PRAYER

Well, I’m going to give this census thing a rest now.

• For one thing, I’m tired of it too.
• For two thing, I find the bickering among politicians, as opposed to reasonable discussion, very discouraging.
• And for three thing, next year, depending on who wins the argument, one in three of us will have it to do (the new household survey), or one in five of us will have to do it (the traditional long form). Then all the squabbling will start up again and I’ll probably have more to say. In the meantime, however, I’d like to devote a few posts to the topic of prayer.

A while back my sister, Mary, asked me to pray for her. – She has a heart problem and if God brings her to mind from time to time it would be very cool if you would pray for her too. – As we were sharing she told me about an intellectual problem she has with the whole idea of prayer. To paraphrase: What sense does it make to go to God and ask for things when he already knows what we want and need, and we believe he is committed to providing the very best for us? It’s a great question that everyone who prays eventually has to deal with. I’ve been thinking about it, and about prayer in general, and over the next few blogs I’d like to share some things that have occurred to me:

1. I don’t think we can really help asking God for things. It’s part of how he made us.

In the Harry Potter books for example, though the kids are thoroughly secular British children with no trace of any kind of religion, when they face a challenge they quite instinctively begin to throw their desperate desires into the air, “O please, don’t let this happen!” or “O no, not that!”

I believe these cries are prayers in rudimentary form, just as the crying of a hungry baby is a rudimentary request for food. It’s been said that there are no atheists in foxholes, but, to be fair, I expect there is very little theology of any king, positive or negative, in foxholes. When the bullets are flying we all do what we do, then we (theists and atheists alike) reflect upon what just happened and try to understand what it means.

2. Prayer, as we generally think of it, is, in part, a refinement of this rudimentary impulse. But if God gave us this impulse why should it need to be refined?

I once had a friend who sang on a worship team, and she became very upset at the request of the leader that she work on her vocal technique. “This is the voice God gave me.”, she insisted, appealing to me to intervene on her behalf. “Who is he to tell me it needs to be improved?”

Well, resistance to instruction is the besetting sin of new singers, new worship leaders, new preachers, pretty much new anythings; and the name of the sin is “Pride”. So my answer was pretty simple. “Just take a turn in the nursery and listen to the voices God gave his children.” (I obviously said more than that in the course of our conversation, but that was the nub.)

The cries of a baby are really quite amazing, but by the time children sing, let alone lead people in singing, their vocal technique has been improved considerably. Everything God gave us has to be refined, developed, improved. And part of how we do this is by taking feedback and instruction from people who’ve been doing it longer than we have. In the end my friend lost faith in me too. And she moved on to look for a worship team leader who was more appreciative of her gift. Not the end of the world by any means but, knowing the gifted and experienced leader she left behind, it was certainly a setback in her development.

To change the analogy slightly, the impulse to pray is like a child’s impulse to draw a picture. I’m sure our heavenly Father delights in the most primitive and basic things we bring to him, and he finds room on the fridge for all of it. But if we delight in the delight God has in us, surely we will seek to grow. Surely we will want our next pictures, our next prayers, to be even better and more delightful to the one who so delights in us.

So, tell me a little about your prayer life. Do you pray? Why and why not? What are you learning? What’s hanging you up?