Morning Prayers

I like starting my day in peace and quiet. Maybe it matters so much to me because I have so little expectation of the day continuing that way. I have learned that if I start my day in chaos, that is how the day is going to likely going to unfold (or, more accurately, unravel). But if the day starts calmly, I feel that I have a better chance, at least, of facing my day centered and calm.

Anyone who spends much time around me in my natural habitat knows that I do all I can to protect my quiet mornings. Generally speaking, that means a ban on early morning noise: no music, no electronic media, no idle chit chat.

Part of my quiet morning regimen includes prayers committed to memory. These prayers have the effect of guiding my thinking and getting me in a proper perspective as I start my day. These prayers are simple, even a bit simplistic. However, if I open myself up to what they are saying, they can have a fairly profound impact on me.

The first of my two morning prayers is actually taken directly from the Psalms. Frankly, I don’t understand why I have never heard of anyone else using this as a morning prayer. Ever since I first adopted it a few years back, it has seemed like the perfect way to begin my morning conversation with God. It expresses perfectly the two desires of my heart: relationship and direction.

Let the morning bring me word of your unfailing love, for I have put my trust in you. Show me the way I should go, for to you I lift up my soul.” Psalm 143:8

A good many mornings these are the first words I speak to anyone. In them I am crying out for new mercies, fresh joy in the morning as God reveals to me a new ‘word’ of his unfailing love.

Why is this so important to me? Because “I have put my trust in you.”  And, if I am truly trusting him, I need him to be close by and personal, not distant and silent, as I go through the day.

But then I also ask him to guide me; “Show me the way I should go”. Again I explain, because “to you I lift up my soul”. My soul, my self, my total being is offered up, laid on the line. “So, God”, I ask, “since you have me, what is it that you want to do with me?”

This is my first early morning prayer. But it is not my last memorized prayer of the morning. Generally, the last thing I pray by myself in the morning is a prayer borrowed from one of my favorite prayer guides[i]. It says,

Lord God, almighty and everlasting Father, you have brought me in safety to this new day: Preserve me with your mighty power, that I may not fall into sin, nor be overcome by adversity; and in all I do, direct me to the fulfilling of your purpose; through Christ Jesus my Lord. Amen.”

Gratitude for the new day and my arrival in it, prayer for protection and a request for guidance that leads to the fulfilling of his purposes for my life. It’s hard to cram much more good stuff into one relatively short sentence.

Sure, as soon as I head out the safety of my quiet home into the busy-ness of the day, it’s easy to lose my focus. But some days these words stick with me. Some days they continue to channel my head and my heart in the right direction.

Perhaps it doesn’t happen as often as I would like, but I think it would happen far less if I started my day in just about any other way.

Shalom.

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i Phyllis Tickle has compiled a three-volume set of fixed-hour prayer books. Each is called The Divine Hours, but there is a volume for Springtime, Summertime, and Autumn and Wintertime. They are published by Doubleday.

Romans 8:26 and the Jesus Prayer

During some of the most difficult moments in my life, I have found help in the words written by the apostle Paul in his letter to the Romans. “In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express.”

There have been times when I have relied upon that promise, and my prayers have been limited to inner, or even audible, groans. It is then that it seems as if the Spirit is opening up a channel to God through which I can reach out to Him, even when I can find no words to adequately express my desperation.

So I know from these experiences that words aren’t always necessary for communicating with God. But, as ironic as it sounds, there are times when it seems helpful, even important, to me to find words that convey my lack of words.

A few years ago, I found words for my inexpressible prayers in the Jesus Prayer. I believe that it was in a copy of Henri Nouwen’s The Way of the Heart, which was loaned to me by a friend, that I was first introduced to the Jesus Prayer. Though Nouwen was a Catholic, the prayer has its origins in the Eastern Orthodox Church. It simply says this:

“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon me, a sinner.”

As I recall, Nouwen suggested that the words of that prayer were like place-holders for whatever needed to be expressed. If it was worship, the words could convey that. If it was confession, the words fit that, too. If it was grief, they expressed that, as well.

And so, at various times, specific words or phrases within this brief prayer can become the focus of our heart. “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God”. “Have mercy on me, a sinner”. Perhaps, simply, “Jesus”, repeated over and over again.

In my own practice, I sometimes pray the prayer exactly as I learned it. But the words that come most naturally to me in moments of distress are a variant on that original. The prayer I most often find myself praying is, “Lord Jesus, have mercy on my soul”.

Pascal’s Prayer

With perfect consistency of mind, help me to receive all manner of events. For we know not what to ask, and we cannot ask for one event rather than another without presumption. We cannot desire a specific action without presuming to be a judge, and assuming responsibility for what in Your wisdom You may hide from me. O Lord, I know only one thing, and that it is good to follow you and wicked to offend you. Beyond this, I do not know what is good for me, whether health or sickness, riches or poverty, or anything else in this world. This knowledge surpasses both the wisdom of men and of angels. It lies hidden in the secrets of Your rovidence, which I adore, and will not dare to try to pry open.

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) – mathematician, physicist, philosopher, theologian

I cannot overstate how impacting this prayer has been to me. It was one of the first written prayers I discovered which profoundly affected me, and it continues to challenge my understanding of how I should pray.

Pascal begins by asking God to make him indifferent to the circumstances he encounters. To paraphrase, “Help me to accept all types of things that come my way with an unchanging consistency of trust and acceptance.”

How can he say this? Shouldn’t we be happy when good things happen to us? Or be upset when bad things come our way? Shouldn’t we pray for God to give us the good things and protect us from the bad?

Relearning Prayer

I am not proud to admit it, but prayer is a part of my spiritual life in which I pretty much feel like a failure.

I’ve attended conferences on prayer, read books on prayer and experimented with various styles of prayer: conversational prayer, silent prayer, listening prayer, journaling prayer, fixed-hour prayer, group prayer, and contemplative prayer – just to name a few. While in high school, I even tried unsuccessfully to learn how to pray in tongues. I figured that, maybe if the Spirit were to take control, I wouldn’t struggle so much with prayer. But no matter what I’ve tried, I have never been particularly good at prayer.

Some friends spend an evening, a day, or even weekend in prayer. I struggle to spend an hour. Some rhapsodize concerning the beauty, wonder and divine intimacy of the time which they spend in prayer and I feel like I am missing something. I pray and my mind wanders, my leg jiggles impatiently, and my heart, as often as not, remains untouched.

About the only thing I can state on my own behalf is that, despite my frequently disappointing experiences with prayer, I keep on pursuing a better prayer life.

I grew up in a Bible-believing, evangelical church during a rather transitional period of the late twentieth century. There was still the occasional formal prayer full of thee’s and thou’s, usually practiced by geriatric elders presiding at the Communion table. But, increasingly, these prayers were looked upon as a form of pious pretentiousness and an indication of spiritual artificiality.

To my generation, real prayers were expressed in words that were simple, commonplace and informal. My generation took to this ‘natural prayer’ wholeheartedly and treated our casualness in prayer as proof that our relationship with God was personal and intimate; just like we were stopping in for a chat with a friend over a cup of coffee.

Obviously, authenticity and simplicity are good things, and conversational prayer is still the ‘meat and potatoes’ of my prayer life. But my search for a deeper prayer life has led me in some unexpected directions. Imagine my surprise in experiencing winds of spiritual freshness and glimpses of divine majesty revealed in classic, old-school prayers which have been passed on, written down and, in many cases, repeated by hundreds of thousands of believers over millennia.

Confessions of a Middle-Class Snob

The New Year got off to a pretty slow start at our house this year. I made a pot of coffee and turned on the Rose Bowl Parade, one of my favorite annual traditions, and just relaxed. I watched the parade on HGTV because they provide commercial-free coverage and, come on…who likes commercials?

After the parade was over, the TV stayed on while we casually went about the other activities of our day. So throughout the day, as we passed in front of the TV, we caught portions of other HGTV shows. I admit that I fantasized about what it would be like to live in the Dream Home which the channel gives away every year. I watched a family’s kitchen get “crashed” – made over in a weekend by a contractor who picked the couple at random while they shopped at a furniture store.

But later in the day, when I came into the room, I saw something that really kind of stunned me. It was a show called Million Dollar Rooms. Yes, I said rooms…not houses. I found myself drawn in, but my gut reaction was not a feeling of envy, it was more like disgust.

Most of these rooms were not million-dollar rooms, they were multi-million-dollar rooms. And the amazing part was listening to the owners talk about their special spaces. One after another, each owner spoke about their extravagances like you and I might describe purchasing a new flat screen TV. There was no sense of shame in their self-indulgence. And, as they described how many hundreds of thousands of dollars they spent on a single feature in the room, they would repeatedly say things like, “And it was so worth it”.

This exercise in self-centered conspicuous consumption re-awakened a sensation that I experience from time to time. I said before that I felt disgust. More precisely, it was disgust mingled with a sense of moral superiority.

Nothing less…but so much more

Do you ever find yourself knowing what it is you want to say, but struggling to find words to clearly convey your thoughts? It happens to me all the time. But recently, certain ideas which had been stirring around my head in a muddle, suddenly crystallized with clarity into a single sentence.

Anyone who knows me will appreciate how uncharacteristic it is for me to say anything concisely, so please take note. It may be some time before this happens again. So here goes…

Because Jesus came to do what only he could do, we should not mistakenly conclude that this was the only thing he came to do.

Please, do me a favor and read that again.

Salvation from our sins, the hope of eternal life, a relationship with God based in grace rather than earned righteousness – all of this is only possible with the voluntary sacrifice of the perfect, sinless, God-made-man Savior, Jesus. Securing all this for us was something only he could do, and it would be a gross injustice to detract in any way from the uniqueness and essential nature of that sacrifice.

But I would contend that we perpetrate an equally grave injustice when we jump to the conclusion that Jesus only came to die for our sins and to secure eternity for us. I get that it seems sacrilegious to say ‘only’ in any sentence when talking about Christ’s sacrificial death, as if it were something small or inconsequential.

But I would contend that it is equally sacrilegious to suggest that Christ could be happy with any faith associated with his name which is best known for providing a means for one to gain eternal life, without any really significant impact upon our understanding of our role and purpose within the world in which we now live.

What’s Next?

Given the diversity and polarization of our culture, we frequently find people hold starkly differing perspectives. So different, in fact, that they sometimes seem more like alternate perceptions of reality rather than just different opinions. In this current political season, evidence of this divide between people is painfully obvious. But politics is not the only place where this chasm is apparent.

Some, for example, look at the condition of the church in Western culture and see a mostly sound institution, but they see a broken society which is so corrupt and degraded that it is incapable of recognizing the truth which the church represents.

Others look at the same scene, and judge that it is primarily the church, not society, which is responsible for the disconnect between the gospel and the culture. In their view, Christians are the ones who have lost their way and they maintain that the broader culture is correct to judge current manifestations of Christianity as deficient.

I look at these two positions and contend that they are both right, to at least some degree. Society is broken and twisted in many deeply significant ways which prevent it from hearing God’s message clearly or objectively. And the church is ineffective is making the case for the gospel due to its many failures which distract from and obstruct its message.

But regardless of where the fault lies, we find ourselves at loggerheads, with both side firmly entrenched and incapable of hearing (or unwilling to hear) anything which the other side has to say – even if it has real merit or truth.

In a new book, The Next Christians: The Good News About the End of Christian America, author Gabe Lyons suggests that this impasse between the church and the culture has reached such a point that nothing is going to change as long as the church, for its part, attempts only to do the same things that it has done up to this point.

If its approach is simply to debate the protagonists, make converts who are not transformed, attempt to legislate morality for society or isolate believers from our defiled culture, it will continue to fail as it has been failing of late. In his opinion, it is just these approaches which have brought us to this point and left the Christian ‘brand’ increasingly ignored and irrelevant in the public square of opinion and culture. Indeed, he sees the contemporary church as so irrelevant that he refers to this period of time as the end of “Christian America”.

A Return to Blogging

Due to popular demand, I have returned to blogging.  Oh, all right…despite the lack of any real popular demand, I have returned to blogging after a substantial period of absence.

There are a lot of reasons for my absence, not the least of which was a perceived need on my part to stop talking for a while and process my thoughts internally rather than externally. I have embarked upon new experiments in living out my faith which have yet to lead to any firm conclusions, but they are leading to some interesting possibilities. I hope to be able to share these new thoughts with you in the future.

In the meantime, I invite you to read below my first posting for some time entitled, The Trail to the Left.

The Trail to the Left

Today I went on a hike in my beloved Superstition Mountains. It was a good hike.

It was good in the same way that they say any airplane landing you can walk away from is a good landing. In other words, I survived this hike but it was, by all other objective standards, a failure.

First, let’s talk about preparation. It was late last night when I decided that, even though the hike I had hoped to take with my daughter, Beth, didn’t work out, I was still going to go hiking. So I set the alarm for 5:30, with the goal of being on the trail by 7:00.

Two minutes after driving away from the house, it dawned on me that I had forgotten to bring any food for the trail. So I turned around and went home for my usual trail snack of an apple and cheese sticks. It’s really too bad that, at that moment, I didn’t think to ask, “I wonder if there’s anything else I forgot?” If I had, perhaps I would have remembered that I hadn’t used the inhaler which helps me with the mild asthma I suffer during demanding physical activity. Or I might have recalled that I had failed to put on the knee wrap I wear on the trail thanks to an old volleyball injury.

Oh, I did eventually remember these things. I remembered them after about five minutes on the trail. I could have turned back then, but that goes against my push-through-the-pain philosophy. As a result, within minutes, during a steep ascent, I was wheezing like an old woman with a three pack a day habit. There were also some moments when pain shot through my knee like I’d grabbed hold of a live wire. Still I pressed on. These were mere inconveniences to overcome.

“What about him? What about them?”

It was an anxious time for Peter. He had some serious fence-mending to do. Just days before, Jesus had been arrested and placed on trial in the courtyard of the home of the high priest. After the arrest, his disciples had followed at a distance. Without their leader they were confused and troubled. Their world was surreal, upended, chaotic.

On the edges of the crowd, not once but three times, some bystander confronted Peter with the charge that he knew Jesus. More than that – the accusation was that he was one of Jesus’ associates, one of his disciples.

Each time Peter denied the truth of the accusation with increasing ferocity. Finally, in his exasperation, Peter called curses down on himself and swore his denial. Just then, Jesus turned and his eyes met Peter’s and Peter wept bitterly at his cowardice. To save himself, he had denied his Lord.

Now, little more than a week later, the world which collapsed into chaos at the arrest, condemnation and crucifixion of Jesus has been transformed. There is still a sense of everything in disarray, but it is different now. It is no less disorienting, but it is no longer the disorientation that leads to despair, but a wildness and a newness which gives birth to hope.

But for Peter there is a great shadow which casts its pall over this new dawning. It is the shadow of guilt and distance caused by his denial of his Lord. Could there be forgiveness and restoration? Sitting in his fishing boat on the Sea of Tiberius that question repeats itself over and over. Then a man on the shore calls out, interrupting his thoughts. The man tells these professional fishermen that despite their fruitless efforts through the night, if they would just cast their nets on the other side of the boat, they would take in a catch.

And what a catch! As soon as the fish are hauled on board, John recognizes that the man on the shore must be Jesus. But it is Peter, so eager for reconciliation, who is the first to act. He dives into the water and makes for shore. And, later, when Jesus asks for fish to eat, it is Peter who rushes back to the boat to grab them. No one is more motivated than he is to please the Master.