You want to know the highlight of my 2011? Prayer. I’m not just being spiritual. It’s really true. I was writing my contribution to the Howard family 2011 Christmas letter last week. As I was writing, I realized that the greatest highlight of my year was actually settling into a way of prayer. God knows I don’t have “relationship with Jesus” figured out. Indeed, that is the whole point. This year, finally, I think I’ve found a way to maintain a life of prayer in the midst of not having it all figured out. It’s not that I had some encounter or anything. It’s just that a few things came together for me and helped me get unstuck. And in the process I realized that perhaps I’m not alone in my prayer confusions. So let me tell you a little bit about what I needed to move forward.
The first thing that came together were my own thoughts about God. For a long time I have had some questions about how an all knowing, all powerful, God relates to my prayers. I worked through many of my theological quandaries as I wrote chapter four of the Brazos Introduction to Christian Spirituality. Nevertheless, it is one thing to study what the Bible teaches about God and it is quite another to believe this truth inside, especially when what you have learned is that God is beyond all learning. It took a while for “who is God?” to work its way down to “this is my God,” but in this past year I think I have found peace with what I know and what I may never know.
Another matter was my practice. I have done prayer in a lot of different ways over the years. I have made prayer lists, meditated on Scripture, spoken in tongues, recited liturgy, and more. Through these methods I have experienced seasons of both refreshing and drought. For the past few years however, no particular method has carried any special energy. So how was I going to do prayer now? Alongside this was the issue of my ownership of prayer. As a student of Christian spirituality, I had spent years and years trying to master the prayer life of others. But sooner or later you reach a point where you need to stop trying to be Johnathan Edwards or Teresa of Avila, and you must just be you,no matter how the books say you should pray. And so gradually I have become comfortable simply placing myself before God using a variety of means of prayer no matter what I seem to “get out of it” any given day.
And then there was the matter of time and place. I had to establish a realistic arrangement for prayer. I have had a special place for prayer for some time, but I felt like I needed to revise my schedule to facilitate this next season of prayer. After playing with a few experiments, I have recently found a schedule of prayer that seems to be just right.
Finally, I needed motivation. I was walking into an environment in which I didn’t really understand what I was doing, I couldn’t count on experiencing anything, and I wasn’t sure how God might answer my prayers. Honestly, I just wasn’t sure how to relate to God. And in this condition you can be sure that Satan used all kinds of strategies to keep me as far from prayer as possible. In the end I sat down and wrote out why I was choosing to pray. I read this little statement each day as I begin my prayers, just to remind me why I am there before God in the midst of ambiguity. This statement, and my own accountable relationships with others, enable me to keep at it from day to day.
It took all of these factors coming together to enable me to take this next step in my journey of prayer. I’m grateful to have found a place to start anew. What about you? How do you navigate the ambiguities of relationship with God?