Turn the corner

Take a look at this picture. Can you see it? I'm not sure if you can or not. On the way back from lunch today, I saw this cloud formation. Can you see the color in it? It was a perfectly sunny day with some white clouds. In this particular cloud, there was a strange rainbow -- I have never seen anything like it before.

I was hoping to get a good picture of it was I was walking toward the building, but once I got out of the car and starting walking, it was gone. Both of the images above were taken from the car, so I wondered if it had something to do with the polarization in my windshield. Silly me, I walked back to the car and drove it through the parking lot again -- nope, gone.

Sometimes I think finding God is like that. We try every trick in the book. We use strange filters, particular rooms, special prayers. We do everything we can to get close to him.

In the Foster Prayer book I am reading, he tries to answer the question of how to do a Prayer of Tears -- that prayer in which we offer our repentance to God. His first step to suggest in the process is to "ask." Ask God to bring you to repentance, because we certainly cannot get there on own.

We try and try to make it happen, but all of our tricks -- getting back in the car, looking through sunglasses -- none of it works. But sometimes, we turn the corner, and there he is. Like that rainbow. Unexpected and breathtaking.

Images: Rainbow in clouds (click on image to see better, and put on your sunglasses). Open door at church during JesusQuest.

Simple Gift

I’m reading Richard Foster’s book Prayer: Finding the Heart’s True Home. It’s been a busy few weeks, and I haven’t had much time to pick it up, but I finished Chapter One this morning. I’ve been purposefully reading it slowly. He writes well, and his work is full of nuggets that need assimilation. I mentioned before that I am hesitant to write in this book – I have no idea why – but I have been, and several lines in this chapter are underlined.

The concept discussed in Chapter 1 is Simple Prayer. I’ve never heard of simple prayer, but I have experienced it. The concept of simple prayer flies in the face of the idea that prayer has to be “just right.”

Simple prayer involves ordinary people bringing ordinary concerns to a loving and compassionate father. There is no pretence in simple prayer. He goes on to say Simple prayer is beginning prayer. It is the prayer of children, and yet we will return to it again and again.

The catch, though, and something that must not be forgotten, is that this is not prayer from which we “graduate.” “Simple prayer is necessary, even essential, to the spiritual life.”

Consider for a moment those sleepless nights that we all sometimes have – those nights when a worry is weighing on our minds. We pace. Because of the gift of simple prayer, we do not pace alone. We pace with God – he walks with us and listens to our worries. It’s not praise – it’s not high sounding theological terms – its our hearts poured out to God – the worries, the anger, the doubt. Isn’t it a gift to know that we walk with our God through those kind of emotions?

Consider for a moment those times when we are exhausted, maybe even too tired to pray, or to even remember God. Simple prayer means that God hears our tired souls anyway. We can bring that weariness to his doorstep and leave it, and he is our pillow.

To believe that God can reach us and bless us in the ordinary junctures of daily life is the stuff of prayer.

Isn’t that a gift? As I was reading this chapter, a Shaker song came to mind. The words were written by Elder Joseph Brackett:

'Tis the gift to be simple, 'tis the gift to be free,
'Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be,
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
'Twill be in the valley of love and delight.
When true simplicity is gain'd,
To bow and to bend we shan't be asham'd,
To turn, turn will be our delight,
Till by turning, turning we come round right

It’s a dancing song; it was written to be used in dance, and the simple instructions for movement are seen in the words. In fact, the melody can be found in the United Methodist Hymnal associated with the hymn Lord of the Dance (one of my favorites). It strikes me that it is also a description of the gift of simple prayer, and how it is a dance with God. Read it again, thinking of prayer.

The gift: "We will discover that by praying we learn to pray. "

Image: Manuscript of Simple Gifts from this site.
Happy Birthday to JtM!

The Grace of Prayer

I'm co-teaching a class about grace. I just finished working as a member of a team of four that planned and implemented a prayer vigil. Steve is getting ready to go on an Emmaus walk as a member of the team, so that is on my mind -- Emmaus walks are all about the grace. I've just started a new book -- Prayer by Richard Foster. I just finished a book called In the Grip of Grace by Max Lucado. I'm feeling a calling to try to emphasize prayer in our church. I'm thinking about a first person monologue I'm doing next week at church, and grace just seems to be running through it (even though it's about Delilah).

Is it any wonder, then, that prayer and grace are intermixed in my mind?

The very small amount of Foster's book that I've finished so far explores the relationship between grace and prayer. Isn't it an amazing, wonderful, grace-filled idea that the creator of the universe is eagerly waiting for us to approach him in prayer?

Foster explains that we often hesitate to engage in prayer because we are waiting to be perfect in prayer. We won't do it until we've read about prayer, until we've learned a technique to make it great, until we can approach it from a spiritual foothold.

The grace of prayer is that God doesn't want us to hesitate. Foster says that "the truth of the matter is that we all come to prayer with a tangled mass of motives." We arrive with altruistic AND selfish attitudes, with mercy AND hate, and with love AND bitterness. If we waited until we could approach God with only spiritual and grace-filled motives, we would never pray.

"This is what grace means, and not only are we saved by grace, we live by it as well. And we pray by it."

God receives us just as we are, and listens to our prayers just as they are. We should bring him anything -- we should not self-edit what we pray so that it is only about "lofty" ideals or God-inspired blessings. God wants to hear it all. We doesn't want us to edit, he only wants us to pray.

The beauty of it is that it is THROUGH prayer that we can find grace. Through prayer we can work toward the perfection that we think we need to have. We can find altruism, mercy and love. We can find them in a way that we never would be able to find them alone.

That's grace. That's God.