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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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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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.

–

Related posts on prayer:

• On being empty and grieving: A litany for the last Monday in July
• On prayer being hard sometimes: Because sometimes you can’t do two things at once. 
• On wanting to sit with Jesus: Morning coffee with Jesus
• On what a conversation with Jesus might look like: A prayer

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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.

“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.”

First comes whimpering. Then crying. Then a screaming that consumes the child’s whole body. Long before danger of starvation, the child makes sure that there is no one within earshot that has any question about a need for food. That same child, a bottle or a breast later, is content. No tears, no cries, no struggles, no fears.

That’s the image a writer uses to describe a soul in Psalm 131. Instead of worrying, of crying out about “things too great and marvelous for me”, the writer has

calmed and quieted my soul,
like a weaned child with its mother;
like a weaned child is my soul within me.

We can go two directions at this point. We could move quickly to talk about those infants who have no food. Those infants who, no matter how loud the crying, will never be satisfied. Adrift in crowds in Somalia, they will die before they have the food they need.

Or we can look at the condition of our souls.

It is easy for me to allow my soul to be consumed with things I cannot understand, that I cannot resolve. International and internal politics. How everything will be tied together, or will fall apart. Being in charge. Things that they have no direct connect to that I watch friends lose sleep over.

Instead, the psalmist suggests,

O Israel, hope in the LORD
from this time forth and forevermore.

Intriguingly, when my soul is content at the side of a loving God, frenetic activity is replaced with thoughtful observation. I quit trying to fix. I quit being God. I can see around me. I notice suffering. And it is possible to climb from the lap and offer hope. Especially to the child crying from physical starvation.

—

My friend Rich Dixon is still riding the length of the Mississippi on his hand cycle, raising money for Convoy of Hope. He’s ridden 1000 miles so far. It’s one way to help kids.  (Rich and I)

You aren’t sure what’s happening. You can’t see to the end of today. And you are waiting.

It reminds you of that summer before your senior year of high school, the summer that you worked third shift. All alone in the building, all alone working on the computer.  Sometimes alone is okay. But in the hours just before dawn, when exhaustion is setting in, you can see waiting.

It reminds you of the time between you decided to apply for the job and the conversation in your office when they said, “We’ve decided to go the other direction.” Those weeks of wondering, those last minutes of sheer uncertainty about which way your whole life was going.

You are waiting.

And in your waiting, you are trying to talk to God. You make promises and then rescind them and then rescind your doubt and then doubt yourself. It’s so deep, your waiting, that some moments you cannot breath. You cannot sit. You cannot touch the keyboard.

An ancient chant starts playing around the edges of your heart.

More than the watchmen, waiting for the morning.
More than the watchmen, waiting for the morning.

Every bit of urgency and despair and desire and fear pours itself into that line. Because that’s how much you want hope, how much you are aching for this to be fixed.  But you can’t remember where that chant came from.

It came from Psalm 130, which is familiar even if never before seen.  Right before the repeated watchman phrase, the writer tells us the object of desire:

My soul waits for the Lord
More than the watchmen, waiting for the morning.

You aren’t the first to wait.  Or the first to cry out from the depths for mercy. I’ve known the feeling. And found hope.

I wrote to a friend yesterday. I said,

“Wait for the LORD; be strong and take heart and wait for the LORD.”

It wasn’t very original. It was the end of a prayer that David wrote (Psalm 27). But it’s what came across my desk yesterday and I passed it on to him.

“Waiting. That’s a really tricky one for me.” That’s how he replied.

I understand. Waiting is really hard.

• When it’s Christmas and you know there must be something amazing and you want to find out what it is, waiting is hard.
• When it’s report card day and you are pretty sure it isn’t going to be something amazing and you are wondering what your parents are going to say, waiting is hard.
• When there are a million seeds in the field, when those million seeds represent everything you own, and there is a race between the seeds sprouting and drought and storms and seeds ripening and the combine working and the market  falling, waiting is excruciating.
• When the enemies of your soul are all around your house and it is the early hours of the morning and you cannot sleep, waiting is hard.

As a professional worrier, I understand.

In the middle of that prayer, David talks about how he talks to himself:

My heart says of you, “Seek his face!”
Your face, LORD, I will seek.

David’s heart, the voice inside that is feeling the pressure, the despair, the stress of everything, wants hope. It longs for something other than the current uncertainty. And that voice says, “Stop trying to figure it all out. Just look for His face.”

David looks.

When at the end of the prayer he talks of waiting, he’s assuring his heart (“take heart”). It’s a “just wait. You’ll see” kind of wait.

Humans are satisfied with whatever looks good;
God probes for what is good.
Put God in charge of your work,
then what you’ve planned will take place.

My friend said, “But how?”

Here’s part of what I said:

We create plans all the time, plans that don’t work.

They don’t work because they center around us and our own view of reality. They run aground because other people exist. We cannot control other people. (We can barely control ourselves).

For example:

You make a plan. Your spouse exists. And her very uttering of anything can affect whether that plan happens.

We think, “If only I could have a bigger view, process more variables, be able to read people better, talk better, explain better.”

Then we think, “What if someone could see the interplay of everyone. See the end from the beginning.  Suggest which path might be better, which way of living might be best.”

And God, assuming that he is who he says he is, is that someone.

But with God, the starting point isn’t that I plan and then say, “Hey God. Make this work.” Or even “Please please please make this work and I’ll be indebted to you forever.”

The starting point is, “So, God, you know where you want me to end up. Even better, HOW you want me to end up. You know the kind of person that you want me to be so that, at the end, I’m more like you. Today I need your direction. About this decision, I need your direction. More importantly, I need to know the values you are using, God, so that I use those as my values so that I end up with the choices you’d make.”

And then never say “amen.”

Back then, I had a plan for that hour. Fifteen minutes of praying, fifteen minutes of reading, fifteen minutes of catching up with online, fifteen minutes of writing (a series of posts on signs for that first month.)

As I think about the four years since then, much has changed in our lives. And I’ve discovered that I can add habits a little better than I used to be able to. (You are reading one of those habits right now).

But I’m also looking at this particular habit and discovering…

Habits sometimes need to be reviewed. I’ve clung to the 6 am habit. I’m still consistent with the social media part of it. But I have to be honest that the other three quarters of that hour aren’t nearly as consistent. Going back to the original intent of the habit is helpful.

Habits sometimes need to be renewed. Having seen where I’ve not been consistent, it’s time to renew the commitment, to look for ways to restore the balance. Not because it’s more spiritual to pray and read the Bible than look online. However, the plan was a good one. It was healthy. And I need the consistency of morning quiet and reflection.

Habits sometimes need to be refused. Some mornings the habit is to get up at six and stare at the screen. Those mornings, I would be better served by laying on the downstairs sofa and catching an extra hour of sleep. Because the beneficial habit isn’t just 6. It’s the content of the hour.

—

This is the second of a series of posts on 6. The first was Psalm 6.