Category Archives: prayer

How Jesus once responded to success.

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You make a new commitment. You watch a friend die. You finally decide. You screw up. You get the award. You finish the book. You make the call. You answer the call. You finish. You start. You can’t figure it out. You didn’t get to sleep. You won. You lost.

Then it’s the next morning.

The success is dulled. The commitment, foggy. The future seems permanently distant, unaffected by whatever you might do today.

If this doesn’t sound familiar,  go refill your coffee and get on to your day. Don’t even waste time here.

If, however, you are reading this and you know exactly what I’m talking about (and you, at least do), do what Jesus did one morning.

The night before had been wonderful, powerful, exciting. People heard that Jesus was staying at Peter’s house. Everyone brought an illness or a demon for Jesus’ autograph. “Heal my mom,” they said. “Keep my brother from being thrown into the fire,” they said.

He did.

In a foreshadowing of the Best Buy parking lot on the Friday after Thanksgiving, people slept in a line outside the door, waiting to get the Magic Healing Touch, as Seen on TV.

Early the next morning Jesus left the house. He found “alone.” He prayed.

The disciples found him. They said he’d made the big time. Word of mouth worked. He said, “We’re going to another village. I gotta tell them the good news. That’s why I’m here.”

What happened out there?

His dad reminded him that his purpose wasn’t making people happy. His success wasn’t measured in crowds. He didn’t have to solve every problem.

He simply had to do what he had come to do.

The line is long outside our doors this morning. We can do what Jesus did. Talk to his dad.

–

This was first posted on May 24, 2011

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How I get things done. Sometimes.

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In a hallway on the other side of the building from my office are two sofas. They are more like love seats. They form the angle of a third of an apple pie, two slices, one for you, one for me. When you sit on these sofas, your back is to a couple windows, your face is toward the empty church sanctuary, hidden behind a brick wall. And most of the time, traffic in this hallway is light.

A couple times a week, when I remember, I walk to the sofas with a cup of coffee and a pile of lists. It’s a printout of my current projects, the list of drafts of various writing things, some articles that I want to read, the list of things that have to get done before I walk out of the building.

I never stay on the sofas very long, unless I fall into the sleep that looks, I tell myself, exactly like prayer. I never stay long because when I sit down and start to look at the list, I start writing. The log-jam clears. I make sketched-out progress on four or six of the things on the list, enough to go back to my office and my computer and write emails and essays and next steps.

There is nothing special about the sofas, I don’t think. Except that I intentionally move away from my connections. I intentionally move away from people. I intentionally move to God.

Because when I walk to those sofas, I am also saying “I need to be able to hear you God.” I would like to believe that it’s what Jesus did when he walked away from the crowds into the hills to pray. When I remember, that’s what I do, taking my lists and brainstorming with God.

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How can I start praying again?

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Dear Jon:

Something just hit me and I hope I don’t get struck down for saying this: I used to pray, something I used to do quietly on my own since I was a kid. But a year ago or so, I began questioning the purpose: If God has a plan for me and knows what I need, why barrage Him with all of these pesky DMs? But, if the purpose of prayer is more to lay our woes at His feet so they aren’t constantly zinging around our heads, then that makes more sense.

Dear friend:

I understand your thinking. I’m wrestling through some of the things that we tell people about prayer myself. What I’m pretty clear about though is that praying is more like this conversation we are having than it is like DM’d spam.

Think about our relationship, you and me. We’ve met face to face just a couple times. But we touch base through twitter pretty often. And we email several times a year. And we are both involved in a group of people who are interacting with each other at least quarterly.

Though we are able to do things for each other, particularly help each other think, the best part of our relationship is that we have a relationship. We are friends in ways that surpass the distance, that surpass the specific actions we can do for each other.

The content of the communication is often less important than the fact that we are interacting. Every touch, every exchange, deepens and enriches our understanding of each other.

I think that’s what God’s desiring as we pray. Doing stuff is part of it. Sometimes it’s handing off woes. But the bigger thing is developing a relationship between persons. With one of those persons being God.

–

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Peace for Thursday.

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On Thursdays we don’t need big challenging thoughts. We need quiet reminders. We need to remember what we believed on Sunday, what we promised on Monday, what we lost track of on Tuesday. We need to sit for a moment, just a moment, and shake off the chaos that was Wednesday and rest.

We can’t rest long. There are only two days left in the week. Which is, of course, a lie we tell ourselves. The week runs all the way to Saturday night. When the next one starts.

It’s enough to make us tear our hair out and run around in circles.

That’s exactly, by the way, what David did one day. I don’t know that it was a Thursday. David was running for his life. He went from Israel over to the Philistines, to the king of Gath. The king’s servants recognized him. David was afraid. He pretended to be insane. It worked. He was tossed out.

And then he wrote a poem about it. Psalm 34. In the middle of it, he offers instruction about what to do when everything is collapsing.

 Come, my children, listen to me;
I will teach you the fear of the LORD.
Whoever of you loves life
and desires to see many good days,
keep your tongue from evil
and your lips from speaking lies.
Turn from evil and do good;
seek peace and pursue it.

See peace and pursue it. Of all the things to do in the middle of a day when every king you know is chasing you, when Saul is throwing spears at you, that’s all he can come up with? Seek peace and pursue it? 

Exactly. Pursuing peace is hard work. It’s not doing nothing. It’s a passionate quest.  It’s life-consuming.

It’s a worthy project for a Thursday.

24 hours to decide.

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That’s the message some friends got. 24 hours to decide whether to try moving ahead with an adoption. And they had no real assurance that moving ahead would ever end up with the child in their arms.

“She might not make it through the night.” That’s what another friend heard last week as his wife, sedated, was in the emergency room. There was a walnut-sized white spot on a scan standing for red blood leaking.in her brain.

“Our gas is scheduled for disconnection this afternoon” is what I heard when I answered the phone, a child fussing in the background. “Do you help?”

“It’s probably cancer, in the thyroid.” He’s a junior in college, he’s getting married in May. Of the kinds of cancer to have, it’s a good one. That’s what everyone who knows says. But that’s a really hard truth to hear. It’s not your neck, or your son’s neck, on the table.

What everyone wants most is fixing, for the uncertainty to be gone and the situation to be fixed. Instead, the clock has twenty-four hours and the hospital lost the fast-forward to brain resolution button, and the gas wrench can only be stopped with cash and this Friday morning at 5 is years away.

So what can I say without sounding like a Hallmark card? “It will be fine.”

“God, you know what you are wanting, you see how this all turns out. Because you are God. And I’m not. So give us wisdom, because that’s something to ask for. Give us peace, because we are having this conversation. And what I’d like, since it’s okay to tell you that, is for Joy to not die. And Jordan to be healed. And S___ to find home. And we’ll take care of the gas bill. And help our unbelief.”