Photo: Bokeh / Tomedia. Silhouettes on the Beach at Night.
My notes on prayer contain a very simple suggestion: please, thank you and sorry.
I like that. I am perfectly capable of making a simple thing unnecessarily complicated, and prayer gives me plenty of opportunities. Am I saying enough? Am I saying the right thing? Have I understood what God wants before I have even started speaking?
Meanwhile, there are things I need help with, things I am grateful for and things I need to own up to. Those seem like reasonable places to start.
A conversation without an audience
In Matthew 6:5–8, Jesus talks about people praying to be seen. He tells his listeners to go into their room, shut the door and pray to their Father in secret. He also warns against piling up words as though the quantity will make God listen.
But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.
That takes quite a lot of the performance out of it.
Nobody needs to hear how eloquently I can explain my problems. God already knows what I need. I can speak plainly and give him my attention.
One of the sermons spent time on the room itself. My notes veer off into the Greek word and descriptions of storehouses. But the instruction I need to act on is clear enough in English. Go somewhere private. Close the door. Pray.
I don’t need to finish a word study before I can manage that.
Something will fill the time
In another set of notes I wrote about ordering our private lives. Unless we make room deliberately, other things will take it.
I know how easily that happens. Work, plans, things I want to build, whatever thought I have decided needs pursuing immediately. By the time I have dealt with one thing, I have usually found several more.
Jesus’ pattern in Mark 1:35 is to withdraw and pray even when people want his attention. There are genuine needs around him. The time with the Father still happens.
And in the morning, rising up a great while before day, he went out, and departed into a solitary place, and there prayed.
For me, the practical step is giving prayer an actual place in the day. Somewhere I can stop opening another thing. A few minutes that I have already decided belong to that conversation, rather than hoping I will feel unusually spiritual between jobs.
Please help me with the thing I don’t know how to handle. Thank you for the people and work you have given me. Sorry for the way I behaved. Show me what needs to change.
There is enough there for a real conversation.
I can ask without pretending to control the answer
I believe God answers prayer. I also know an answer can look different from the thing I had in mind.
That is difficult when I want certainty. I can start treating prayer as another way to manage the outcome, then become confused or disappointed when life doesn’t follow the version I requested.
The Lord’s Prayer itself asks for God’s will to be done. Jesus teaches us to ask for what we need while recognising whose will we are seeking.
I want to be able to ask honestly and remain willing to listen. That includes prayers for other people, whose circumstances I can’t control and often don’t fully understand. I can bring their names to God without producing an explanation for everything they are going through.
A quiet room won’t sort out every distraction I have. But I can put the phone down, close the door and start with what is true today. There is something I need help with, somebody I can pray for, and plenty I can thank God for. I can give that conversation a few uninterrupted minutes.