Dear God, please make my post interesting. yeah yeah yeah. I mean Amen.
This is my response to the Q posed by Erin Word, Cindy Bryan and Lyn: “How Do You Pray?”
My first response to the Q 'how do you pray' is 'not enough.' Why am I wired like that, why is it if if any question about spiritual disciplines is asked most christians I know (which would be from a protestant evangelical background) seem to answer the same. We all hang our heads, stare at the floor and confess our inadequacies in praying or whatever. It's as if collectively we recognise that prayer is good, it has benefits but that as individuals we're not just very good at it. Often we can resolve to pray more but then go our individual ways - prayer we seem to collectively say is afterall seems to be mostly a private matter between God and I.
So how do I pray... or how i was i taught to pray:
Me magic formula... (success sometimes guaranteed :)
It's funny how I often pray with that formula...
'Dear'... it makes me feel like i'm writing God a letter, but somehow that sort of formal start seems better to me than "Hi God" or just "God." Sometimes i start with something else like 'thank you' but most of the time the formula sounds best to me with 'dear.'
'God'... another thing I note is that I often address God as God - although I'm quite passionate in my trinitarian belief I find God such an inviting cover all the bases catch all. No gender issues, no parenting issues, no relational issues - it's almost like God is a blank canvas that I can project onto - safe, nebulous, distant and personable all at the same time.
'Please'... it is God after all and I am polite enough not to demand, word the request carefully. Please after all is the magic word.
'I/me/my'... the heart of many of my prayer is ME. God can you give me xyz. God can you do xyz for me. Sometimes (often) it is me just asking God to baptise who I am/what I want. In fact i think since i pray more than I think, often situationally (God help!) rather than sitting down (in a quiet time sense) then it makes sense that my prayers are often requests to get me out or change the situation I am in some way.
Which thinking about it is not such a bad thing, admitting that things in my life are more than I can deal with and that I need help is often the honest response (when in a hole stop digging and start praying???)
And God being good I'm pretty sure he intervenes often in the situations I'm in.
'Amen'... Well who likes long goodbyes anyway?
Some other ways I'm discovering...
praying for others... one of the questions I am learning to ask people is what can I pray for you? I might have my own ideas but asking people and letting them respond however they want is liberating. Remembering to pray for them is another challenge - often I pray right there and then. Nothing worse than someone saying "thank you so much for praying for me" a few days/weeks/months later and me going "oh yes of course" (if God is outside time do retrospective prayers count???).
Sometimes I don't even ask, sometimes the response to some of the crap stuff is just to pray, to wrestle with God, to ask questions and for his involvement, comfort, help for people who are suffering, hurting, needing, groaning...
As part of praying for others i am learning to wonder if i can also somehow be the answer to prayer - what else can i do here? How else can I give of myself?
And on the flip side can I ask people to pray for me as well. Can I be honest and open and realise that opening my life up for people to pray for me helps me be part of a community where the answer to prayer can be the kindness, encouragement and sticking with me in tough times and celebrating with me in good times...
praying using the prayers of others... I've written about how I have found the 'Divine Hours' helpful in both having a prayer rhythm and in inspiring my own prayers. After all the formula approach above was how I learnt to pray and how i have most often seen prayer modelled. Learning to pray the prayers of the bible and by the saints across time/traditions helps me learns different ways. It also helps me take the focus off 'me' when I pray and remember the wider world in which i live (i mentioned in the same post how i've found praying the 'our' in the Lords prayer particularly helpful in this respect).
I've also be inspired by this Jason Clark talk to pray using the letters ACTS [for Adoration, Confession, Thanks-giving and Supplication]. It's been helpful in putting what I want at the end of my prayers and for learning to praise and thank God as well as reflect on my own character, what God is doing in my life and where he might want to be doing stuff.
praying with others... I don't do this very often but when i do i find it really inspiring - it's communal and others prayers can infect my imagination and my responses. I've been especially excited with learning from how others pray and from interactive prayer - prayer whethere there are things focus and inspire me and the people praying together.
I find it the hardest to pray with just my wife - it's like i know so much about her and long for so much for her that it makes it really hard to know what to say and how to say it. I'm not talking about those occasional prayers that i'm tempted to pray: "dear god, please can you change Debs to make my life easier. Amen." It's almost the prayers that are about the deepest things where we live in and with the struggle of the reality - there is no escape. In fact i often wonder in those times of prayer that it is not whether they are answered how we want but in the way that we are committed together, surviving together...
praying God's way...?
i'm beginning to find prayer is sometimes conversation, sometimes request, sometimes questioning, sometimes sulking, sometimes begging and sometimes i come to the point of stopping praying my way for my things and instead trying to pray for God's will to be done rather than mine. In fact the more i do of the above exploring and the less I do of praying just for me the more convinced that I am praying in God's ways.
I'm encouraged by something Dallas Willard said, that God wants us to be able to ask for anything that we want because we'll have grown up in God enough to chose/discern what God wants.
I'm also learning to pray to God by name - Jesus is pretty easy, holy spirit seems a bit stranger (given that where i learnt to pray we didn't really give him a lot of time) but the one that weirds me out the most is Father. I can pray Father i guess cos that is formal and not any layer of emotion but if I want to pray as 'Dad', Daddy - that feels very strange indeed. Clearly a lot of father/son issues to work through :)
So that's me, how about you - how do you pray? and how are you learning to pray?
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