I, like many others, don’t put much time into prayer. I quite often say a quick please and thank you in the morning before getting out of bed and getting on with the business of the day. Sometimes a sorry (particularly if I’ve been heavy on the red wine the night before). However, when I do actually take the time to devote some real time to it, the results are quite amazing. More of what happens later.
I used to wonder why monks and nuns had chosen to remove themselves from the world and spend so much of their day in prayer and silent contemplation. Of course, I appreciate that there is no one answer to why someone makes that decision and that their reasons may be varied and complex as people are. I must admit, I did used to think that it was a bit of a waste of time, that if they so loved God and the message of Jesus then they would be better off out there in the world trying to do good works and help others. However, it later occurred to me that if you accept that you are created by God, that everything is meaningless in the bigger picture, then making sure that you have God at the centre of your life and communicating with him is probably the best thing that you can do with your time. (Incidentally, Ecclesiastes is an amazing ‘wisdom’ book and far from being despairing and cynical, it is full of hope – a subject for another blog post.)
I’m not going all Sound of Music on you, I’m not running off to be a nun anytime soon. However, it did make me think maybe I really ought to be spending a bit more time on prayer than I currently do. Earlier this week, through my letterbox came my free copy of New Wine magazine and after a quick flick through admiring the graphics and the quality of the paper, I actually read ‘How to Hear God’(which you can read by clicking here). This article reminded me about that thing called two way praying.
So, I sat down and asked God what he had in store for me that day. Nothing. So I waited a bit longer. Nothing. Tax return deadline is looming and I need to finish my accounts. But I waited. Nothing. It had been a whole ten minutes now and I really needed a cup of tea. Nothing. So, I opened my bible at Luke (if you have read my previous posts, you will realise I am spending a bit of time on Luke at the moment) and I turned to Luke 11 ‘Jesus’ teaching on prayer’ where Jesus taught the disciples to pray. We can probably all recite the Lords prayer and maybe often do it, as I do, mindlessly and without it saying or meaning a great deal each time we say it. I read through the familiar words in just this way. Nothing.
I carried on reading to the familiar passage of Luke 11:9-12 ‘ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you’ which explains that if your children ask you for something, you do not give them something awful instead and that we will give good gifts to our children (despite our handicap of being human, flawed and ‘evil’) so God will give us the Holy Spirit if we ask. So I read it again and knocked. Then God spoke. I read the Lord’s prayer again and, sure enough, the words ‘Forgive us our sins for we also forgive everyone who sins against us’ jumped out of the page at me. This set me off on a very interesting path of forgiveness that will be the subject of another post.
Sometimes we may not know what to pray. This doesn’t matter; ‘We do not know what we ought to pray for but the Spirit himself intercedes for us’ Romans 8:26. So, I think this is a note to self on prayer: persevere, keep doing it, keep on knocking, your persistence will pay. Keeeeep on praying!
ps. for the benefit of my overseas readers, we have a show in the UK called Strictly Come Dancing (the picture is of that show) which ends with the phrase 'Keep on dancing'.
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