On Praying and Prayers, and Why Some of Them Don't Get Answered

Why do we need to tell an omniscient God what our needs and secret desires are? Shouldn't he know already? Why does he make us wait? Does he take pleasure in our grovelling? Why doesn't God just give us what we want?

Why have we fasted and You do not see? Why have we humbled ourselves and You do not notice?' Behold, on the day of your fast you find your desire, And drive hard all your workers.
Behold, you fast for contention and strife and to strike with a wicked fist. You do not fast like you do today to make your voice heard on high.
Is it a fast like this which I choose, a day for a man to humble himself? Is it for bowing one's head like a reed And for spreading out sackcloth and ashes as a bed? Will you call this a fast, even an acceptable day to the LORD?
Is this not the fast which I choose, To loosen the bonds of wickedness, To undo the bands of the yoke, And to let the oppressed go free And break every yoke?
Is it not to divide your bread with the hungry And bring the homeless poor into the house; When you see the naked, to cover him; And not to hide yourself from your own flesh?
Then your light will break out like the dawn, And your recovery will speedily spring forth; And your righteousness will go before you; The glory of the LORD will be your rear guard.
Then you will call, and the LORD will answer; You will cry, and He will say, 'Here I am.' If you remove the yoke from your midst, The pointing of the finger and speaking wickedness,
And if you give yourself to the hungry And satisfy the desire of the afflicted, Then your light will rise in darkness And your gloom will become like midday.
And the LORD will continually guide you, And satisfy your desire in scorched places, And give strength to your bones; And you will be like a watered garden, And like a spring of water whose waters do not fail. (Isaiah 58:3-11)

You ask for something but do not get it because you ask for it for the wrong reason-for your own pleasure. (James 4:3)

We squeeze our eyes shut and rhyme off a Christmas list, address it to God instead of Santa, and sit back with the idea that God is somehow bound to deliver. This is not the prayer the Bible describes, nor does it give us a handle on the Living God.

What is the purpose of prayer, if it is neither the exercise of reciting our wishlists nor the wrestling into submission of a reluctant deity?

Prayer is first of all my recognition of who I am, and who God is. It is my opportunity to relinquish my responsibility for the lack - to lay the burden of my need and my longing before the One who can take responsibility for it. Prayer draws me into the very heart of God and allows me to share his thoughts and his great longing heart.

As I come near to the God who is Love and lay my burdens down, I am drawn into a circle of shared understanding. I begin to see, not through my own priorities of fear-driven pain-avoidance, but as Love sees. As I name my hurts, my worries, my wants, he puts them in with his own, and I am allowed, as much as I will, to see things as they truly are. Most amazing of all, I am allowed to join Love in his great aching and longing over his own broken creation. I participate in the hurt of his loving, and I know the comfort of his love toward me in my brokenness.

In prayer, I am reminded that Good is far greater than the petty ideas of comfort and self-satisfaction that we humans seek so doggedly. As I pray, my self-centred wants are deepened and transformed until I begin to long after those things that God himself longs after: the redemption of the broken, and the filling of the whole universe with Love and Light and Truth - beginning with your heart and mine.

When my requests remain un-granted, I am sure of this: the God who hears is ignoring my worded request for good things because instead he is satisfying the cry of my heart after the Good I cannot name. There are two reasons I am sure of this: the Bible promises it: And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose (Romans 8:28), and I have tried it. Never has God refused my request for a good thing and not given me instead the Good I couldn't have imagined. Every bitter, painful thing I have surrendered to him in prayer has been sweetened and time after time I have seen the very thing I begged to be set free from become the means by which I have received my deep heart's desire.

The God who hears my prayers has proven himself faithful to his word again and again and again. He doesn't always save me from hurt or hunger or embarrassment. He doesn't make me immune to the difficulties or the indignities of ordinary life. But God is changing my selfish thinking, bit by bit. I have been surprised to find him less like Santa Claus, and more like my Mother. He is filling every corner of my life with a Good that is more like carrots than candy, and with every passing experience, I learn that His love doesn't always mean giving me what I think I want.

He hears all my prayers, but sometimes he doesn't obey me. Thank God.

Shopping for God

God is not easily seen in our lacquered, branded, and packaged world. He hides himself even from those who say they are looking for him. Some have looked long and hard - up and down the theological mall, and even in through Sunday sermon-markets. They've read treatises, attended churches and conferences and camps, tried their best to have faith in healings, participated in book studies and prayer groups. Others have searched online, asked questions of their leaders, studied apologetics. Why does God hide his face?

Oh, there's a plethora of God-shaped toys and God-labelled substitute deities - all cheap knock-offs that are sure to let you down when you most need them. There are God-rituals to participate in and God-songs to sing and play and God-movies to watch and any number of God-clubs to join. There are books about the most efficient ways to follow God, and scientific discoveries that pinpoint which brain cells are used when thinking about God, and university courses on the history of world-wide philosophies about God. There are God-stickers for your car, and God-approved political parties to vote for, and theological God-alternatives.

But where, oh where, is God? What else can we assume, except that what so many are looking for doesn't exist?

Thank God, it doesn't.

The kind of God you can go shopping for and pick out the same way you pick out a pair of shoes is blatantly and hopelessly non-existent. Our lives have become so padded with comfort, so bloated by excess, that we have little concept of what it means to need. We are more burdened by the results of too much food, too much leisure, too much choice, than we are by any sort of lack.

‘Because you say, “I am rich, and have become wealthy, and have need of nothing,” and you do not know that you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked... (Revelation 3:17)

Our society is looking for a commodity - an accessory; a divine talisman that can be toted about with even less trouble than those cute little be-ribboned dogs poking their heads out of purses. We want a magic genie who will make our troubles go away and rewind-and-erase our little slip-ups, and so save us from our guilt. We want a friendly grandfather who will scratch his chin and forget just how things really are, and who will just step in with gentle words and smooth over things in our relationships when we need the help. We want a pretty little God-pet that will do back-flips in his cage to impress un-believers. Oh, we'd be happy with any of the above, actually, so long as God, when he shows up, is well-documented in scientific journals. Or at least approved by the scientists they interview on the nightly news. The thing is, we'd like this God to be real - we aren't going to be hoodwinked like generations before us. We want a well-pedigreed Dog, er, God - one with papers.

And the search goes on, because there is no such thing.

You might shop 'til you drop, but none of us ever finds the God who is Love until we see our desperate, awful need of him. When we find ourselves, dizzy and sick, at the precipice overlooking the dark caverns of selfishness in our own souls; when we awake to the fact that the poison eating away at everything of ours that is pure and good comes bubbling up from the inky depths within us; when we have grown bone-weary of the struggle to fix the broken-ness that increases its destructive force as we take arms against it... When we cry out in utter helplessness for the Love and the Light and the Truth we so terribly need - then is revealed the God who Is.

He's not waiting for us to manipulate our skepticism into blind belief. He doesn't expect us to join the 'right' religion, or pretend we don't think evolutionary theories are likely. But God is neither philosophy nor meat. He is not consumed at your whim or mine. He cannot be sought as one seeks a new rug. It is our understanding of our need that defines what it is for which we search.

The Living God is freely known, but never cheaply. He comes warm and swift as a rushing wind into the awful vacuum created by the admitted need for what He alone is - Love. Light. Truth.

And you shall seek me, and find me, when you shall search for me with all your heart. (Jeremiah 29:13)

Expectation and Experience and India, and God

I didn't really want to go to India. I had never actually been there, of course, but I'd read books and seen bits in movies and heard stories. I knew about as much about it as I cared to, and it just didn't seem all that interesting. For one thing, everyone said it was dirty. And crowded. The music sounded whiny, and wasn't there a rather inhumane caste system still to be dealt with? What else was there to know?

But I was going. I had been roped in with a group and India was the chosen destination. So I went.

And oh, how I long to return to India. The colors and the casual grandeur were breathtaking. The rich, deep, age-old culture that lay, multi-faceted and palpable, draped over and under and interwoven with everything, and the people - warm and smiling and open-hearted, and the life-energy running through and around it all, humming and vibrant... I fell in love with India and all that she is. The dirt and the crowds were there, but they didn't seem tedious and annoying as I had imagined. Even the fine dust that blew through the air and ruined my clothes and wouldn't be scrubbed from my skin bespoke a simplicity, and seemed a subtle reminder of the humble origins of humanity and our vital connection with the earth. The vaulting of the sky seemed much higher and grander than I remembered it being in Canada. The jostling commotion of the crowds wasn't all pleasantness, but it made me feel a part of something great and vital. The very air thrummed with life and living and a kind of drumbeat, felt rather than heard. Color and sound and rhythm streamed like long banners overhead. India wasn't comfortable - it was hot and old and dusty and dirty and noisy and even unkempt - but somehow, comfort didn't seem to be all that I had felt it was back home in Canada.

This is a little how it is when one really comes to know God for the first time. Oh, you may have seen 'The Jesus Movie', or maybe you've been brought up in the church and listened to a million sermon-stories. Maybe you've even read the guidebook. But God is nothing like you've imagined. Like India, he is deep and rich and warm and dear and living, and filled with a wide freedom and a captivating sweetness. Like India, he is not comfortable - but he shows comfort for the meagre, pitiful thing it is. Like India, God can be ignored and shoved onto the shelf in your mind marked "religion", and you might go your whole life with your assumptions, never really knowing what you're missing...

'til Love Returns

"'That there is brokenness,' he says quietly. 'That this world is brokenness. But within brokenness is the Unbreakable Name. How the whole earth groans 'til Love returns.'" (Joy Kogawa, Obasan, 1981)

Looking for Love

Evangelical Christians commonly offer Christ to mankind as a nostrum to cure their ills, a way out of their troubles, a quick and easy means to the achievement of personal ends... What we do is precisely what a good salesman does when he presents the excellence of his product as compared with that of his closest competitor. The customer chooses the better of the two, as who would not? But the weakness of the whole salesmanship technique is apparent: the idea of selfish gain is present in the whole transaction. (A.W. Tozer)

The sales technique works - there are many who follow the Christ in hope of some 'blessing'. They will find in the end that they have purchased an empty package. Unless what we seek is a freedom from that driving selfishness; unless we first find that ugliness destroying all that is beautiful and true in us, we may spend a lifetime steeped in Christian culture and church work, but we will neither seek nor find the only One who can and will set us free.

Once the head of the house gets up and shuts the door, and you begin to stand outside and knock on the door, saying, ‘Lord, open up to us!’ then He will answer and say to you, ‘I do not know where you are from.’ “Then you will begin to say, ‘We ate and drank in Your presence, and You taught in our streets’; and He will say, ‘I tell you, I do not know where you are from; depart from me, all you evildoers.’ Luke 13:25-27

But to the sad truth that some are wrong about their acceptability to God, the Bible adds a promise that those accepted are not, as some assume, limited to the western world:

...And they will come from east and west and from north and south, and will recline at the table in the kingdom of God. (Luke 13:29)

We are not acceptable to God on the basis of our piety, but on the basis of our reaching for his mercy:

[Jesus] also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and treated others with contempt: "Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, prayed thus: 'God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get.' But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, 'God, be merciful to me, a sinner!' I tell you, this man went down to his house justified, rather than the other. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted. (Luke 18:9-14)

On Arrogance and Awe and Dr. Suess

Dr. Suess's Yertle the Turtle is an ingeniously prophetic work. It is the tale of the modern Western man. Yertle is a turtle who has a yen for leadership. He wants to rule. As king of the pond of Sala-ma-Sond, he soon grows dissatisfied with the rock that serves as his throne. So he piles up all of the other turtles and steps on them, one by one, until he reaches the top. He styles himself king of all he sees:

I'm the king of a house! And a bush! And a cat!
But that isn't all. I'll do better than that!...

But, while he was shouting, he saw with surprise
That the moon of the evening was starting to rise
Up over his head in the darkening skies.

In the end, though, all it takes is a burp from one little turtle and Yertle finds himself king of the mud.

Aren't we Yertle? We've stepped on everything that can be put under us - nature, philosophy, history, humanity - exploited it and discarded it and climbed up on it until we really think we are the kings of all that we survey. We fancy ourselves infinitely more wise than any people groups who have failed to come, fawning, to buy and sell in our marketplace, and whose cultures have not yet been laid humbly before our own mass-mediated philosophies. Cultures throughout our world and throughout history have been aware of a world higher than the natural world - but WE alone are un-primitive and un-ignorant, so we can pity the poor sods who just didn't have our understanding of things. We can scoff at global warming and the energy crisis and the dearth of nutrients in our soils - because we are the greatest, and we frankly can't imagine a crisis that the omnipotent mix of our scientific forces and technological advances wouldn't be able to put to rights.

Like Yertle, one of the things we have lost is a sense of awe. Because science has allowed us to arm-wrestle nature into a kind of submission - at least for the time being - we think we can rule it. Because we can name scientific laws - some of them - we think we can control them. We toss around the bits we have learned about particle physics and black holes and we think we are the rulers of it all - because however little we actually understand, we can talk about it - a little. Just like Yertle, outraged at the moon, which dared ascend higher than him on his turtle-pile.

One little burp is all it's going to take for this pitiful little 100-year, several-country flash-in-the-pan to go Plunk! in the pond.

If only we had some inkling of the powers that are over us, and around us. We could see them, if only we could first admit our own weakness.

In the year that king Uzziah died I saw also the LORD sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, and his train filled the temple.
Above it stood the seraphim: each one had six wings; with twain he covered his face, and with twain he covered his feet, and with twain he did fly.
And one cried unto another, and said, Holy, holy, holy, is the LORD of hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory.
And the posts of the door moved at the voice of him that cried, and the house was filled with smoke.
Then said I, Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips: for mine eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts.
(Isaiah 6:1-5)

We have seen the enemy...

In the collective consciousness of at least Western society is a half-fantasy, half-fear of alien invasion. In our daydreams, the aliens are coming to destroy us. Their dark powers will spread throughout the universe unless they are put to death by charmingly innocent and grandly idealistic us. Sometimes they are robots; sometimes borgs; sometimes mind-forces. At all costs, they must be stopped before they destroy the whole universe.

We would like to believe that the darkness; the destruction, is something out there that may be met on the portals and finished off by the essential goodness of humanity. We need to face that fact that we are the the dark aliens. We are not the idealistic children we always let ourselves be in the sci-fi movies - we are the mutants, the devouring borgs who are systematically destroying every square inch we have the technology to reach. We have almost sucked this amazing planet dry. We are doing a thorough job of robbing it of its rich biodiversity and intricately balanced eco-systems. We have reached, as far as our technology allows us, into space.We pride ourselves on our scientific and technological achievements and our social sophistications. We forget the hideous and spreading corruption we have authored. We ignore the violence and oppression that run rampant despite our complicated societal codes.

The dark aliens aren't coming - they are here. They are us. And who is going to keep us from destroying the whole universe?

Oh, I am so disappointed in us. In people. In me.

We are so lovely, but for our wretched selfishness. That wicked, sucking heart of darkness reveals itself time after time, and we make excuse after excuse, but we know, if sometimes dimly, the truth.

There is only One who is lovely, trustworthy, pure. His name is Love and Jesus Christ. He doesn't hate us, the destroyers in a universe of beauty; he pities us. He comes without ray gun or flashing light sabre, but holds out his hand.

This is my body, which is broken for you... Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do...

When I am tired of the weakness, the lies, the unreliability of my own heart, I take refuge in One who is Truth. I am content to rest, then, at his dear feet. Somehow, though, he bids me come closer. If I will, he can set me free - free from that dark, clawing within that isolates me and eats away at all that is pure, making me something alien, to be feared and loathed.

He is not the God I have imagined, bending magnanimously to bless the humble penitent with his fingertips. Here is a Father and a Friend.

He shall call upon me, and I will answer him: I will be with him in trouble... Psalm 91:15

I have sought in vain such a friend among humanity's hordes, but in Him alone my heart finds rest. He has given me pain, but never out of selfishness. He has let me cry and rage, but he has never deserted me.

Isn't this the One we need?

Wise Men on Wisdom

"There is no happiness where there is no wisdom;
No wisdom but in submission to the gods.
Big words are always punished,
And proud men in old age learn to be wise."
- Sophocles, Antigone

"The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom: and the knowledge of the holy is understanding."
- Proverbs 9:10 (KJV)

Earth, Idealism, and God

I think I might be a bit of an idealist. I don't like that. I mostly like to think of myself as realistic, but from time to time, I sense the idealist shoe fitting pretty snugly about my little foot. This might be one of the reasons that I so often find myself disappointed. I don't realize, most of the time, that my expectations are anything more than modest. That is, until I come smack up against reality. -Pop- goes my shiny bubble, and I'm left wiping soap scum off the computer screen.

The boys in the reading club I teach are in the middle of a book about an alien who comes to earth. He writes back home about his experiences, and one of his observations is this: "Earth is a tough neighbourhood." I liked this statement. He's right. We humans are always trying to build trust, and always letting each other down. We talk about brotherhood and peace, but deep down, we only want those things if we can have them and all the other things we want, too. At our very best, we are broken.

There is only one thing in my life that has been better than I expected, not less; that hasn't left me feeling flat or disappointed: only God. Only He has been more warm, more kind, more lovely, more rich, and more trustworthy than I dreamed he would be. Only He has kept every promise. Only He satisfies, surprises, and delights the idealist in me with her high-flown expectations. What a sweet relief after I have got a look at the disappointing weakness of the human heart, and the failure that dogs the most noble of us.

And this is the message which we have heard from him, and declare to you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. (I John 1:5)

Oh, here I can rest my weary heart...

Jesus still calls...

“Come to me all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” Matt 11:28-30