Live Prayerfully Conclusion

[I'm working on finishing up drafts for the chapters to Live Prayerfully: Three Ways Ordinary Lives Become Prayerful. The general of the aim of the book is to provide guidance on historic practices of prayer in simple ways. Below is a draft of the Conclusion. I'd love your feedback, so please consider leaving a comment. And if you like it, share it on Facebook or Twitter.]

The Making of Prayerful People

Synergy: the interaction or cooperation of two or more organizations, substances, or other agents to produce a combined effect greater than the sum of their separate effects.

I find I am better or worse as I pray more or less. Prayer tones up the whole of life. I can never be better in life than I am faithful in prayer. If prayer lags, life sags. If we know how to pray, we know how to live; if not, then we exist, we don’t live. When I pray, I’m like an electric bulb in the socket, full of life and power. When I don’t pray, then I’m like that bulb out of the socket- lifeless.

E. Stanley Jones

The secret to a life of prayer, by and large, is showing up.

Robert Benson

My first sincere attempts as a youth at growing toward a prayerful life were by praying with my own words. Other than when we said the Lord’s Prayer in worship services, this was the only way of prayer that I knew, so it was the only way that I prayed for years.

In my first years after college, I enjoyed the discovery of reading spiritual writers who taught about praying without words. For a time, that became my primary way of praying, though by then praying with my own words was deeply ingrained enough in me that I could not completely let go of it.

About a decade later, while I sat at a Transforming Community retreat and listened to Ruth Haley Barton teach on fixed-hour prayer, I felt my soul being drawn like a magnet to the kind of prayer she described. I had experienced it in the Transforming Community and other places without even realizing what it was we were doing, so then as Ruth taught us this centuries-old way of praying with other people’s words, I was eager to explore it and shape my life around it.

Upon returning home from that retreat, I immediately bought a copy of The Divine Hours and began a rhythm of praying with other people’s words through fixed-hour prayer. I immediately noticed how it became a valuable bridge for me. Being a new parent, I often had days when the craziness of adapting to life with a baby in the house meant that my normal space for praying without words and/or praying with my own words was pushed aside. Yet with the constant rhythm of fixed-hour prayer, I was able to bridge those gaps.

As I became more familiar with the rhythm of praying with other people’s words through fixed-hour prayer, I began to experiment with incorporating times of praying without words and praying with my own words into those established times of prayer. Then I experienced synergy.

Having benefited from each of these three ways of praying, initially each independently of the others, I was surprised to notice the difference it made when I put them together. I felt like every part of me was becoming more open to God, like I was finally getting a taste of the kind of prayerful life I had always wanted.

I can’t say for sure whether or not your experience will the same. In some ways, it certainly will not. But I can say that since I have found God’s grace to be available so abundantly through these three ways of praying passed down to us from countless numbers of followers of Jesus throughout history, I am reasonably certain that you will too.

One more thing: 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 become 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 II of this book is a guide that you and others can use to do so.

When Our Friendship Grows

[I'm working on finishing up drafts for the chapters to Live Prayerfully: Three Ways Ordinary Lives Become Prayerful. The general of the aim of the book is to provide guidance on historic practices of prayer in simple ways. Below is an excerpt from the conclusion of the third chapter (Praying With Your Own Words).] The day when my son told me, “If you were going somewhere by yourself, I’d want to catch up” was a day worth remembering for me. He is older now than when he said those words to me, and though he’s still very young, there are already beginning to be times when he wants some distance from me rather than being right by my side. And adolescence hasn’t even hit yet. Although I hope it never happens, there may well come a period of time when he doesn’t want much to do with me. But his own words to me that day when he was three years old came from a very sincere place in his little soul, a place that knew he was loved, that his daddy delighted in him, and that it was a good thing for the two of us to ride around in our pickup truck together. Whatever the future may hold for us as father and son, I will always know that place in his soul is real and is still there, even if one of these days he completely stops paying attention to it. 

There have been times in my years of seeking to follow God when, whether in joy or pain, I have expressed my love for God in sincere and authentic ways through using my own words in prayer. I’ve come to believe that those words delighted God is much the same way that my son’s delighted me. There have also been times in my years of seeking to follow God when, like a confused or rebellious son, I didn’t want to have much to do with him. Thankfully, though, even when those times came, I was eventually able to go back to words that came from a very sincere place in my soul that has known I am loved, that God delights in me, and that it is very good for us to do things together. Looking back over the decades, I can see that it’s when I talk to God about those things in my own words that our friendship grows.

I Don't Like Deadlines. I'm Giving Myself a Deadline.

If you're familiar with Myers-Briggs terminology, I'm a nearly off-the-chart P. I like to go with the flow and take things pretty easy, and I don't like deadlines. But to survive in a work environment where an organization exists for more than going with the flow, I've had to learn some J skills. These days in my life, I love setting my own schedule, but... the kind of flow I'm comfortable going with could slow down to where its movement is almost imperceptible to the naked eye. That wouldn't bother me much, but it also wouldn't help this book project get done.

So I'm giving my J side a workout and actually (painfully) setting myself a deadline. If I was working with a traditional publisher on this, that would certainly help get it done. They would give me a deadline, and I would have to stick to it. But since there's no one who will ever be barking at me to get this moved past the finish line, my hope is that by unnecessarily posting this information publicly to the galaxy, a couple of you might love me enough to bark if the book isn't done when this date comes around.

So here it is: The book, Live Prayerfully, will be completely finished by Nov. 25, 2012. This is pretty ambitious, but I think it's possible. Since I've taught the material of the book a few times on retreats, it's almost all written. My only task is to change it from speaking notes into book chapters and add some parts where needed. I'm about 90% there now, so that part of the project is doable. It also means I need to go ahead and make some contacts with people who might be able to do the book cover, final edit, and anything else for which I'lll need the help of someone who really knows what they're doing.

I know it's easy to underestimate how long things will take, but I'm also grateful to already have a much smaller DIY self-publishing experience under my belt with Understanding Infant Baptism, so I think I've got a decent idea of the steps involved. We'll see.

So why Nov. 25? A few reasons:

• The main content of the book will be offered again through our church early next year, hopefully in January, and it would be helpful to have for people by then.
• Also, our church will have a year-long emphasis on prayer in 2013, so I hope to be guiding folks through the ideas in Live Prayerfully in other settings as well next year.
• That emphasis in our church has given me the idea for the next thing I want to write: A Year of Living Prayerfully, in which I would chronicle a year of going to the most reasonable extreme of organizing my life around the ways of praying described in Live Prayerfully. For a variety of reasons, it would make a lot of sense for me to start that project during the first week of Advent, so I've backed this new deadline up a week from that, and we have Nov. 25.

Oh man. I really don't like deadlines. And I really don't like announcing a self-imposed, not set in stone deadline to the world.

Prayer All-Stars, Why I'm Not One, and Why That's Okay

[I'm working on finishing up drafts for the chapters to Live Prayerfully: Three Time-Proven Ways Ordinary Lives Become Prayerful. The general of the aim of the book is to provide guidance on historic practices of prayer in simple ways. Below is an excerpt from a section of the third chapter (Praying With Your Own Words), which discusses why it's okay if we don't have some of the same kinds of prayer experiences as famous Christians.] One of my favorite stories about a prayerful person is a story about George Mueller. Some of you may recognize his name. He became a fairly well known for his work with orphans in the 1800s in England. He decided from the outset of his ministry that he would never ask for financial support for his orphanage. He would simply ask God to provide for his needs through prayer, and trust that God would do so.

By the end of his life, Mueller’s orphanages had cared for more than 10,000 children, and he established 117 schools which provided education to more than 120,000 kids. He was so effective at providing an education to poor children that he was actually accused of “raising the poor above their natural station in life.” And all of this was through a man who was radically dependent on God and was extremely prayerful.

The story goes that Mueller was on a ship that was sailing for America, when they came into a dense fog.

“Because of it the captain had remained on the bridge continuously for twenty-four hours, when Mr. Mueller came to him and said, ‘Captain, I have come to tell you that I must be in Quebec on Saturday afternoon.’ When informed that it was impossible, he replied: ‘Very well. If the ship cannot take me, God will find some other way. I have never broken an engagement for fifty-seven years. Let us go down into the chartroom and pray.’

“The captain continues the story thus: ‘I looked at that man of God and thought to myself, What lunatic asylum could that man have come from? I never heard such a thing as this. ‘Mr. Mueller,’ I said, ‘do you know how dense the fog is?’ ‘No,’ he replied, ‘my eye is not on the fog, but on the living God, who controls every circumstance of my life.’ He knelt down and prayed one of those simple prayers, and when he had finished I was going to pray; but he put his hand on my shoulder and told me not to pray. ‘Firstly,’ he said, ‘because you do not believe God will, and secondly, I believe God has, and there is no need whatever for you to pray about it.’ I looked at him, and George Mueller said, ‘Captain, I have known my Lord for fifty-seven years, and there has never been a single day that I have failed to get an audience with the King. Get up and open the door, and you will find that the fog has gone.’ I got up and the fog was indeed gone. George Mueller was in Quebec Saturday afternoon for his engagement.” 

(Glenn Clark, as quoted in A Guide to Prayer for Ministers and Other Servants by Rueben P. Job)

Isn’t that great? I love to read the stories of some of the “prayer giants” like that. For more than 50 years, John Wesley awoke between 4-5 a.m. for prayer. He said that he often had so much to do in a day that he could not afford not to spend at least three hours in prayer.

I have read stories about men and women like that for years, and for a long time I imagined that if I was ever going to be teaching others about prayer, my doing so would be full of stories like theirs, trying to inspire us to imitate their efforts.

The main obstacle that keeps me from trying to inspire others to imitate the efforts of the Muellers and Wesleys of history is simple: I can’t imitate their efforts. I tried to pray like Wesley once. I gave up on day two, because, man, I was tired. To be someone who prays for hours every day, and sees things happen like fog disappearing from Mueller’s ship... I have started to believe that those kinds of experiences may not be for me, nor for most of us. And it’s interesting that while Wesley and others like him certainly urged others to pray, they generally never encouraged others to pray in the ways that they did.

So, at this point in my life, I think I’m okay never making it into the prayer hall of fame. I don’t need to become a superhero and have extraordinary experiences. Instead, what I really, deeply desire is simply to keep becoming a more prayerful person. Remember again the story of Albert Haase from our Introduction, whose spiritual director told him, “The point of praying is to make us prayerful people,” meaning that the point of the times that we spend set aside for prayer is so that we will be more able and likely to pray and be aware of God’s presence through the rest of our day. We pray during some parts of each day so that the rest of every day can be lived prayerfully

Therefore, please understand that we don’t do the kinds of things we discuss in this book in order to try to become the prayer all-stars. Rather, my hope is simply that we can learn time-proven ways of praying that have been helpful to other followers of Jesus for a very long time, some of whom we may know their names, but the huge majority of whom were never known beyond the people right around them.

I still think it’s good to be inspired by stories of people like Mueller or Wesley, but I hope that none of us have prayer’s equivalent of football’s all-pro quarterback in mind when we think of what it would mean to live a prayerful life. If we’re going to associate a word with the lives of God’s prayerful ones, I think it is much more helpful to us, and much more consistent with the message of the scriptures, to get rid of images and words like superstar or hero, and replace them with another, much simpler word: friend.

...

Why Our Own Words Matter

Tonight, I thought of a story about my son that I wanted to work into the Live Prayerfully chapter on praying with our own words. When I sat down to start writing it, I thought I may have used the story in some way on the blog before, and sure enough... not only had I already used it, but I had also already connected it to praying with our own words. Man, a blog can be handy.

So this post is really just a link to an old post: If You Were Going Somewhere By Yourself, I'd Want to Catch Up.

Excerpt from Chapter 1: Praying With Other People's Words

[I'm working on finishing up drafts for the chapters to Live Prayerfully: Three Time-Proven Ways Ordinary Lives Become Prayerful. The general of the aim of the book is to provide guidance on historic practices of prayer in simple ways. Below is an excerpt from the first chapter (Praying With Other People's Words), which discusses many of us already come to this kind of prayer with a bias for or against it.] If you were to walk through my church’s building about five minutes after the beginning of our worship services, on one end of the hallway you would hear a huge pipe organ booming as that part of our congregation sings a hymn that is likely to be three to five hundred years old or older. Other parts of their worship service will likely include things like the people up front being in robes, praying by saying aloud one of the responsive readings from one of the Psalms in the back of the hymnal, or banners hanging in the sanctuary that have to be certain colors at certain times of the year.

If you would normally prefer to worship at this end of the hallway, my hope is that this chapter will add depth of meaning to some things you likely do in worship already, and help you to see ways that we could become more prayerful people by carrying those practices into our the other parts of our days and weeks.

However, the worship service taking place at the other end of the hallway is very different. If you were to walk toward it, you would hear music equally booming, but this time coming from a drum set, guitars, and electric keyboards as that part of our congregation sings a song that is likely to be six months to a year old or newer. Other parts of their worship service will likely include thing like the people up front being in jeans, every prayer said being made up on the spot by the person saying it, and various multimedia images being projected on the majority of the wall space visible throughout the service.

If you would be more likely to find yourself in the drums and multimedia end of the hallway, thank you for at least reading to the fourth page of this chapter before skipping ahead in the book. Hang in there with me, because my experience is that you are likely to find at least as much depth of meaning in this way of praying as your friends down the hallway.

I mention this because I am well aware of the potential that some of you may already be turned off to this chapter just because of its title. If that is you, it’s okay that you feel that way, and there is likely some good reason that you do. I am more of a newcomer to intentionally using this kind of prayer than the others that we will explore in this book, so I think I understand your hesitations. Yet I include this way of praying, and I include it first, for some important reasons. First, I have found this way of praying to be very life-giving to me personally, and as I have taught this material to others in classes and retreats, this way of praying is the one where people most often describe a light bulb coming on inside of them. One woman stopped me after we opened a retreat by teaching on the topics in this chapter and said, “Even if we didn’t do anything else after that, I’m glad I came.”

(I wanted to stop the retreat right then, realizing the mistake I had made in setting people up for disappointment in the remainder of the things I had to say, but it all ended up okay.)

So, if you are one for whom the title, “Praying With Other People’s Words” fails to light a light bulb or anything else within you, remember the advice of Albert Haase’s spiritual director that we considered in the Introduction, “Find the way of praying that works for you,” the way of praying that helps you to be prayerful, and do so by trial and error. If praying with others’ words isn’t something that you think makes you tick, I am only asking you to hang in there with us through the end of the book and experiment with how each of these ways might help you become a more prayerful person.

Do Prayer and Exercise Have Anything in Common?

A really good comment from my friend Alayna (a.k.a. Paul) got me thinking about some connections between prayer and exercise. Like any metaphor, it eventually breaks down. I've never wanted to throw up after prayer, nor been hardly able to walk the next day from praying more than I should have when I wasn't used to praying very much. But I think there are some good parallels:

Whether we realize it or not, some good how-to guidance really matters. When we aren't praying, or aren't exercising, we can think of both of these activities as things we know we should be doing, and already know how to do, but we just aren't doing them. When we aren't praying or exercising, the how-to seems too elementary for us to bother to investigate: to exercise, we could just go out our front doors and start jogging. To start praying we might say something like, "Dear God, please help me..., please help them...., please help us... Amen." While neither of those approaches are the worst in the world, neither are they the best. That approach to exercise rarely makes an unfit person healthy, and that approach to prayer rarely makes an ordinary life prayerful.

On the other hand, once we begin to attempt exercise or prayer, we find that some good how-to guidance is highly valuable. For example, we find how helpful it is to have a plan, or to learn from those who have already taken the steps we're attempting to take. In exercise, the guidance helps us to avoid injuries and to stick with it when we don't feel like exercising. In prayer, the guidance helps us to shape our our prayers in ways we might not think of on our own and to stick with it when we don't feel like praying.

It's easy to avoid doing them by convincing ourselves we always do them. I have a good friend for whom I have enormous respect who used to wear a pedometer, and we'll call him Russell. (The point of wearing of a pedometer is to count how many steps you take during a day in order to quantify your level of activity, or lack thereof, in a normal day.) While it was a good thing that Russell wore that pedometer, I don't think it accomplished its intended result. Rather than attaching it to his hip, as the instructions say to do, Russell discovered that the pedometer also fit nicely onto the side of his shoe. In addition to looking a bit more stylish, this also allowed Russ to earn quite a bit of extra credit on the pedometer. All day long, as he sat at his desk (or drinking Dr. Pepper with me), he would habitually shake his foot... all the while getting credit from the pedometer for living an active lifestyle.

When we think of our main way of praying as "praying all day long," we're like Russell sitting at his desk, drinking a soda, shaking his foot and getting credit for exercising all day long. We absolutely need specific, dedicated times of exercise to be healthy, and we also need specific, dedicated times of prayer to be prayerful. When we have those specific times, we begin to find that their effects spill over into the rest of our days, and then the real experience of praying all day long comes into view for us. The times of exercise give us more strength or energy in another part of the day when we wouldn't have had them otherwise. The times of prayer help us to be aware of what God is up to in our world when we would normally have been completely oblivious.

This is the flip side of what I wrote about in A Life That Makes Prayer Come Naturally. The key in that post to prayer coming naturally for Mr. Means from the moment he awoke each day was all of the time he spent intentionally praying throughout his life. If we try to only develop a sense of constant prayer without building it on dedicated times of prayer, we may as well sit at a desk, shake our foot, and see how healthy it makes us.

It's tempting to stop short of letting them take their effect on us. Several years ago, I bought a weight set. (We disassembled it when we moved six years ago, and it's never been put back together since then.) I used it two times in one week, and suddenly I thought of myself as a serious athlete. The truth was that I was still practically as unfit as I had been before getting the weight set. The only real difference was that I was an unfit person who had lifted weights twice in a week. I may have been headed toward a more fit life, but I surely wasn't there yet, regardless of how I was thinking of myself.

It's the same with prayer. If we have two consecutive days with dedicated times for prayer, many of us think we'll soon be nominated for canonization as saints, even if we're not Catholic. However, the likely truth is that we're probably still living largely prayerless lives, though we're hopefully on the road toward living more prayerfully.

The point of exercise and the point of prayer is not what happens during the moments when we exercise or pray. Rather, the point is the (healthy or prayerful) life that those moments lead us to develop over the course of time.