Praying, personally
Slight redirection of this conversation: where are you particularly encountering God in prayer these days? This is not meant as an 'accountability question--"So, how's your prayer life?"--but more to give us a chance to share with one another places, times, ways where our encounters with God are particularly fresh, pointed, "alive," etc. I'm using "prayer" fairly broadly here, to include the variety of ways in which we may be experiencing ourselves drawing near to God, and God drawing near to us.
posted by Brian Emmet @ 3:08 PM
9 Comments:
I will jump in her first, Brian, since I essentially made no contribution to your last question. Personally, my prayer has changed over the past several years. In a world of way too much busyness and overly committed schedules, I have found that it has actually increased and become a greater part of my life. As LeRoy was touching on in the last blog, the key (I have found) is in relationship . . . sitting with my Father and having rich fellowship with Him. How? First, in the morning, it takes the shape of having my first cups of coffee with him. I drink mine black, becasue I figure that that is what He wants . . . if He wanted us to drink it with cream and/or sugar then, He would have put those ingredients in the coffee beans when He created them.:-} I touch Him through Scripture, devotionals (reading the one recommended by Bob Mumford at Gatlinburg, Diary of An Old Soul, by Gordon McDonald),and about 15" - 20" of journaling/listening. All in all, usually 30 - 45 minutes of fellowship.
The second component of my prayer is primarily (though not exclusivly) through prayer walks. I have an iPod Shuffle which has about 5 CDs on it . . . three are from a group in Cyprus and one is from IHOP in Kansas City. Most of the songs do not lend themselves for singing Sunday morning, but I find that they vault me into the "heavenlees." While there I find further communion with the LORD which usually leads to intercession. This is typically 40" - an hour. Additionally, I find myself praying while driving, in the grocery store, or the line at the bank,etc. It seems the Scripture say something about "prayer without ceasing." If I am not talking with God, then I spend an awfully large part of my day talking to myself!!!!! I had a period of time recently, about four weeks, where that extra 40" to an hour was squeezed out of my schdule. Man, did I miss it! I am back in the routine and I find that no matter what else happens during the day, that if I have had sufficient time with the LORD, it really doesn't matter. I have also been learning to be flexible. My more lengthy prayer time is usually in the early morning, but I have enjoyed it mid-morning, early afternoon, and late afternoon. Making it a priority has made a big difference in my life. I prayer walked while in Banda Aceh last summer, while in Galinburg, and Columbus. It is becoming a lifestyle. Additionally, when possible, I try to make our weekly gathering, "The Dwelling Place," which involves sitting in the LORD's presence and participating in His Communion Table . . . rich!
Could we talk about journaling for a minute? I confess this is a practice I have never been able to develop/maintain. Do all of you journal? For those who do, what got you started and what things keep you going?
And Yes to Robert's point that these conversations can go in several directions--feel free to come back to something that was posted a while ago--I don't think we ever really finish a topic, but it seems that if there isn't a new conversation-starter every two weeks or so, the conversation dries up altogether. I see my job as providing a prod every so often.
Apart from the typos in my last entry, I would like to make a correction, the book is written by George McDonald, not Gordon. He left this earth in 1905, but his influence was significant in the life of another great author, C. S. Lewis. I am sorry, the teacher is coming out; most of you probably already knew this!
In response to Brian's question, I have found journaling to be very helpful. I essentially write my prayers early in the morning. This is not intercession, per se, but conversation with God, a prayer letter. For some reason, I have found it to be a very meaningful way of connecting with the Father. Of course, it also allows you to go back and review what you wrote (prayed) at a later time, and it is especially helpful if you feel the LORD speaking to you. It seems if we don't write those words down, they are soon forgotten. For anyone who is just beginning journaling, I would suggest ten to fifteen minutes to start out. Just allow your prayer language to flow; of course, if you find yourself praying in tongues, then that might be hard to journal. Altough, Robert did make a noble attempt a couple weeks ago!
It is Saturday night and everyone in Baltimore is depressed. Good night!
On a purely mechanical level, I try to wake early each morning and have time with Him personally before our team prayer time which starts at 6 am Monday through Friday. When I am able to do this, I can start the day by talking to Him, listening to Him and soaking in His presence until all of the weight is off my shoulders and on His. This then makes it easier for me to follow Him into the day...I just stay close, keep taking anything that jumps on my shoulders to Him again and try to "stay in the river."
Each of our kids pray with us on the way to school and we pray together before they fall asleep.
Beyond the mechanics of it all, this is all just the setting for a journey that began with Him even before I gave my life to Him.
I sense always when I will listen that He is heading somewhere and asking me to grow in my ability to trust His leading, His voice, His Word and step out into it with Him. It is like a dad pulling up in His work truck, swinging the passenger door open and asking me to go to work with Him for the day.
As always, the ante keeps upping. During the mornings or at moments during the day, I am able to open up His Word and hear Him speak through it in deep ways that change things in me. During the day, He whispers phrases or directs me to following Him into receiving more of His love and then allowing that love to flow through me to the person in front of me.
This is where I am finding Him in deeper ways. To be honest, it is getting scarier and scarier to walk with Him. This is pushing me deeper and deeper into community in Costa Rica and beyond.
Well, yes, we in New England are celebrating ANOTHER mighty VICTORY by the always-estimable-yet-frequently-underestimated NEW ENGLAND PATRIOTS. So if Robert gets to rap in some of his posts, I should at least be allowed the occasional WAHOOOOO!
In all honesty, I'm not sure if I've ever said the following to anyone, but one of the times when I feel closest to God, most alive in Christ, most anointed if you will, is when I am telling stories to my schoolkids. My "chapel talks" for the past 20 years have primarily been in the form of storytelling, stories that I "make up". These are kind of like old fashioned movie serials--they come out in about 10-minute sections day-by-day, and not infrequently they'll go on for several weeks. It is a frequnt occurrence that I will not know where the "daily episode" is going until I'm halfway through it. The current story has been going on for a couple of months--not every day, but a steady thread... there is a "revelatory" aspect to this experience that is...fun! But these are probably the times when I feel "closest" to the Lord, or most in tune/in touch with the Spirit...
Kinda weird, huh? Hey, maybe I'm postmodern!
DO NOT BET AGAINST THE PATRIOTS! They don't always win, but it is a fool who bets against them.
Yes, we're kind of giddy up this way...
I'm grateful for this conversation and for all of your contributions--very edifying, encouraging. Maybe there is more to prayer than we understand--more actually going on while we're praying than we have any idea of. This shifts my focus a bit from the "How does prayer work? How do we explain what is going on when we pray? How do we get more effective in our praying?" (kind of a "modern" orientation, eh?) to more of an entering-into-a-mystery kind of thing... for example, the Psalms were, at least at some point in their composition, the "ordinary" prayers of "ordinary" people--but because there is something of the Spirit of God in that praying, those particular prayers were included in Scripture, even as prophetic foreshadowings of the Messiah. No, I of course do NOT mean that my prayers should be granted Scriptural status... only that if God could do "above and beyond" things with those prayers, maybe he is doing "above and beyond" things ("greater things will ye do because I go to the Father") with ours. No excuse for carelessness or sloppiness here, just a wonderful possibility that there's more going on here than meets the eye, ear, mind, heart of man. Which is great encouragement to keep at it, incompetent as I typically feel!
My son Joshua is getting deeply interested in physics and cosmology. He is having me walk with him through understanding String Theory as we watch physicists struggle to wed quantum physics with Newton and Einstein. One of the things that keeps hitting me in it all is the sovereignity of God...which Dow focused us on at the Next Conference last month.
What I mean in it all is that the infinite power and presence of God seems to exist in ways that seem to conflict to us. From our eyes, He somehow exists in conflicting ways...the undetectably small and the unquantifiably large...in perfect order and dangerous chaos...in the apparent holiness of high church and in the horrific darkness of a crack house. Regardless of if it fits our mindset or ability to reconcile it all, He IS....and He is constant, unchangeable, knowable and faithful.
I like Brian's touching on the mystery of this "conversational" living in connection with Him that we call prayer. I think that in order to have the best conversations, we have give room for the other person to be themselves so that they can really share their hearts and so we can really hear their hearts. I have hung out with young people that will only talk while playing video games, playing basketball, drinking coffee...and even some...doing crack cocaine. I have gone with them in order to know them.
God apparently is communicating to each of us in our prayer closets (cars in rush hour, offices, kneeling down beside our beds, walking our dogs), in the midst of that amazing smell of coffee, during long prayer meetings surrounded by people who would probably all have a very different definition of prayer and even in telling stories to school children.
This does bring up the question of how much prayer and even waiting on God should involve absolute stillness/contemplation and how much should involve action in "living a life of love"/following Him as He leads us out there? From all of our accounts, He appears not to be just "in there" or is He also "out there!" What does this mean for us?
Among the many reasons I appreciate this conversation is the help it provides for sermons! As I've been noodling on prayer with you, I found myself returning, naturally enough, to the Lord's Prayer: Jesus clearly was more than receptive to the disciples' desire to learn to pray, so clearly there is something to prayer, and likely more than we know. So I've strated working on a sermon series called "The Things that Really Matter" and realized that prayer is one of the tools God uses to clear the clutter out of our lives so that we're able to be attentive, receptive and responsive to him. There's a whole world in just the first word, "Our..." I'm not a cartesian individual, unnconnected to and independent of everyone else. I can't follow Jesus in prayer without doing so as an "I" who is part of an "us." Prayer is simultaneously intensely and intrinsically personal AND communal, and has to be both. And then I got thinking about just who constitutes this community contained in that "Our..." and I may have to spend a month unpacking that, even before getting to "Father"! And Jamie--if you and Joshua have gotten string theory pretty much under control, there are some folks here at MIT who would like to hear from you!
For the past few months, I have been reading as part of my devotional time, "The Journals of Father Alexander Schmemann, 1973-1983" (obviously, not one of the Ancient Fathers). He is now with the LORD. This morning I was reviewing some of the passages that I had highlighted, and I came accross these words: "What is prayer? It is the remembrance of God, the feeling of His presence; it is the joy from that presence. Always, everywhere, in all things" (p. 10). Amen!
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