Last week, I hit a wall. As I scurried from one crises to another, wondering what in the world God was up to, I got smacked with a rather brutal realization. I had forgotten how to pray.
Yeah, you read that right. I forgot how to pray.
I know that must sound weird to you, but think about how I felt. All of these years where prayer was such a huge part of my life, and then suddenly, I just couldn’t do it anymore. Every time I tried the words got in the way, and I felt as if I had been betrayed by my best friend.
Words are a huge part of my life. My days are spent sifting through them, polishing them, and placing them in a precise order to create an image, to illicit an emotion, or provoke another to thought. It is what I do, and it is a natural as breathing for me. They are my tools and my weapons in this world. They help me make sense of what is around me, and they offer a comforting order to the chaos of my life. Yet, here I was unable to string two together without them rebelling against my attempts to align them according to my need.
Oh, I would start to pray and then I would realize that I wasn’t praying at all. Sure the words still flowed through my head, but it wasn’t prayer. Instead, I was thinking about how I was going to use them for a blog post or in the next book. I was writing articles in my mind about how I pray or what I was praying about. I was formulating the next idea I was going to present to the world, trying to find the most brilliant arrangement of words to impress you, my reader. In short, I was talking about God but I wasn’t talking to God.
And there is a huge difference.
So I did something radical. I took some time off. I put away my computer and I didn’t write anything other than replies to messages. I have to tell you it was weird. After years of arranging my days around time to write, I felt a little out of sorts and at a bit of loss at what to do with myself. I am writer, writing is what I do, and so who am I when I am not writing? What defines me if I am not doing the one thing I know I have been called to do? What if this was permanent? What if God decided that I needed to just put it down for good? What if my writing had become too much of an idol in my life, and I had to smash it if I was going to be faithful to him? So many moments of existential angst!
And it wasn’t like I could talk him about it, I had forgotten how to pray. Remember?
That meant the next step was trying to remember. My first attempts were less than eloquent. In fact, they were pretty much just groans and a repetition of the “Father…Father, Father…….Father….. Father, Father, Father.” If I attempted any other words, I would fall back into my pattern of writing in my head. Somewhere along the way something began to happen, the words stopped being important. And my mind began to fill with images of me standing before him, holding out all the broken things and people in my life. I didn’t need words to define the image. It was all there. Me small and powerless to fix things standing before my Father and King with my tangled kite strings, broken dolls, and shattered teapots, making my silent appeal for him to take them from my outstretched hands.
I fell asleep that night feeling as if I had experienced a major breakthrough. I wasn’t trying to contain or define God with my words. I had allowed my mind and heart to be opened to just being in his presence, but then I was reminded – this was God I was dealing with. Things are never that simple, even when they are.
The next day, we began phase two of remembering how to pray and this is where things got icky. It seems just giving God all my broken stuff wasn’t good enough. He wanted more, and more specifically, he wanted me. He wanted me to get real with him, to be honest about how this was affecting me, and what I thought about it. This meant I had to actually feel all the stuff I was trying hide behind a façade of faith and spirituality. Wounds had to be probed, some dead tissue removed, and some pride amputated. It wasn’t pretty, and it hurt like blazes.
And none of this could happen if I was trying to get out of it by just writing about it. It seems that I have become rather proficient at using words that describe the condition of my heart to distance myself from actually experiencing the condition of my heart. I could not judge my progress by a word count or pages written. I was having to confront me, without the one thing that I had begun to think made me, well, me.
The whole process was too much to do sitting still. So I started walking more, and resisting the urge to take a trash bag with me to pick up cans or plugging in a podcast to distract me. I did a lot of fishing, contemplating life, God, and me. It is amazing the amount of thinking you can do while staring at a bobber dancing around on the water.
And then something happened. When I put aside all the things I had been using to hide out, the words started to flow. Angry words, hurtful words, and heart wrenching words. Not the kind of thing you put in a blog post or book, or at least not one where you are trying to encourage people to seek God. I began to tell him about how mad I was that all of this was happening in my life. I started explaining to him how he was falling down on his job, and how I was sick and tired of him not taking care of me and the ones I loved. I told him that I was hurt and mad that he hadn’t stepped up to defend the hearts and minds of those I love, and how he needed to stop them from being stupid, from hurting themselves. I told him my faith was wearing a little thin, and he needed to do something quick because I wasn’t sure that it was going to hold out much longer.
Then there were no more words. Just that sad empty feeling you have after you’ve released all the anger that held the sadness at bay.
I wish I could say this when I saw a burning bush or the clouds parted and a voice called down from heaven telling me that it would all be okay. Heck, I would have settled for a phone call telling me that the ones I love had come to their senses and there was sizable check in the mail box. But the truth is, nothing happened. Nada, zip, zero.
The wind just kept blowing across the water, the birds kept singing, and fish kept snubbing my minnows. No major revelations, no change in the state of the world, just me and God sitting on the lake shore not talking to each other.
I don’t know where we go from here. I can’t shake this idea that God is real and he has a purpose and plan in all of this. Intellectually, I get that, but I am still upset by the things that are happening in my world. It hurts. I hurt. Knowing that he loves me is all fine and dandy, but sometimes you just get the itch to feel like he loves you. To get a break from all this operating in faith and have something a bit more tangible, a bit more comfortable and secure.
For now, I am not operating on my feelings. My feelings are still a big tangled mess of kite string that are keeping me grounded. I am making the choice to believe, to trust, and to love. He knows I am not happy with how he’s handling all this, but right now I don’t have a whole lot of joy and happiness to give him. So I am giving him what I do have the anger, the sadness, the doubt, the confusion, and all those icky emotions that make so many Christians uncomfortable. I am not giving them to him because they are pretty or that is what he deserves. I am giving them to him because they are real and right now it’s the best I’ve got - for now.
