praying with reckless simplicity
Recently I read this quasi-humorous quasi-serious satirical take on the evangelical Christian approach to spiritual life:
While I chuckled at the items on the list, and nodded along in understanding with many of them, one item in particular stood out:
You might be evangelical if …
7. … you tell God what to do when you pray. This becomes clearest when you attend a non-evangelical service and the Episcopal priest, say, begins, “We pray for the worldwide church, Lord,” and you wait to hear what he will pray about the worldwide church but instead he moves on. “We pray for our bishop, George,” and while you wait to hear about George’s great needs, he moves forward: “We pray for the sick in our midst: Helen, Steve, Raven…” For the evangelical, by contrast, it is a point of pride to intuit God’s desire: “We just pray that you will give Steve strength as he heals. We ask, Lord, that you knit those broken bones together and help him keep his wound clean beneath the cast. And Lord, for his mother, as she juggles nursing her son now with her job down at the post office, and her grocery shopping every Monday, we just ask that you give her extra strength in her body and love in her heart and gas in the tank of her Crown Victoria.”
How true! In my evangelical past I have certainly thought that this was the only right way to pray - that nonspecific general prayers were feeble and weak, and that a sign of a mature Christian who asks for prayer requests is to ask for all the minute details of each prayer “target”.
A friend of ours recently summarized this approach with the following analogy : prayer is like guiding a spiritual missile, so if you want highly targeted results your prayers better provide precise and accurate data. If you provide only fuzzy nonspecific prayers, you will get fuzzy nonspecific results.
YUCK!
I recoil in shocked revulsion at analogies like this - prayer is not a weapon, it is a life-giving conversation with the almighty. Prayer is not a computing machine that receives targeting data and allocates spiritual forces accordingly. And, most disturbing of all, prayer is NOT SOMETHING WHOSE RESULTS WE HAVE ANY CONTROL OVER.
Prayer is not about us and what we say or even how we say it - prayer is about God, and what He discerns in our hearts as we relate our concerns to Him.
Prayer is what drew me to Jesus in the first place. It is a God-life nexus that is so precious that Jesus had to die and rise from the grave to make the relationship possible. I refuse to treat such a precious relationship as a machinistic power to be controlled and manipulated and “targeted”.
All this to say, I used to pray like the satirized example above. I used to think similarly, that I needed to know ALL the facts of the situation, including NAMES, DATES, and exact TIMES of upcoming situations that needed to be prayed for, that I needed to know EXACTLY what God needed to be asked to do, and how it should be done, BEFORE I could pray for said person or event.
I am now realizing just how much freedom and immense power there is in praying with reckless simplicity. Instead of trying to know all the details, trying to divine God’s will for the prayer “target” that is, I would like to simply pray with full trust and faith in knowing God and full security in not knowing the details.
I am setting msyelf a challenge - the next time someone asks me to pray for someone or something, I will not press them for more details. If they start giving me a lot of detail, I will politely ask them to stop. I will challenge myself to ask this question in my heart: “what is it about this prayer that I really need to know in order to bring it before my God?” I will challenge myself to know only what I really need to know, and trust God with all the other details, juicy and desirable though they may be.
I will even challenge myself to do this next step : I don’t even want to know how things turned out. I won’t ask leading questions to ask people for information on how I can monitor the effectiveness of my prayers.
I just want to pray. Simply. I want to bring the prayers to God in full trust and full faith, recklessly simple.
Perhaps I will even reach a point where nobody has to ask me specifically to pray for them - perhaps God will teach me through this something about being prayerfully aware of His presence at all times in all conversations and circumstances, without needing to know DETAILS.
I think it makes for a much simpler and fuller faith life really - does not Jesus himself give us the simplest of templates for prayer, and specifically caution against our tendency to want to fill in all the details?
When you pray, you are not to be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners so that they may be seen by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full. But you, when you pray, go into your inner room, close your door and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you.
And when you are praying, do not use meaningless repetition as the Gentiles do, for they suppose that they will be heard for their many words. So do not be like them; for your Father knows what you need before you ask Him.
June 25th, 2006 at 10:15 pm
Yeah, I agree with a lot of what you said. I think a lot of our prayer can be more gossip-repetition than faith-filled conversation. But I don’t understand what you mean about details being a bad thing. Certainly you can take that to the extreme, and to micromanage it is, well, extreme. But much of the heart of prayer is asking, and honestly I still think the vague prayers mentioned above (from the list) are weak and faithless. Of course it’s simpler to pray that way… but it’s not actually asking for anything. I think it’s more of a general “thinking good thoughts” than asking God for anything. Even if you read through Paul’s prayers and Jesus’s prayers, they were pretty specific. In Ephesians, Paul tells the people specifically what he prayed for them. In John Jesus’s prayer for the disciples is written out. Yes God knows how to answer our needs better than we do, but there’s something amazing about the fact that God gives us power through prayer against spiritual strongholds in ours and others lives. Don’t ask me how this works- I have no idea
Wow, I feel like this is a whole conversation. I’ll stop clogging your comments.
June 26th, 2006 at 5:20 am
Yes, I feel that the other extreme is pretty bad too - no details at all, just “good thoughts”, although, sheesh, what’s so bad about just “good thoughts”? We could definitely think more “good thoughts” when we pray… but I just want to move away from the micromanaging-God extreme I find myself in
I find that my current way of praying seems to have a very “little” view of God’s will - e.g. the “parking lot attendant” view, or the “doctor’s headlamp” view, rather than the “master of the universe” or the “great physician” view.
It’s difficult to put into words what my main beef against details is
I think I’m using too generic a word when I say “details”, certainly I don’t mean the kind of details you mention in Paul’s and Jesus’ prayers. But there is something different about the details in those prayers compared to the detail-infested prayers I find myself praying.
Hmmmm… here’s another angle on this - it seems like when I pray I first focus on the specifics and then structure my prayer to cover those specifics, i.e. like writing a modern essay… or, a better analogy, like painting a scene but starting with the fine details first. Which means that oftentimes I find that I have to make up a theme for the painting that will fit the details I start with.
In striking contrast are the paintings that Paul and Jesus and other noted prayer “artists” paint - it seems like they have a powerful overall theme that is painted in broad strokes with detail that fits the theme, leaving a lot of the fine points up to God.
I think what I am aiming for is cultivating that ability to “see” the theme first, not get fixated on the details. I feel like I am currently trying to paint complex scenes with too much detail, much of which is frankly inane (e.g. “pray for XYZ’s job interview today”) before I have come to see and ask for the simpler but more powerful scenes that truly need prayer and move God (e.g. “pray against the stronghold of despair and insecurity in XYZ’s life”).
Maybe the “right” level of detail comes with time, with knowing God’s heart more and more through praying simply. Maybe the kinds of details that Paul and Jesus and other people of prayer used in their prayers weren’t what they started with, but something that came to them as they painted with a simple but powerful overall theme.
June 27th, 2006 at 12:13 pm
Okay, funnily enough, just a few hours after I posted that comment, I got an email from a good friend of mine asking for prayer for an upcoming job interview…
I guess I have some explaining to do on my “that is inane” comment
I think there is value in praying for God’s guidance and wisdom in something as important as a career change - I just don’t want to start thinking that I can tell God what to do about said job interview.
Instead, I am praying recklessly and simply for my friend’s overall career direction - and leave it up to God to surprise us both with what direction he shows my friend. It may not necessarily be the job that he is interviewing for…
November 18th, 2006 at 3:50 am
Hari, I honestly am somewhat of an “old fogie”, in that this relatively new blogging seem to me so open. But I can say honestly after just now really starting to read you, here online today, that I am coming to a profound respect for not only the gut honesty of this amazing “new” medium of comm. but indeed I already respect your Spiritual journey and deep thinking and seeming wisdom. As well as the “breath of fresh air” that your specific sharing online brings into my inner prayer life already.
Ah yes, to the point of this prayer subject thread. I believe that you are really on to something here, when you speak about bringing a real trust to the thrust of our prayers. In fact that maybe we too often do buy in to the world’s labels, like “evangelical” instead of doing the “reckless” thing and obeying our fear-less leader: the Preist, The King of Kings and the LORD OF LORDS! ( amen brother>>Blogg on, I am waiting with baited breath!
November 19th, 2006 at 3:02 am
Thanks Mark! Good to hear from you!
I’m also a relative “old fogie” in this new-fangled (new to me anyway) blogosphere. Others are doing quite amazing things on and with blogs!
Thanks for the reminder and focus on the reckless trust in our “fear-less” leader!
An update on my friend who asked for prayer for his job interview almost five months ago - God has certainly surprised him with interesting twists in his career, and I’ve been watching with glee because he’s unleashing his creativity to pursue the dreams God’s placed in his heart! Go man go!
And, yes, that means the job interview did not go as he expected it to. But the overall theme of my friend’s career direction is being painted in some really bold brush strokes by the Master Painter!
I continue to pray for the theme and the audacity of my friend’s Jesus-life!