Important… boring… irrelevant, would have been my answer if you’d asked me what I honestly thought about prayer several years ago. I might have added that it was good for older ladies (no offense) who have the time for it and no energy for anything else. Definitely not me (at least not back then when I was young, busy and had tons of energy to waste)
I’ve bumbled through most of my Christian life with a shot-gun approach to prayer. When the crisis hits, I aim at God and shoot at Him a bunch of rat-tat-tats that can be summarized with three simple words: yelp for help. He helps, I get my adrenaline fix – Cool, God, You are so awesome! - enough to keep me going until the next crisis. And, so my prayer life trotted along my ‘regular’ life going from emergency to emergency, from crisis to crisis, from disaster to disaster… C.S. Lewis did say that pain is God’s megaphone to awaken the sleepy world (or something along those lines). Well, I admit I am a deep sleeper difficult to wake up. So, the megaphone strategy definitely worked very well in my life… but I started wondering if there might be a better way….
So, instead of thinking of prayer as an emergency alert system, I begun to see it more as a conversation. A two-way conversation, to be more precise. Most of my prayer-ing consisted of presenting my shopping list to God and pretty much telling Him what to do. Since I didn’t really expect Him to have much to say, I kept going through my shopping list again, and again, and again… And, even though it was my shopping list, eventually it got boring… For monologue is not a conversation. And no matter how good the monologue is, even Shakespeare gets boring if you keep repeating ‘to be or not to be’ ten million times.
I clearly remember the day when I told somebody ‘I’ll pray about it’ in my usual platitudinous way, and when I actually did, I told God I don’t need to really pray about it since I already know what He is thinking. … … Well, I didn’t put it quite that bluntly, but that day God got His point across. And the point is,
I don’t know what He is thinking, and if I really want to know what He is thinking, I’d better ask. And when I ask, I need to prepare to listen to what His answer is.
I think that was a turning point. Suddenly my prayer life went from a monologue, to a dialogue, to a full-fledged drama with many players and many parts and many episodes. Boring suddenly became something I wish I had more in my relationship with God.
That also took care of the irrelevant. In fact, talking to God and listening to Him became the most relevant aspect of every detail of life. I admit it’s a little freaky to be known to the level of detail that God knows me. And then to think that He desires to speak to me and offer feedback relevant to those details feels like something coming out of the Sci-Fi movies. That He would bother to listen to me and actually pick up the phone when it rings with my name on His caller ID?!!! Who does that any more?!!! Maybe only our moms and dads!
And so I learned that God, in fact, has a lot to say to everyone who cares to listen to Him – to me personally, to us as a family, to us as a community. It seems to me that it is important that when God speaks I/we take time to listen to every word He has to say. Once we engage in an ongoing dialogue with this living, active, engaged God, there is one thing for sure… actually two… it’s not going to be boring. And it’s not going to be irrelevant.
For the word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing as far as the division of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, and able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. Hebrews 4:12
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