Thoughts on prayer...

Prayer… I found myself thinking about prayer the other day. It seems that I have in the past prayed for, and even been taught to pray for, carrots. And I of course mean carrots in the figurative sense, not actual carrots. I mean things that I want, magic tricks, selfish desires, etc. Now I hesitate with the last description, but at the end of the day, that is what many of my prayers have boiled down to. “Lord give me this” or “Lord do this for me”. It strikes me like so many of the prescription drug commercials that I have seen. You know the ones. The one in which you receive a 15 second lesson about the drug, given by the company that will profit from its sale that ends with the commercial telling you that the next step is to go and tell your Dr. that you need it. Because without your help, and extensive knowledge, they may never do the right thing for you. I have prayed like that before. “Ummm… Lord… I just thought of something you missed… Turns out I need ______. Don’t worry though, I am not mad, I missed it to… at first… but its all good now. Just hand it over so I can be happy…” This, of course is an oversimplification, but hopefully you catch my meaning. I pray for what I want. Me to stop feeling lonely, financial security, a better job, that I wouldn’t sin so much, that the guy in the car ahead of me would get out of my way already, and the list goes on… and on… Or perhaps I am sometimes more noble… Praying for someone to be healed, or for orphans to not go hungry, or for someone to give that guy on the street a chance, or a sandwich, or that kids would have someone to hang out with… Noble wishes. And while I am not necessarily directly condemning these prayers, I am just thinking about how I pray… They still seem an aweful lot like me telling God what He should do… inherent in which is, whether I want to say it out loud or not, the assumption that I, at least in this area, know better then God…

But how should I pray? There is a quote by Soren Kierkegaard which goes something like this (and I apologize for not being able to locate his exact phrasing), “Prayer does not change God, but it does change him who prays…” I like it. God is, well He is pretty much It. In fact one of His names is I AM. Yep, He is. There isn’t anything lacking in Him. There aren’t things that He doesn’t know… and this included anything and everything that I could ever pray for or about. So what do I do? I would think that a logical progression would be to try to find myself in God’s plan, and try to align that in my prayers and in my life. Praying not that I wouldn’t be tempted, but that I would see the temptation and be able to rise above it with His guidance, all while learning what He has for me to learn. Praying for the humility to actually give of myself instead of just giving my prayers to someone. Not necessarily praying for change, but believing that God has me right where He wants me and praying that I would be the best that I can be where I am. Not praying to avoid or escape hardship, but that I would use the hardship as best I can to allow myself to be sharpened by it. (How sharp would a knife be if it “escaped” after the first pass of the file?) And praying for His eyes, to see what He sees, His perspective. If we could have that, I think that our prayer lives would change dramatically. If we could see that plan, the big picture, the way that He does, we would pray for very different things. I would even go so far as to say that if we simply believe that He CAN see the big plan, and that He IS in already in control, our prayer lives would change dramatically.

But here is yet another thought, and this idea, if I remember right, originated in something that CS Lewis (coinciding with the Kierkegaard phrase) said basically, in the forced practice of something, in this case prayer, I can change my thought process, and thus change myself. Teaching myself to think of others, or even taking a look at my own needs in prayer, can offer a good deal of perspective… perspective which used correctly can bring about change and action. So perhaps there is still something to be said for training ourselves to think of ourselves as needy, or at least to recognize our needs from an eternal perspective. Praying for our needs helps us to notice them, and noticing them can cause us to do what we can about them. And perhaps there is power in that as well…