There is no way around you, Father. You are all and in all.
What does that mean for us? How we approach you? How we express our hearts to you? What do we ask you to do other than what we would simply do for ourselves?
Is prayer, then, just our “thinking” about what is best?
If prayer is about asking you for things, what’s the point if you have already determined what's best for us and are already working that out in our lives? Would you ever give us something that wasn't best for us?
For prayer to be meaningful at all, either the outcome isn’t determined OR prayer is a transaction whereby we think (with the picture of You we have in our minds) about what’s best for us and then move toward some peace about our circumstances?
But in thinking about what’s best, we are so tempted to fall into the trap of thinking only about what’s best for me. And even then, it’s impossible to really know what’s best for me because what I think is best only amounts to thinking about what I want, or what makes me feel better at this moment, or what attends presently to some hurt I’ve entertained.
Because prayer does more than that - because prayer places me squarely inside the space where you are sovereign outside of my design for you, I know that you are real. In prayer, your Spirit moves me outside of my own thoughts, fears, and desires and toward a vision of my existence I COULD never - that I WOULD have never - imagined on my own.
It’s a version of myself that I don’t like. It’s vulnerable. It’s frail. It’s powerless. It’s subject to the agendas of other people. It sometimes loses its shape in others. It loses its shape in You. I can’t see the re-formation taking place because I’m measuring your work from the vantage point of my disbelief. That I KNOW this shows me how real you are. I come up against a choice I must make. Do I resist you, Father? Or do I discern your presence - your gentle leading - and surrender?
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