Living Prayerfully Together in Marriage

One paragraph continues to bounce around in my head (in the best possible way) from what I've written in Live Prayerfully:

I said in the Introduction that a prayerful life is meant for everyone. Here in the Conclusion, I want to add to that statement and say: a prayerful life is meant for everyone, and none of us becomes prayerful by ourselves. Perhaps the synergy that surpasses that of putting together practices of praying with other people’s words, praying without words, and praying with your own words is that of putting these practices together with others. It might be on a retreat, in a small group, or with your family, but the only way we are meant to live prayerfully is to live prayerfully together.

Part of the reason this paragraph continues to simmer in me is that, when I wrote it, I knew it was true–yet had experienced it only in the smallest degrees. I still think I've only experienced a bit of the goodness of living prayerfully together with others, but one of the really enjoyable byproducts of my experiment this year is that, for the sake of being able to keep the commitments I've made for this year, I've been able to get others to jump in at points with me and we get a taste of living our lives together in these ways.

It started at home. Even though my wife and I, for our entire marriage, have both been people committed to serving God and honoring God in our home, we had a very unimpressive track record when it came to living prayerfully together. Sure, we both prayed, but for the most part, her praying was hers and mine was mine. We wanted prayer to be more central in our relationship, but whatever sporadic attempts we sometimes made at praying together were usually less meaningful than we'd hoped for and it never stuck.

(In light of what I've written in the book, I can look at that and now realize that this was largely due to only ever trying to pray together in one of the three ways–praying with our own words–rather than ever incorporating the other two. I remember one time, years ago, when my wife expressed a desire that we pray together more often. I was hesitant, because during that period I had just begun learning about and practicing prayer without words and was finding it to be very life-giving. When I described that to her and explained that I was in a stretch of mostly praying without words... she let me know that sitting together in silence wasn't what she was hoping for. Now, thankfully, we've given ourselves a fuller range of tools to use when we try to pray together.)

In the first couple of weeks of this year's experiment, we had to make a road trip from Missouri back to Texas, and I knew that I would need her help if I was going to be able to stick to my commitments while driving 1,100 miles. During the trip, she read morning, midday, and evening prayers to me while we drove, and we read the night prayers together before going to bed. I don't recall a point when we ever talked about it or specifically decided to do so, but the habit of the night prayers has stuck for us. The unintended but really good result is that we have prayed together more during the three months since I began this experiment than we had in the eleven previous years of our marriage combined. It's mostly praying with others' words as they're printed in the night prayers of the book, and sometimes also including small amounts of praying with our own words and/or without words.

It is never anything spectacular–I don't think any of these times of prayer together have ever been particularly eventful or noteworthy for either of us–but it's still very good. We've gotten to the point where going to bed without praying together would feel very strange to us, as if we'd left our day incomplete.

If I hadn't taken on this somewhat silly experiment, we wouldn't have read those prayers together during that road trip, so we wouldn't have continued the practice of praying night prayers together (and occasionally the others as well), and the level at which we live prayerfully together would still be the same as it had been for the first decade+ of our marriage. But thanks be to God for a wife who's made this experiment possible and who, when we feel like it and when we don't, sits next to me as we end each day prayerfully together.

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Something I've prayed this week:

Almighty God, whose blessed Son was led by the Spirit to be tempted by Satan; Come quickly to help us who are assaulted by many temptations; and, as you know the weaknesses of each of us, let each one find you mighty to save; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen. (Prayer for the First Sunday of Lent from The Book of Common Prayer)

[This is the 22nd post from A Year of Living Prayerfully]

I've Had Daily Mini-Lents and Didn't Even Know it

If I were to begin this blog post with the words, "Four score and seven years ago," most of you would realize that I'm probably not making a statement about something that happened 87 years ago. It would be more likely that by using that phrase, I would be trying to say something about Abraham Lincoln, or freedom, or the dignity of all people, or all of the above. If I would choose to use a phrase like that, it would be to point you back to something about the meaning of the Gettysburg Address, in which it was originally said.

On the other hand, if you had zoomed in from another culture and had no way of connecting my use of that phrase with its context, you'd likely have a hard time getting the full meaning of what I would be trying to say. If you really wanted to dig in, you'd probably get a dictionary out to look up the meaning of "score", then make the calculation, then you could do a lot of research on what someone like me might have been trying to say about the year 1926. And you would have completely missed my point.

This happens way too often in reading the scriptures. Particularly when we read the New Testament, it's so packed full of allusions and quotations of things from the Old Testament–which point us back to something about the meaning of the original passage–that we're like the person who has zoomed in from another culture and we don't have the culturally ingrained knowledge required to make the connections that the author intended. Even if we are serious students, we might get out all of our tools, dissect the words, make some misinformed calculations and completely miss the point. (If you're not convinced of this, try reading the book of Revelation. Then take a look in a bookstore or online at how many different ways intelligent people have tried to interpret it.)

I've started to become much more aware of this in the past couple of years as my own reading of scripture has been rejuvenated by capable teachers who help me to see the connections that I miss otherwise (especially N.T. Wrights fantastic series of For Everyone commentaries), since when I read these things written by ancient Jews, I'm unquestionably looking in on a culture very different from my own.

This week, I've been glad to discover the same kind of dimensions at play when I pray with other people's words. As part of my experiment this year, I've noticed two lines that come up every single morning in the words that I am given to pray: "Lord, open our lips. And our mouth shall declare your praise."

At first, being that person zooming in from another culture, I didn't recognize these as being from scripture. Then one day I was reading in a passage and noticed them, but still couldn't have remembered their context or what the fuller meaning was that they might have been put in these prayers to point me toward.

Then I read the scripture readings for tomorrow, Ash Wednesday, and it clicked. Tomorrow is the beginning of Lent, and one of the traditional readings for Ash Wednesday is Psalm 51. This psalm is David's prayer of confession to God after the prophet Nathan confronted him about his adultery with Bathsheba. It's a very rich prayer, and very fitting words for us to pray each year when we begin the season of returning to God with all our hearts.

Thus, even though I certainly haven't realized what I've been doing, every morning during the two and a half months since I began this experiment, I've been pointed back to David's powerful, gut-wrenching, prayer of confession. Every morning, through praying those words, I've been offered the chance to think back to their fuller context (including "Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love, according to your great compassion, blot out my transgressions...Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me...") and to have a mini-Lent, a daily returning of my heart to God as I begin again each and every morning.

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Something I've prayed today:

Almighty and everlasting God, you hate nothing you have made and forgive the sins of all who are penitent: Create and make in us new and contrite hearts, that we, worthily lamenting our sins and acknowledging our wretchedness, may obtain of you, the God of all mercy, perfect remission and forgiveness; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen. (A Prayer for Ash Wednesday from The Book of Common Prayer)

[This is the 21st post from A Year of Living Prayerfully]

Why Multitasking Stinks

"No wonder we have the attention span of a ferret on a triple cappucino." – James Bryan Smith I've come to a conclusion about what might be one of the most helpful things to do in my efforts to live prayerfully this year: renounce multitasking. Much of what I hope to gain from this year's experiment is an increased ability to pay attention to God and to those around me, and there may be no other socially encouraged practice that works against this as much as trying to accomplish multiple things at once.

Perhaps some people are more wired to be multitaskers than others, and I'm just not one with the wiring for it, but I think there's another level to it. In Live Prayerfully, I talk about how the point of times we have specifically set aside for prayer isn't what happens to us during those times, but how they help us to be prayerful in all of the other parts of our lives. The point of this post is what happens in the other direction: how the way we live during the rest of our lives impacts what we do when we attempt to give our attention to prayer.

It seems like we're blinded to it, but there's a pretty obvious connection between the ways that we intentionally let our attention flit from one thing to another during 90%+ of our waking hours and then find it very difficult to stay focused when we try to give God our attention in five minutes of prayer. The more advanced our technological gadgets become, the higher the number of constant potential distractions and interruptions we always have with us. (Remember in the old days–six or seven years ago– when you actually had to go sit at a computer to check email?)

How prayerful might my life be, if during the +/- 23 hours of the day that I'm doing something other than spending time set aside for prayer, I was committed to only doing one thing at a time? My hunch is that during that 24th hour of the day, my mind, spirit, and body would be able to settle down more easily and give my attention go God–then I would also be able to give better attention to others during the course of a normal day.

So, some ideas for training myself to do one thing at a time for the purpose of increasing my ability to pay attention to God and others:

• Even while I've been writing this, I changed from my normal on-computer working routine (which almost always includes having at least five programs open simultaneously) to having nothing on my screen except writing this. My computer is very able to do multiple things at once, but perhaps it's not good for me to see more than one of them.
• I wonder if it's possible for me to regress to those email practices of six or seven years ago and go back to only working on email when at my desk. Of course it's convenient to be able to check and send messages from my phone, but I'd guess that 90% of the times I check email on my phone, I'm not looking for any message in particular–and the ones that come in are almost never things that can't wait. I'm also usually with other people who are more worthy of my attention than those messages that grab my attention. Checking email on my phone is apparently more of a physically ingrained habit than it is a useful activity.
• One of the quickest ways for me to lose patience with my kids is for me to try to accomplish anything while they're with me and want my attention. Sure, there are times when something has to be done at that moment, but most of the time I have a choice and could easily put my task away (usually something on my phone or computer) and give my attention to my kids instead.

Other ideas?

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Something I've prayed this week:

O God, who before the passion of your only-begotten Son revealed his glory upon the holy mountain: Grant to us that we, beholding by faith the light of his countenance, may be strengthened to bear our cross, and be changed into his likeness from glory to glory; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen. (Prayer for Transfiguration Sunday from The Book of Common Prayer)

[This is the 20th post from A Year of Living Prayerfully]

How to Be as Prayerful as You'd Like to Be

I've recently been reading a book on health. It's got lots of good information on nutrition, exercise, and overall health. No one around me would be able to guess that I'm reading it, though, because I have changed absolutely nothing about my health habits while reading it. I'm still eating the way I always have been and continue trying to convince myself that activities like typing on a keyboard or riding around in a pickup truck have a small amount of exercise built into them. The bottom line is that I've been reading this good health information, thinking that the things I read are good ideas and that it would be nice if I ever get around to living that way, but I've been reading them without any intention of doing what they say.

A conversation with Robert last week got me thinking about this in connection with this year's experiment. We were talking about one of our heroes, Dallas Willard, and how he teaches the reliable pattern for change in any area of our lives as VIM: First we need to have the vision of how good such a change would be, then an intention to make the necessary arrangements in our lives to make them conducive to the change, and then we find the most helpful means for allowing the change to happen. The example Dallas often uses is of learning a foreign language. If we can clearly see the benefit of learning a language, we will likely become determined to do so, and then do the things necessary to learn it.

So, for most of my life, I've wanted to be prayerful. Some parts of my life have certainly been more prayerful than others–particularly in the seasons when I discovered the good guidance from others which Live Prayerfully is written to pass along. But also for much of my life, I wanted to be more prayerful than I was. In a vague, subconscious way, I continually looked forward to sometime off in the future when I might become the kind of prayerful person that I'd thought all along it would be nice to be.

I've studied enough of the lives of God's friends through history (including knowing a good number of people who fit that category) that I had a pretty good vision of what the prayerful life might be like. And since I've been able to learn from some very good folks along the way, I've also had great guidance in how to go about different practices of prayer. I had the vision. I had the means. But one piece of Dallas' pattern was missing and kept me from living the kind of prayerful life I had wanted for a long time: I never intended to do so. There was always something else I intended to do with the days right in front of me than to become prayerful.

Honestly, in taking on this experiment for this year, my thinking about it went only so deep as that it would give me things to write about on this blog. But the occasion of making that commitment seems to have been a stumbling, bumbling step over the line of finally letting my intentions genuinely match the vision and means of the prayerful life that had already been given to me by others. I'm extraordinarily blessed to have had others in my life to help put those in place, but the solid, gut-level, established intention was the piece only I could take care of.

(PS: By opening with the example of diet and exercise, I certainly don't want to imply that I'm okay with ignoring my physical life and happy with doing so because I think my spiritual life is in good shape. There are multiple levels on which that would be foolish, including thinking that I have a "physical life" and a "spiritual life." I, like you, just have a life, and it's my responsibility to cooperate with God's grace in each area of it. But something I've observed over the years is that, regardless of how dramatic someone's conversion to God may or may not be, we all learn one lesson at a time and cooperate with his work in one part of our lives before doing so in another. In other words, hopefully the intention is coming about nutrition and exercise one of these days. But–dear God–I hope I don't make a commitment to blog about that for a whole year.)

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Something I've prayed this week:

Almighty and everlasting God, you govern all things both in heaven and on earth: Mercifully hear the supplications of your people, and in our time grant us your peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen. (Prayer for the Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany from The Book of Common Prayer)

[This is the 19th post from A Year of Living Prayerfully]

Downgrading My Patience Rating

I can be a remarkably patient father for about three minutes.

In fact, for a certain time period of my life, I thought of myself as someone who was always patient, and that streak lasted 23 years, until I got married. I have a wonderful wife, so that's not an insult to her, but rather just a statement with which anyone who's ever been married to an actual human being can probably identify. Any self-illusions that we are patient and selfless people get thrown out the window when we marry someone and our selfishness suddenly can't find anywhere to hide.

So after getting married, I downgraded my own patience rating from outstanding to above average. That lasted exactly seven more years, until the day I became a parent. The patience rating took another major hit three years later when the second little one came along. Now, I find myself in the same patience class as Bobby Knight and the Tazmanian Devil.

I'm reminded how much I deserve this low patience rating each time my kids get dressed. It's amazing how close the wrestling match can be between my 6'7" body and that of my 19-month-old daughter when trying to put a shirt on her. And my four-year-old might hold the world, olympic, and Texas state records for longest time getting dressed. I never cease to be amazed by how many other things can catch his attention between getting the first and second arms through their sleeves.

The most humbling part of it is that whenever I watch him in the height of his dilly-dallying and he exceeds that patience limit, I know I'm staring at myself. It isn't just that I see so much of myself in him that I'm sure I was just like that at four years old, but I see so much of my 34-year-old self in the things he does at this age. I get frustrated at his distractions, then fifteen minutes later (by which time he might have his head through the appropriate hole in his shirt), I've probably told my wife, "Okay, I'll be right there," only to get distracted by five or six other things on the way to whatever it is I said I'd do.

Thanks be to God that his patience lasts more than three minutes! In this year-long experiment in prayer, I'm enjoying the luxury of carving out time each day to do nothing but be with God, and when I do so, my distractions affect me so much that I'm well aware how much my attempts at being with God are like my little boy's attempts at trying to get dressed. My attention flies from one thing to the next, but thankfully I've read some good things through the years and am convinced that God is much more patient than I am and those distractions bother me more than they bother God. And I have hope–I'm quite sure that as my son grows, the time required for him to get dressed will decrease, but nonetheless–he does end up with clothes on. So maybe my attention span will increase and I'll get better at this, but even if not, the limited attention that I can give to God as part of this experiment is surely better than none at all.

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Something I've prayed this week:

Give us grace, O Lord, to answer readily the call of our Savior Jesus Christ and proclaim to all people the Good News of his salvation, that we and the whole world may perceive the glory of his marvelous works; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen. (Prayer for the Third Sunday after the Epiphany from The Book of Common Prayer)

[This is 18th post from A Year of Living Prayerfully.]

My Daughter Thinks My Name is Gaga

My daughter has gone the first nineteen months of her life without calling me anything close to "daddy." She's been able to say "dada" for a long time, but it's always been clear that term refers to diapers instead of me. Until about a month ago, I was just "Uh." We would play the game around the table at meals: point to my wife, and she would say her name; point to my son, and she would say his name; point to me... "Uh."

I guess I bugged her about it enough that around a month ago, she decided to give me a name, though it certainly isn't one I would've chosen for myself. Now I am "gaga." I really hope this is temporary. I'm extremely uninformed when it comes to pop culture, but from the tiny bit I know of my namesake, I'll be really glad whenever the first time comes that my little girl looks at me and uses any of the more traditional affectionate names for her dad.

Thankfully she's young enough that this doesn't bother me, but only gives me something to joke about. It does really matter to me, however, that even though I know her so well at this point in her young life, that as she grows, she'll also know me better along with time. An important step in that process of her growing to know me will be the day when she realizes, "Hey, I bet this guy would like being called daddy more than gaga." But right now–at nineteen months–she's still pretty limited in her capacity to know me, so I'll continue to delight in every "gaga" she says when she looks at me. 

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I've come to believe that knowing God isn't as clear-cut of a thing as we've often made it out to be. I do believe it's possible, and that it is meant for every person, but after having studied the process of spiritual formation for quite a while now, I really don't think that it's as simple as you may have heard it described–at least not for me nor for most of us. It's likely that at some point you, like me, have heard a preacher or some other well-meaning person say that we need to have "an intimate personal relationship with Jesus" and then give a description of how that comes about, which sounds something like meeting a stranger on the street who already knows everything about us and instantly becoming best friends with him.

I'm sure there are exceptions, but for most of us, relationships don't work that way–and I think we do ourselves and others a disservice to expect it to work differently with God. It's true that the scriptures communicate an invitation to know God in very close ways, but as often as "intimate personal relationship" gets used, you would think it's a direct quotation from a passage of the Bible. (It isn't.) The Bible uses a lot of metaphors to describe the nature of our relationship to God, but I don't think any metaphor is used more often than that of God being a loving father, and us being God's children. This metaphor is throughout the teachings of Jesus, and in many other passages, such as this:

When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son... It was I who taught Ephraim to walk, taking them by the arms; but they did not realize it was I who healed them. I led them with cords of human kindness, with ties of love. To them I was like one who lifts a little child to the cheek, and I bent down to feed them. (Hosea 11:1,3-4)

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When we talk about knowing God, maybe we can find a better way of doing so than the usual "intimate personal relationship" description. Perhaps it's more helpful to talk about it in ways that are dominant throughout the bible–such as God being a loving father and us being his beloved children.

Considering things in that light helps us to see a bit differently. We can realize that the primary reality of the relationship between us and God, rather than being our "intimate personal" knowledge of God or lack thereof, is God's steadfastly loving knowledge of us. Just like children who are still very limited in their capacity to really know their parents, though they can surely love their parents and express that love in different meaningful ways, our knowledge of God doesn't instantly go from being strangers to best friends. Our knowledge of God will always have a different quality to it than our knowledge of other people. Regardless of how much I ever mature, I don't sit down and eat a burrito with God in the same way that I do with my friends.

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As a child, I spent a lot of time with my dad. He knew me, and I knew him as well as little ones can know their parents. Before his death, though, I never really paid attention to how limited my knowledge of him was. There are many questions I would love to ask him now.

Yet even though my knowledge of him was limited by my being a child and his being my parent, I have still found myself becoming more and more like him as I've grown. Because of the time that I spent with him as a little one, then as a teenager, then as an adult, I'm still becoming more like him even though I never see him anymore, never hug him anymore, never ride around in the truck or eat a burrito with him anymore.

Maybe our knowledge of God is much more like that than the encounter with a stranger on the street who already knows everything about us, then with whom we instantly become best friends. For thousands of years, the ones who have known God best have insisted that we are his children and he is our loving father. So if the way that you know God can't be described as intimate and personal, I don't think I'd worry about it too much. Maybe it's more important to let it sink in to the core of our beings that we are known, loved, and welcome to spend time with a God whose is present everywhere. After years, even decades, of doing so, I'm sure that–because of the time spent with him, knowing him to whatever childish degree we were capable–we'll notice ourselves becoming more like him.

And to wrap our minds around this: the promise of scripture is that one day, God will finally set us–and everything–right, and the limits will be gone. "I know in part, for now; But then I’ll know completely, through and through, even as I’m completely known." (1 Corinthians 13:12, Kingdom New Testament)

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Something I've prayed this week:

How precious is your steadfast love, O God! All people may take refuge in the shadow of your wings. They feast on the abundance of your house, and you give them drink from the river of your delights.For with you is the fountain of life; in your light we see light. (Psalm 36:5-7)

[This is 17th post from A Year of Living Prayerfully.]

"But Dad, We Were Having So Much Fun!"

Last night, my wife and I were going through the routine of getting our kids ready for bed. She took care of the little one, our daughter, and I was taking care of our son. The usual routine with him is that one of us will read a couple of books to him before bed. We read our books, and then–because it was a little earlier in the evening than he has been going to bed lately and I knew he wouldn't like going to lay down yet–I told him that I still needed to read my evening prayers and that I would sit in his room with him while I did so and he could look at some books in his bed. He was excited to have been told anything other than that it was time for him to go to sleep.

So I sat on the floor of his room read the prayers from my prayer book while he was in his bed looking at books with a flashlight. After reading the prayers with other people's words, I still needed some time for the day to practice praying without words, so I layed on his floor and tried to do so. Whenever I can, I give this practice twenty minutes, so it was a decent amount of time that I was laying on his floor being very quiet while he was in his bed still looking at books with his flashlight. When the twenty minutes were up, I started to get off of his floor and say goodnight to him, but he objected: "But Dad, we were having so much fun!"

We really hadn't interacted at all for the previous twenty minutes, so I was a bit puzzled at what the "so much fun" was that he was referring to, and I know him well enough to recognize in those words a four-year-old's attempt to avoid going to sleep. But I think there was another level to it also.

Looking at books with a flashlight in his bed is something he does nearly every night. It's part of a regular day for him. But it's interesting that he was able to notice the difference it made to do that regular thing while also on another level being very aware that his daddy who loved him very much was in the room with him.

Though as his parents we are careful to help him learn some boundaries and understand that it's okay for him to be alone in his room right across the hall from us, and even though part of him was surely trying to avoid going to sleep, I'm sure that there was another part of him that was legitimately having more fun reading a book by flashlight on his bed while I was on the floor than he would have doing the same thing without his daddy there next to him.

John Ortberg writes, "Spiritual growth, in a sense, is simply increasing our capacity to experience the presence of God." Or, in the terms my son would be more likely to put it, we have more fun when he's in the room with us.

A good part of what I'm trying to accomplish in living out the things I wrote in Live Prayerfully is to increase my capacity to do the things I regularly do in a day while being very aware at another level that my loving father is with me as I do them. My son is right; doing things that way certainly beats doing them alone.

Perhaps there are a number of people out there (maybe even some of you who will read this) who can live with that kind of awareness of God's presence during the things they regularly do without having to take some relatively drastic measures to practice being aware of God's presence, like I'm doing in this year's experiment. Not me. My attention flies all over the place, and I can so easily forget God, that I'm desperately in need of these four-times-per-day reminders of how, regardless of what I'm doing in the rest of the day, a very loving father is right there with me.

Something I've prayed this week:

Almighty God, whose Son our Savior Jesus Christ is the light of the world: Grant that your people, illumined by your Word and Sacraments, may shine with the radiance of Christ's glory, that he may be known, worshipped, and obeyed to the ends of the earth; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, now and for ever. Amen (Prayer for the Second Sunday after the Epiphany from The Book of Common Prayer)

[This is 16th post from A Year of Living Prayerfully.]