A Moment Aside ---- 1 September 2020

 

A Moment Aside ---- 1 September 2020

    I think we’d all like to pray as if our words could be written down for future generations and reused  by people as an example or a set of phrases worth repeating and reusing. Maybe we’d want to be the stuff of prayer books.

     Chances are they won’t be.

     But as the angels said “Don’t be afraid!” That’s not what our prayers are for! Our prayers are our conversations with God over important things like sickness, death, failure, family, and general troubles. They’re also our conversations with God over less important things like recipes, sniffles, ingrown toenails (which can be problematic, don’t get me wrong), birds, or the weather when we want to take a walk.

     The photo at the top of the page reminds us that our prayers may be “awkward” or “feeble.” Very few of them might be considered literary and spiritual masterpieces. However, they are our prayers and as such God hears them. Just as we might take joy in hearing our children or grandchildren’s latest exploits in sandbox pies or dirt garden highways, so God takes joy in hearing us. There are people who hold an all-day-long chatter with God and God accepts that. (There are times when God might say “Shhhhhh! Be still and know that I am God.” …quoting Psalm 46:10)

     The photo at the top reminds us as well that the power of prayer resides in God and not in ourselves or in our words or thoughts. Since God has the power, our prayers are valuable to God, not because of their poetry but because they are our’s. Even though there is no guarantee that our prayers will be fulfilled as we wish, they are guaranteed to be heard! It could be that our prayers are answered in how we are changed to grow closer to God despite possible unfulfilled wishes. We might be changed in prayer by the power of the One Who Hears.

     Please don’t be ashamed of the words you might use in prayer; there is no failure there. Let each and every word bring you into God’s presence. (Well, it’s impossible to leave God’s presence, so maybe we just become aware of the presence of God.) Continue to pray in whatever way you can and let God provide the power.

{For those interested, I’d recommend a small book called “The Practice of the Presence of God” by Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection. It was written in the late 1600’s but is worth reading even today.}