We’ve just had a blizzard here, and the snow is still falling. I haven’t turned on the news yet this morning, but I know there are people without electricity today, people without sufficient warmth on this windchill of 4°F day, and worst of all, people who may have been out in the blizzard and who are now gone. My heart goes out to these families, and I wish there was something I could do – and so I want to pray.
God, here are your children – cold, suffering, perhaps in mourning. I can’t do much here, but You are everywhere, and You are all powerful. I ask you to send out your fire fighters to just the right locations, your Red Cross workers in the directions they should go, your homeless and electricity-deprived children into shelter and warmth. Give strength to your snow plow operators, as they’ve been at it all night long already. Encourage your weary, depleted, and cold children, Lord. And if there is anyone within my purview in need, please give me the wisdom and ability to help.
I don’t know what reactions I might get to typing out a little prayer, but I hope it is not taken as an act of self-righteous piety. The truth is, writing my prayers has always been the most focusing for me. I get so distracted when I think my prayers (something I’d like to work on, because I am not always able to write things out). Saying prayers aloud is an option, but there is truly something about seeing the words on a page that moves and changes me. I can see where I started in my prayer, and where I ended up, and how only God could have moved me in that direction.
But I am by no means a faithful pray-er. I used to be. I think back on how I used to start every day with a prayer journal and my Bible in hand, and I am ashamed that I seldom seem to pray now. But if I’m honest, there was an element of the occult in my prayers before. I really thought I had something to do with the results, as if my prayers were a type of magic. I would pray feverishly for something or someone daily, and if I skipped a day I was afraid the outcome would be disastrous – as if God could not move without my resolve.
I still believe that prayer is a mystery, and that there is some crazy element of human and divine collaboration that takes place, but I know that in my soul at the time, I was not giving the control to God. God still did amazing things in the lives of people I was praying for, but I wonder what He would have liked to do in me.
Perhaps it’s silly to have swung in the complete opposite direction, but here I am. And even as I look back at the prayer above, I realize that God already wants to do those things – that He is already in charge of all of that, and yet here is my little request that He please do what He is already doing!
Maybe the struggle is part of the story, as a recent Pinterest post puts it. Maybe I will always be in tension between wanting to have control and wanting God to take control. I don’t think that God requires, or even expects, only theologically correct prayers from me, or I would never pray at all. There is a beautiful image of prayer in scripture that I always think of when I realize my words are insufficient to express everything I want to say to God:
…For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words.
I’m grateful for that.
God knows what I want to say, and God knows, even when I am subconsciously using prayer as a talisman, what I really need. If my prayer above is not answered the way I’ve asked it to be, maybe God has other ways of providing.
That last thought is not my own – it comes from artist Nichole Nordeman’s song “Gratitude”, and it’s the best explanation for where I long to be with God and prayer. Listen to it here, with lyrics below.
Send some rain, would You send some rain?
‘Cause the earth is dry and needs to drink again
And the sun is high and we are sinking in the shade
Would You send a cloud, thunder long and loud?
Let the sky grow black and send some mercy down
Surely You can see that we are thirsty and afraid
But maybe not, not today
Maybe You’ll provide in other ways
And if that’s the case
We’ll give thanks to You
With gratitude
For lessons learned in how to thirst for You
How to bless the very sun that warms our face
If You never send us rain
Daily bread, give us daily bread
Bless our bodies, keep our children fed
Fill our cups, then fill them up again tonight
Wrap us up and warm us through
Tucked away beneath our sturdy roofs
Let us slumber safe from danger’s view this time
Or maybe not, not today
Maybe You’ll provide in other ways
And if that’s the case
We’ll give thanks to You
With gratitude
A lesson learned to hunger after You
That a starry sky offers a better view if no roof is overhead
And if we never taste that bread
Oh, the differences that often are between
What we want and what we really need
So grant us peace, Jesus, grant us peace
Move our hearts to hear a single beat
Between alibis and enemies tonight
Or maybe not, not today
Peace might be another world away
And if that’s the case
We’ll give thanks to You
With gratitude
For lessons learned in how to trust in You
That we are blessed beyond what we could ever dream
In abundance or in need
If You never grant us peace
But Jesus, would You please?
A Return to Sabbath 