On prayer
I gave a talk, or led a discussion, or something, this morning about prayer. Someone asked a question and I wanted to give it a better answer here, since I wasn’t ready on the spot (like I should have been!).
The question was: why pray? If God is going to give us good things anyway, why pray? And how do we understand the obvious fact that when we pray for things, sometimes it works out and sometimes it (often tragically) doesn’t? So I want to give this a better answer.
Why should we pray? It’s not primarily about getting things from God, but about spending time with him. God loves us and it’s very normal to want to spend time with someone you love! And we love him too — not perfectly, but we do. When we love someone, and especially when we want to grow closer to that person, we make it a priority to spend time with them. And so we should with God.
I’m tempted to leave it there, but I want to address a guilt problem that could crop up rather easily if I leave it. Maybe you don’t love God, or don’t think you love God, or you secretly feel guilty about not having lots of warm fuzzy feelings for God. So I want to address a related question: “Why love God?”
First, I want to point out that you do love God, even if you don’t know it. Think of all the things that you love, or that you recognize as good: beauty, patience, courage, goodness, life, growth, generosity, humility, selflessness, love. Maybe you don’t live these perfectly, and maybe you struggle to understand them, but you do recognize these things as good, right? That is the beginning of loving God. God is the source of everything that is good, and when you recognize that a sunset is beautiful or when you admire your friend’s generosity, you are recognizing and admiring a little glimpse of God. If you see goodness anywhere, God is like that. Or, more accurately, that little bit of goodness you see is a little bit like God. If you find yourself desiring more beauty, more generosity, more justice, more peace, more life, then it is because you are desiring more God. That is how I suspect that you do love God, even if you don’t recognize it in yourself.
The second piece of this is important. I listed a bunch of abstract concepts — beauty, courage, gentleness, peace, generosity, kindness, etc. — and said God is the source of those things. That is true. But it’s also important to know that God is personal. God isn’t an abstract concept; he is personal and he loves you. Think back to a time when you gazed at a sunset or lake or vista and just marveled at its beauty. Pause for a moment and call to mind that feeling of awe. Now imagine that the sunset or lake or vista loved you back. Imagine that the sunset or lake or vista cared about what was going on in your life, and really understood the things you’re struggling with, and genuinely desired for you to be happy. It’s weird to think about because sunsets are not personal. But God is personal.
Here’s a third piece that’s important. God is perfect, infinite, and outside of time. God cares about you, yes. But lots of people care about you! You’ve got family, friends, neighbors, and those wonderful people you don’t know super well but always seem friendly when you see them. All this human love that you’re surrounded with, which you rightly recognize as good, is also like God, because God is love. But God is different, and here’s how. God doesn’t have flaws. He doesn’t get distracted. He always has time for you. He doesn’t need anything from you. He’s not going to get sick or have his own problems and not be available to you. His love for you is perfect, complete, infinite; he isn’t hiding little bits of selfishness here and there. And so God is the only way to really fulfill your need for love. It is true that God often loves us through others. Their love for you is a participation in God’s love for you. But only God can love you infinitely and perfectly, and that is why we need him.
Let’s go back to prayer. Prayer, as I said, is about spending time with God, nurturing our relationship with him, growing to become more like him. It is good to be tight with the source of everything that is good. It is good to spend regular time with the one who loves you perfectly. We need it. The people we interact with need us to be tapped into that. The best thing we can do for the people we love is to prioritize our own life of prayer. This is how we become more like God — more patient, more gentle, more courageous, more peaceful, more prudent, more generous. When we are filled with God’s love, we are better able to love others, including (especially!) those we live with. Imagine yourself, but more confident, more courageous, more patient, more selfless, more loving. That is what it means to grow closer to God, more secure in his love for you, more like him.
So here is what I’d recommend. Shoot for 20 minutes a day. Go to your room and close the door, or find some other place where you can enter into your heart and not be interrupted. Prioritize it, but don’t beat yourself up if it’s naptime and nobody is sleeping, or the babysitter canceled, or whatever. Sometimes your three-year-old desperately needs to tell you, right now, that her shirt is orange, and that’s just how it is. God knows what your life is like. But do make it a priority. If it’s hard, spend some time figuring out how you can make it work. Get up early? Swap childcare with a friend? Be more strategic about timing naps? Make it a priority and be creative.
Find your 20 uninterrupted minutes, silence your phone, silence your heart, and place yourself in God’s presence. He is always with you, always present, and always available for you to turn your heart to him. Remember who he is — everything that is good is like him, and he loves you perfectly. Don’t try to be who you think you’re supposed to be. You’re you. God loves you. God wants to spend time with you. Be with him. Take a moment just to be in his presence.
This can be the first thing, or the only thing. If you want to just sit there with him, and stay there, do that. If you want to move on to other things, you can do that too. Things you’re worried about, things you’re anxious about, things you don’t understand, things you’re excited about or nervous about or happy about or grieving. What is going on in your life? I mean in your actual life, not the pretend life that you feel like you’re supposed to have. This is a time when you can be real.
Remember that God doesn’t need anything. He isn’t going to misunderstand you. He doesn’t have anywhere else to be. He’s not going to be mad at you for feeling the way you actually feel about things; he’s not going to mock you or shame you for not having it all together. His love for you is constant and powerful; nothing you say or do can make his love for you falter. You have complete freedom to be real.
Whatever is going on in your life, your real life, bring it to him. Are you happy about something? Remember that it is a gift from him, and thank him for it. Let him now how great it is. Are you worried about something, or grieving a loss? Bring it to him. Give him your anxiety and your grief. Give him your mixed and complicated emotions. It is perfectly acceptable to say, “God, I’m worried that this thing might happen” or “I don’t understand why you let this thing happen” or “It is all too much and I can’t handle it anymore!” or “God, I just… I don’t even know. Here it is.” If you’re struggling to articulate it in words, that’s okay. He already knows what it is, and he loves you. It is more about the movement of the heart than about finding the right words.
Especially if it is something difficult, this is where we can ask for help. “This thing happened, and it was really hard, and it’s still really hard, and I don’t understand why I can’t let it go. Everyone else seems to have moved on, and I’m stuck. Help me heal. Help me understand. It really feels like you don’t love me. I know in my head that you love me. Help me to know that in my heart. Help me to be really confident and secure in your love.”
God doesn’t always respond the same way. I used to ask, “Why is God’s response so arbitrary?” Then I realized it’s not arbitrary; it’s personalized. I don’t respond to my kids in the same way, because they’re different people at different stages in their lives, different levels of comprehension and ability and responsibility, and it doesn’t make sense to have a canned response. God is personal. He loves you, the actual person of you, not the imaginary ideal person that doesn’t really exist. He’s going to respond to you.
God’s response doesn’t always make for a great story. Maybe you will feel a deep sense of peace in his presence — if so, it’s okay to stay there and just be with him! Maybe you will have a sudden insight that will make sense of things. If so, great! Thank him for it. Maybe you will be swatting distractions away like mosquitos on a summer evening. (I heard a priest say that we shouldn’t beat ourselves up about being distracted 20 times. Rather, we should think of how happy God is that 20 times, you returned to him.)
Maybe you will feel like you’re talking to a wall, and this is a piece I want to address.
God is present, always, not just during our time of prayer. Our awareness of his presence may be lacking. (And that’s okay! It’s not necessarily on you.) Sometimes his response is slow and unfolds over time. You bring a thing to him in prayer, over and over again, and a long time goes by and it seems like nothing is happening. How can we understnad this?
If you’ve watched little kids, you know that sometimes you just plain can’t teach them certain things until they hit a developmental milestone. The best pediatric occupational therapist will not get a three-month-old walking; the best speech therapist will not get a 12-month-old using full sentences. Often, lessons can’t be learned and skills can’t be gained until a person is ready. That’s obvious with little kids, and it’s true of adults as well, and we need to be patient with ourselves. God is working, even if it’s not obvious. The thing to do is keep up our prayer, keep spending time with God, keep trying to have that dedicated time of silence with him and let that time of silence infiltrate the rest of our lives. Keep learning, growing, trying to be more like God. Tell him you want to understand, to find peace, to know his love, and do your part to orient your heart to be receptive to his peace and love.
Life can be hard. Life can be really really hard sometimes, and many of us find ourselves suffering something we are not equipped to handle. We experience things that hurt deeper than we thought we could hurt. This is real, and we’re wrong if we pretend otherwise. Here is what I want to say: God’s loving presence is in those deep parts of our hearts, too. His loving presence is real. When we spend time with him in prayer, we become more attuned to that presence, more aware of it. We begin to understand that those things matter to God, too, and that they are caught up in his plan that is perfect love.
Years ago, I read The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom. It’s her memoir of what happened when her family hid Jews from the Nazis and got found out. She suffered some of the greatest evil this fallen world has ever had to offer. At one point, she found her sister in the camp, and her sister told her (this isn’t an exact quote; someone else has my copy of my book right now): “When you get out, you have to tell people what we’ve seen here. God is present in the darkness. They will believe us, because we have been here.” Corrie and her sister both had very deep prayer lives, and that is how they were able to see God’s loving presence in the midst of an unspeakably horrific experience.
God is not less present to us. His love for you is real, and it is greater than anything else in the world. This is why we should pray: to know his love, not just in our intellects, but in our bones, in our experience, in our hearts. To grow in our capacity to receive his love and love him in return. To participate more fully in that exchange of divine love. To grow closer and more intimate with the one who loves us perfectly and unfailingly. The one who loves you, as you actually are, with love that is perfect, unfailing, and most importantly, real.