“I’m
having a snotty day” was the comment of the teacher to her classroom aides. She
was heartbroken when she learned that one of her students had died in the
hospital. The response of her teammates was “we better watch out.”
However, I think her honesty
has a profound insight on why most of us find it difficult to pray. We want to
pray, make resolutions to pray, but never quite get around to actually praying.
Why?
It’s not so much that we
are insincere, ill-motivated, or lazy, it’s just that invariably we are too
tired, too distracted, too restless, too emotionally preoccupied, too angry,
too busy, or feel ourselves too distant from God to feel that we can actually
pray. We have too many headaches and too many heartaches. And so we come home
after a long day and simply can’t work up the energy to pray and instead call a
friend, watch television, rest, putter round the house, or do anything to
soothe our tiredness and wind down from the pressures of life, except pray.
How can we pray when both
our bodies and our hearts are chronically stressed and on over-load?
By understanding what
prayer really is. Prayer, as one of its oldest definitions puts it, is “lifting
mind and heart to God.”
That sounds simple but it
is hard to do. Why?
Because we have the wrong
notion of what it means to pray. We unconsciously nurse the idea that we can
only pray when we are not distracted, not bored, not angry, and not caught up
in our many heartaches and headaches so that we can give proper attention to
God in a reverent and loving way. God then is like a parent who only wants to
see us on our best behavior and we only go into his presence when we have
nothing to hide, are joy-filled, and can give God praise and honor. Because we
don’t understand what prayer is, we treat God as an authority figure or a
visiting dignitary, namely, as someone to whom we don’t tell the real truth. We
don’t tell the “our boss” what is really going on in our lives but what should,
ideally, be going on in them. We tell God what we think he wants to hear.
Because of this we find it
difficult to pray with any regularity. What happens is: we go to pray,
privately or in church, and we enter into that feeling tired, bored,
preoccupied, perhaps even angry at someone. We come to prayer carrying
heartaches and headaches of all kinds and we try to bracket what we are
actually feeling and instead crank up praise, reverence, and gratitude to God.
Of course it doesn’t work! Our hearts and heads grow distracted because they
are preoccupied with something else, our real issues, and we get the sense that
what we are doing—trying to pray—is not something we can do right now and we
leave it for some other time.
If we take seriously that
prayer is “lifting mind and heart to God” then every feeling and every thought
we have is a valid invitation into prayer, no matter how irreverent, unholy,
selfish, snotty or angry that thought or feeling might seem. Simply put, if you
go to pray and you are feeling snotty, pray snotty, bored, pray boredom; if you are feeling
angry, pray anger; and if you
want to praise and thank God, pray gratitude. What’s important is that we pray
what’s inside of us and not what we think God would like to find inside of us.
Lord, I pray for all my
Sonshine Friends who are feeling “snotty” about some headaches or heartache and
we really need your comfort and healing. Help us to be more honest like that
teacher and come to you in prayer when we are feeling bad, irreverent, sinful,
emotionally, and unworthy of praying. All of these feelings can be our entry
into prayer. No matter the headache or the heartache, we only need to lift it
up to God.
