Praying Like Monks, Living Like Fools: An Invitation to the Wonder and Mystery of Prayer

A maturing community is a confessing community - not a church without sin, but a church without secrets.

Prayer means the risk of facing silence where we’re addicted to noise. It’s the risk of facing a God we’ve mastered talking about, singing about, reading about, and learning about. It means risking real interaction with that God, and the longer we’ve gotten used to settling for the noise around God, the higher the stakes. What if it’s awkward or disappointing or boring, or what if God stands me up altogether?

Prayer can’t be mastered. Prayer always means submission. To pray is to willingly put ourselves in the unguarded, exposed position. There is no climb. There is no control. There is no mastery. There is only humility and hope. To pray is to risk being naive, to risk believing, to risk playing the fool. To pray is to risk trusting someone who might let

The assumption of biblical prayer is that God's action always precedes my request The aim is not to get God in on what I think he should be doing. Rather, the aim of prayer is to get us in on what God is doing, become aware of it, join it, and enjoy the fruit of participation.

Holy One, there is something I wanted to tell you, but there have been errands to run, bills to pay, arrangements to make, meetings to attend, friends to entertain, washing to do . . . and I forget what it is I wanted to say to you, and mostly I forget what I’m about or why. O God, don’t forget me, please, for the sake of Jesus Christ. Eternal One, there is something I wanted to tell you, but my mind races with worrying and watching, with weighing and planning, with rutted slights and pothole grievances, with leaky dreams and leaky plumbing and leaky relationships I keep trying to plug up; and my attention is preoccupied with loneliness, with doubt, and with things I covet; and I forget what it is I want to say to you, and how to say it honestly or how to do much of anything. O God, don’t forget me, please, for the sake of Jesus Christ. Almighty One, there is something I wanted to ask you, but I stumble along the edge of a nameless rage, haunted by a hundred floating fears of terrorists of all kinds, of losing my job, of failing, of getting sick and old, having loved ones die, of dying . . . I forget what the real question is that I wanted to ask, and I forget to listen anyway because you seem unreal and far away, and I forget what it is I have forgotten. O God, don’t forget me, please, for the sake of Jesus Christ . . . O Father . . . in Heaven, perhaps you’ve already heard what I wanted to tell you. What I wanted to ask is forgive me, heal me, increase my courage, please. Renew in me a little of love and faith, and a sense of confidence, and a vision of what it might mean to live as though you were real, and I mattered, and everyone was sister and brother. What I wanted to ask in my blundering way is don’t give up on me, don’t become too sad about me, but laugh with me, and try again with me, and I will with you, too. What I wanted to ask is for peace enough to want and work for more, for joy enough to share, and for awareness that is keen enough to sense your presence here, now, there, then, always.

Pray as you can, and somewhere along the way, you will make the most important discovery of your life—the love the Father has for you. That discovery is God’s end of the deal. Your part is just to show up honestly. Show up, and keep showing up. That’s the one nonnegotiable when it comes to prayer.

The deeper our faith, the more doubt we must endure; the deeper our hope, the more prone we are to despair; the deeper our love, the more pain its loss will bring: these are a few of the paradoxes we must hold as human beings. If we refuse to hold them in the hopes of living without doubt, despair, and pain, we also find ourselves living without hope, faith, and love.

Prayer enlarges the heart until it is capable of containing God’s gift of himself. Ask and seek, and your heart will grow big enough to receive him and keep him as your own,” writes Mother Teresa.

God didn’t lower the standard of holiness. He found a way to make us holy that isn’t dependent on our performance. Grace wins.

Jesus hasn’t revealed a God we can perfectly understand, but he has revealed a God we can perfectly trust. Trust is the certainty that the listening God hears and cares.

If you can’t pray with hope and faith, God isn’t bothered. He wants you to tell him about your doubt and disappointment. If you can’t pray in phrases of praise and adoration, don’t fake it. Pray your complaints, your anger, or your confusion. And if you’re more comfortable with cynicism than innocence, unsure about your motives, afraid of silence, afraid of an answer, or pretty confident you aren’t doing it right, you’re in the perfect starting place. Pray as you can, and somewhere along the way, you will make the most important discovery of your life—the love the Father has for you. That discovery is God’s end of the deal. Your part is just to show up honestly. Show up, and keep showing up. That’s the one nonnegotiable when it comes to prayer.

Again, I’ll pose the simplest question: If God gave you everything you’ve prayed for in the last week, what would happen? The only reason I ask is that you are a ruler, a co-heir with Christ, a manager of heavenly resources. What are you doing with all that authority? If we really took Jesus seriously on the invitation to prayer, what would happen? What would happen in you? What would happen to your community? What would happen in your city? Isn’t it worth finding out?

It’s always the common places that turn out to be holy, isn’t it? A burning bush in that same familiar field where Moses punched the clock every day for forty years. The sitting room where Esther presented her request to the king. The upstairs windowsill where Daniel rested his elbows while he defiantly prayed against royal law. The depressed old barn of a poor farmer on the outskirts of Bethlehem. The beach that Peter had docked at since he was a boy. The duplex on a seedy street in Jerusalem where the wind started blowing inside. It only takes a moment to turn an everyday place into holy ground.

One of the names thrown around for Jesus is the great physician. But a doctor can’t heal you without an accurate diagnosis. If you show up to a great doctor and describe yourself as “generally sick,” they’re not gonna be able to do a lot for you. To confess is to say, “I want to name my symptoms, completely and comprehensively, because I want healing, completely and comprehensively.

Jesus is very plainly telling his disciples, “Until now, you’ve never really prayed, not like I designed it. But when I go to the Father, you’ll discover prayer in my name.” The ancient phrase “in my name” means “under my authority.” To pray in Jesus’ name means to pray with recovered authority. He won back on our behalf the authority we were created to carry and lost. “In Jesus’ name” was never meant to become just a fitting tagline at the end of the prayers of experienced Christians. It’s the exercise of Jesus’ victory. To pray is to experience the very same access to God the Father that Jesus has.

A maturing community is a confessing community—not a church without sin, but a church without secrets.

Will the pain, suffering, and needs that intrude on our own stories harden our hearts, or will they soften our souls? How does the very pain that is eating us alive become an agent of deep transformation? We have to invite God—the very One who broke our trust—into the muck with us. We invite the One we are labeling “perpetrator” to be our healer. It’s the most courageous of all choices.

God is looking for relationship, not well-prepared speeches spoken from perfect motives.

Scripture makes it clear that God collects two things—prayers and tears. This world in its current form is passing away, but our prayers and tears are eternal.

Those who prioritize a loving relationship with God, meeting with him in prayer through stolen moments throughout the day, long stretches of disciplined contemplation, and fiery pleas of intercession, are those with whom he shares his divine power.

Hurry is the great enemy of the spiritual life. Why? Because hurry kills love. Hurry hides behind anger, agitation, and self-centeredness, blinding our eyes to the truth that we are God's beloved and she is sister, he is brother.

I trust God to be God. I believe—really believe—that those who seek him will surely find him.

It has been said that, in times of chaos, we do not rise to the occasion; we fall to the level of our training.

One of the biggest mistakes we’ve made in the modern church is to reimagine spiritual maturity as the need to confess less. The unspoken assumption is, “As I ascend in relationship with God, I confess less because I have less to confess.” True spiritual maturity, though, is the opposite. It’s not an ascension; it’s an archaeological dig as we discover layer after layer of what was in us all along. Spiritual maturity means more confession, not less. Maturity is discovering the depths of my personal brand of fallenness and the depths to which God’s grace has really penetrated, even without me knowing it.

C. S. Lewis said of prayer, “We must lay before Him what is in us, not what ought to be in us.

When it comes to prayer, God isn’t grading essays; he’s talking to children.

Adoration given to God is always given back to us. As we lift our eyes, recovering a true view of God’s identity, we also recover his view of us.

In prayer we persistently, faithfully, trustingly come before God, submitting ourselves to his sovereignty, confident that he is acting, right now, on our behalf.

The Swiss theologian Karl Barth once said, “To clasp the hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world.

What started with Adam and Eve never stopped. The same ancient conspiracy repeats itself in the Tower of Babel, in King Saul, in the Pharisaic priesthood, in the CEO of your company, and in me. We’re all prone to drown out our view of God, to keep moving, to go about our lives as though we are the center. Stillness is the quiet space where God migrates from the periphery back to the center, and prayer pours forth from the life that has God at the center.