I go about my day? This is not to say there should not be disciplined times of prayer, I believe there should be. But when I move prayer from a check list of things to do to a walking with God in the mundane tasks of life, things change for me. Prayer becomes an hour by hour dialogue and a posture of gratefulness for God’s continual presence as I acknowledge God’s mercy in meeting me right where I am. Again, this does not eliminate the need for discipline in my life of prayer, it just frames it with a new end in mind.
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