Tag Archives: prayer

Sometimes you talk for an audience.

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Nancy and I talk quite a bit. We walk and talk. We text. We tweet. We email.

Sometimes, when we are out for supper, we probably look like the couples who never talk. We eat. We listen. We look sideways at the people who are talking loudly at adjacent tables. We feel no need to perform.

Sometimes, however, we do talk in front of other people so they can hear us talk, so they know how we interact. There have been times when we’ve been with our kids that we have made sure that we have talked and laughed and even kissed. It hasn’t been made up, it’s not pretend. It’s the public version of a deep private relationship, with an awareness that there is an audience and an awareness that the audience shapes the conversation and, perhaps more importantly, is shaped by the conversation.

Jesus is standing outside the tomb where Lazarus’ body is. He looked up and said,

“Father, I thank you that you have heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I said this for the benefit of the people standing here, that they may believe that you sent me.”

Jesus was, for the people listening, establishing that there was a relationship. He acknowledges that they talk all the time. He wants everyone to be sure that what is going to follow, the emergence of Lazarus, is clearly rooted in the conversational relationship he has with his father. It can’t be his own power. It can’t be a coincidence. It needs to be that Jesus made a seemingly heretical claim, and instead of being struck by lightening, Lazarus is struck by life.

Maybe like Jesus,  just as I  “public talk” with Nancy, I need to “public talk” with God.

Maybe life would strike twice.

if i could sit with you.

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If I could sit with you, I would tell you that sometimes we can hear God talking and sometimes we can’t. I would tell you that when we hear him talking, you don’t actually hear anything with your ears. I would tell you that you hear it anyway, that is probably isn’t an essay, it’s probably just a couple words. But you know when it’s God.

If I could sit with you, you would ask me how you know for sure. Because, you would say, all the time you have thoughts that you think could be God talking, but you want to be sure they aren’t wishful thinking. Especially when those thoughts are telling you how stupid you are. Especially when those thoughts are too convenient and fun.

Then I would tell you about a shepherd, one that never calls sheep stupid.

Think about a shepherd who spends time around his sheep, talking enough that they know his voice enough to recognize it. They have heard that voice talking to the sheep around them. They have heard that voice talking to assistant shepherds. They have heard that voice talking to them, calling them by name.

How would a sheep be confident about the voice of the shepherd? By knowing that there are strangers who wander by. By knowing that there are hired hands who don’t really care. By knowing that it is important to listen. By spending as much time listening to that voice as possible, listening for tone of voice, for topics, for style of talking, for consistent concern with sheep welfare.

Then I would ask how much time you and I spend actually listening, reading letters, reading stories, being open to hear. We may not hear much, but we will hear more clearly than if we never listen.

Prayer. Again.

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(Paul Merrill writes here every First Friday)

I constantly seem to forget how important and real prayer is. A few months back, I wrote about a friend who was facing foreclosure because he had not received a paycheck in over a year. I prayed with him for several months. God brought a job! Another friend had been looking for a job for a long time. I prayed with him. He has a job! A third friend – the same.

My prayers are certainly not amazing or special. But God is. He must realize that my trust in Him needs some bolstering right now, so He is clearly answering some of these requests.

I’m asking God to provide a “yes” for another friend who is looking for a job. Heather and I haven’t received an answer to those prayers yet. (Maybe we have received an answer – and it’s “no” – but I still want to keep praying.) Paul reminds me in Romans 12 verse 12 to “Be patient in trouble, and always be prayerful.” The being patient part is hard.

God simply wants us to talk to Him. And a great thing is that He doesn’t mind if all we do is talk about ourselves. I’ve read books and heard sermons about how our prayers need to follow formulas. I don’t think God uses many formulas. He just does things like an artist – effortlessly. He is like a good father who loves hearing what His kids did that day. (What good father would tell his kid, “But you didn’t ask me the right way or in the right order!”) He also doesn’t mind hearing us cry about our problems. As Jon mentioned, David did a lot of crying to God in the Psalms.

So be honest with God. Your earthly father may have rejected you. God won’t.

Sometimes you just sit and listen.

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My boss was very active. He handed me lots of things to work on, lots of projects to research. And I enjoyed it. It was stretching. It was fun.

We were sitting in his office one afternoon, talking. I already had a long list of next steps in front of me. I was ready to walk next door to my office to get busy on the list. There were deadlines. My boss himself had set some of the deadlines.

And we were just talking. Not about the projects, not about the todo list. We were just spending time together talking.

I started to get twitchy. Because we were talking, the work was not getting done. Opportunities were being missed. Instead we were just sitting here, talking.

Right now I have no idea what we were talking about. I just remember the frustration.

And then I started to smile inside.  I realized that the lists came from the person I was talking with. He knew the deadlines. He knew the projects. He knew how much there was to get done. But he also knew that he wanted to talk with me, that our conversations mattered, that our relationship mattered.

Although some bosses may waste your time and then punish you for not getting your work done, this one didn’t. And neither does God.

Jesus invited the twelve to follow. At least some of the time they they were just sitting, talking. We don’t have transcripts of those times because the primary purpose was not note-taking, it was being together, it was relationship.

I have a funny feeling that one reason we have such a hard time with the idea of listening in prayer is that we think we have to be working on some list. Maybe we could just live, listening.

You mean I haven’t talked about that before?

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I really wasn’t planning to plunge into a series on prayer.

Next week I’m teaching about prayer at a denominational conference. To help me think, I went to the group I teach on Sunday mornings and began exploring this question: 

What does it mean that so many people end prayers with some version of “In Jesus’ name, amen.”? Why, really, do we do that?

It was a wonderful conversation, one that led to making two people from the class sit on chairs in front of the room so we could see the side-by-side image that showed up in the two chairs post this week.

As I’ve spent the rest of the week writing about prayer, other topics keep bubbling up in my brain and yours. I’m seeing them in the comments and in emails. And I’m realizing that there are some things that I often say when I’m talking with people about prayer that I have never written about.

  • Why do we call them “prayers”? How is that different from calling them “formulas” or “incantations”?
  • And why do we limit ourselves to the word “pray” when we talk about interaction with God when we have many other words for our interactions with each other?
  • What does it mean to pray constantly? Does the idea of “ambient intimacy”, taken from social media, help us understand what that might be like?
  • Where is heaven? Although that is a huge question, far beyond the topic of prayer, it would be helpful to know how long the string on our tin-can prayer telephone is. Or, perhaps, the imaginations that work so well in understanding science fiction literature might help us understand where heaven is.

Those are posts coming very soon. But I probably should ask, what do you wonder about this thing called “prayer”?

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If you don’t want to ask in the comments, send me an email at jnswanson at gmail dot com.