Tell Papa what you want.

Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. Philippians 4:6

My two year old nephew was standing at the sink with a cup in his hand, pointing at the tap and whining, while my mother and I sat at the kitchen table trying to have a conversation. Every now and then Mom would turn to Greg and ask him if he wanted something, and he just kept whining and pointing. Eventually, becoming frustrated with the interruptions, I took up his cause. “Mom, how would it be if we just give him a drink of water? He obviously wants a drink.” But Mom declined the suggestion and eventually Greg toddled over to us and said, “Water Gramma?” Mom got up immediately, took his cup, suggested to him that he might prefer some juice or a drink of milk, got him a drink, gave him a hug, and sent him on his way. Then she sat back down and helped me understand what had just taken place. And, out of the subsequent conversation came an illustration of the development of prayer that I have used for many years.

As I said in my last post, I believe prayer begins where all social interaction begins, in the inarticulate expression of our needs and desires. A baby is hungry or uncomfortable in some way and cries out. This is a mere reflex, but it has a social context of which the baby is, presumably, unaware. When Mama hears these cries and responds it is the beginning of social interaction and a doorway to a lifetime of personal relationships. Of course, there are also coos of contentment and gurgles of satisfaction, but we begin our lives as needy creatures. The cries are clearly set, in decibels, pitch and frequency, to get attention.

My mom’s first point was that my little nephew, who, at the age of two, was in the process of developing language, needed to learn to articulate his needs and desires. And we, as responsible adults in his life, needed to encourage him to do that. We might be tempted to anticipate his needs because we dislike the whining – I certainly was – but Greg needed help to leave this baby stage behind. He needed to discover that crying, whining, grunting and pointing were becoming ineffective. And it was up to his grandma and uncle to make sure they actually were.

But why should he articulate his needs when they are perfectly clear to us?

Well, apart from the fact that they aren’t perfectly clear to us, they probably aren’t particularly clear to him. Once he did ask mom for water she suggested some other options (juice or milk) that he might actually prefer. That’s one of the great things about words. They suggest other words and, thus, facilitate reflection.

As a child gets into using words to express his or her desires he or she will discover degrees of subtlety that might be hard to imagine without words. There’s juice, milk, pop, and eventually coffee, tea, beer and the kind of wining that actually goes well with dining. And then there’s a whole world of drinking that has little to do with being thirsty. To go for coffee is not essentially about thirst. (I asked someone once if he’d like to get together for coffee sometime. He declined because he didn’t drink coffee. Obviously a victim of inferior parenting.)

I believe, on this level alone, it’s important for us to ask God for things in prayer. Not in spite of the fact that he knows us better than we know ourselves, but because of it. As we articulate our needs we discover many things we might not otherwise see:

• how many we have,
• how few really matter,
• how many we don’t have because they’ve already been met,
• how selfish we are,
• and how many of our deepest needs we hadn’t even noticed until we started praying about them.

How many of us would have ever noticed our need for forgiveness if we’d never learned “Forgive us our trespasses” in the Lord’s Prayer? How many would think to ask to be led away from temptation?

The psalmist writes:

Search me , O God, and know my heart;

test me and know my anxious thoughts.

See if there is any offensive way in me,

and lead me in the way everlasting. Psalm 139:23-24

In conversation with God we discover ourselves, our own hearts. And we begin to discover that prayer changes us. In fact, I believe that’s mostly what it does.