Day 18-19

I shared in my last post an insight that emerged from some prayer time with my daughter, Sophia. As I said then, there was another part of that experience that prompted some helpful thoughts about prayer. After I prayed that evening, it was Sophie's turn. She was a very willing prayer that night. She jumped right in with her standard "Dear God" and flowed right into several specific things that she wanted to share with God. Much of what she prayed in my presence that night was predictable. Sophie has several things she is very consistent about including in her prayers. What struck me that night, was not the specifics of what she prayed, but rather the overwhelming theme of all that she prayed for. Almost everything thing she spoke that night began with the phrase "Thank you for..." and then filled in with the usual cast of characters: her grandparents and their pets (she really loves to pray for those dogs), her sisters, her mom and dad, her teacher and school, our church, her dolls (a few even meriting specific mention by name), etc. As I listened to her and thought about it afterwards, I was glad that Sophie is learning to be so comfortable with expressing gratitude to God. However, it also raised a challenging thought over the concept of "balance" in our prayers. Obviously this applied more to my own prayers rather than the budding prayer life of a 4 year old, by a concern sprang up over how often I find myself in a rut in my prayer life. I realize now that these ruts are also an important factor in my past struggles with prayer. I began to wonder, how often do I find myself stuck in the "requesting" mode or "thanksgiving" mode or some other aspect of prayer in a way that is detrimental to the other key components of communication with God?

Many of you may remember some rote prayer you were taught as a child as a place to begin the journey of prayer. Or perhaps some shared with you one of the many formulas or models out there for helping people organize and go through their prayers. The most common and personally memorable one for me was an acronym: ACTS, which stood for:

Adoration

Confession

Thanksgiving

Supplication

Many of you will recognize that model I'm sure. While none of these are ever perfect or completely adequate on their own, they can be good aids in learning to pray. More importantly almost all of them share a common implication, prayer isn't just about communicating one specific thing or in one specific way. If it was, why would we need any kind of model or aid. Consider the prayer Jesus gave us in the "Sermon on the Mount." If prayer was just about asking for things, wouldn't he have just said "And when you pray, just ask for whatever you need," and then moved on to the next part of his lesson? He doesn't do that, though. Nor does Jesus just give us a singularly themed mantra to chant. Despite its brevity, this prayer (commonly called "The Lord's Prayer") is amazingly robust and leads us to communicate about a variety of different things from a variety of internal postures. Wonder, obedience, gratitude, humble need, confidence, broken confession, etc., more than most of us really know how to unpack yet.

I guess the summary thought for me is this: balance in our prayer life is important, because God is important in so many different ways than any of us will ever really comprehend. To get into stale patterns or ruts of only communicating with God in a few specific, limited ways...no matter how good or right it is communicate in those ways...leaves us vulnerable to minimizing the greatness and significance of God in our life and all of creation. I must admit, there is a small alarm going off in the back of mind as I write this, because I believe there is an easy way to misinterpret or misapply this idea and create equally unhealthy prayers that can be overindulgent or too self-serving. Perhaps I need to share some about that in a future post. However, while caution is always appropriate, it should never be used as excuse for failing to say or do what we ought to. So, the challenge for our prayers today is to examine them a little and see if there are some important ways or things we're not opening up about because we're only praying over things or in ways that we've already grown comfortable. I believe balance is a critical component to a healthy, robust prayer life.