When There Are No Words

Sometimes it is a long, long time before the words come.  Sometimes they never come.  The sorrows flood through every crevice.  The pain is too raw.  And ages pass before we can even feel anything.  We are numb.

O God, O God, O God.  We just sit with Him wordless.  And He knows.

One after another, the storms came.  The world was turned upside down.  No one will ever be the same.  We don’t have to say anything.  Because He knows.

Like music that requires no words attached to it right now, it is not just ok, but what we need.  To sit and just listen to the silence and let His Presence embrace us, His refuge from the noise.

In quietness and in trust shall be your strength.  Isaiah 30. 16   We need not conjure it up, or hang on by our fingertips, but let Him hold us tight.

And we can know, even in what we cannot yet see, that we have hope because this brokenness will not last forever.  Tears will be wiped away.  Pain shall be no more.  And nightmares will cease.  In our exhaustion, we cannot even discern whether it is night or day.  It appears the darkest dark.  But all is not lost, even when it feels that way.  Our hope is still in You.  Because the darkness does not win.

Praying is not always about words.  Because sometimes there are no words in those way down deep places of our souls.  Words for these bleeding-out wounds have not even been invented yet.

Sometimes our most gracious response is to hold tight and to be held tight.  That is what tears are for.  Each tear is precious to God.  He keeps them like love letters along with His own.  Because those aching parts inside of us are God weeping with us.

And we come to realize a side of God we have never really understood before.  He knows sorrow.  And He is with us.  Even now.  Even in this.

We need not say a thing, but just abide.  That is about all we have strength to do right now.  Even in the darkness, the Almighty has His arms around us.  He is here with us.  We need not use words right now.  He knows.

And that too is prayer.

The Whereness of Prayer

 Where do we pray?  People pray in church.  Some claim a prayer closet. Others pray out loud in their cars, around the supper table, or on a walk in the park. Silent prayers are offered in classrooms.  (As long as there are math tests, there will always be prayer in schools.)   

Other believers sense a nudge in the middle of a conversation, “May I pray for you right now?”  And many of us instead of just tossing and turning, pray in our beds when we awaken in the middle of the darkest nights.

The point is that we pray, seizing those often unexpected pockets of time and unlikeliest places.  And that would be anywhere and everywhere...  in the ordinary and in the crises.

Being sensitive to our whereness nurtures our awareness to pray.

Prayer is not limited to certain times or GPS locations.  But God opens up the universe and our days to pray.  No place or schedule defines when and where.  Just being aware to pray opens up where to pray.  I once knew an elderly woman at church who told me that as she watched the news in her living room every evening, she prayed through what was happening in the world.

And in a season in life decades ago, night after night, I was up with a fussy baby who did not sleep well. I would carry her and walk up and down that dim hallway, begging God for her to go back to sleep.  And then when she didn’t, those frustrating minutes gave me a place where I could pray for whomever God put into my thoughts.

Brother Lawrence, a French monk in the 1600’s, faithfully washed dishes in a monastery kitchen for 36 years and in years after that, mended the worn-out sandals of his fellow monks.  He did not view those jobs as menial or insignificant, because it provided him the opportunity to pray as much as he wanted, even in the dark monastery cellars, as noted in his book The Practice of the Presence of God, compiled after his death.

And in the sanctuaries right where we are, we can pray.  He is with us.  We do not just sense His Presence, but in prayer, we can practice the reality of His Presence.

Out loud, or in the quietness of our hearts, we can pray.  No matter the situation, the Lord is in our midst.  When we pray, what we only see as circumstances to endure, God changes into what are opportunities to pray.  And we will never see the end of what God does with that.

In the course of praying, God makes us aware of Himself, aware of others and their needs, and surprisingly aware of where He has placed us.  He opens our eyes, and He changes our hearts to not just to respond to our surroundings differently, but to see Him differently.

Because in whatever we do or wherever we are, we stand on sacred ground.

“If we do not do the running steadily in the little ways,” says Oswald Chambers in My Utmost for His Highest, “we shall do nothing in the crisis.”  It is in our faithfulness to pray on the most ordinary days, we learn how to pray in the fierce storms of life, curating our first response, not last resort.

The most amazing thing of all is not where we pray or how we pray, but that we can talk to God.  And that would be everywhere.

In our whereness, O Lord,

    increase our awareness to pray.

 

Rejoice always.

Pray without ceasing.

Give thanks in all circumstances.

                 1 Thessalonians 5. 16-18

Wherever we are.

The Secrets of Slow Cooking

The rock-hard frozen chicken thighs made a slight clunk as I dropped them into the slow cooker.  I threw in some spices, two cans of coconut milk, and a sauteed diced onion, and covered it with the lid.  The unlikely mixture did not look at all appetizing at this point. But I gave it a long slow afternoon.

For a time, slow cooking doesn’t look like anything heroic is happening at all.  And then, a gentle boil and perhaps a bit of condensation is visible on the lid.  We leave to do something else, but when we return and walk into the room, the aroma gets all over everything.

Faithfulness believes in the slow cooking of prayer. All too often, we pray pre-packaged microwavable prayers and expect an immediate pre-conceived plastic-wrapped answer in sixty seconds or less.   

But we just need to trust in the slow work of God.

A lot of ingredients have yet to be added.  And the flavors need long slow hours to meld.  God is at work.  Over time we may realize something else is missing, a vital element perhaps.  And many more long-simmering prayers are mingled in the pot, added in sequence when the time is right, and somehow our hearts come to a different understanding.

We don’t comprehend the tenderizing that is happening, the connections being made with unrelated people or situations that appear not to fit.  The deeper things cannot be rushed.  And the result would not be the same if it were hurried along.  The Lord is not slow to fulfill as some count slowness…  2 Peter 3. 9

It is just not the same without the slow cooking of our prayers.

Recently as I was cleaning out a file, I uncovered scraps of papers covered in prayer requests which I had jotted down in a Bible study group from years ago. We had prayed through personal disasters, heart aches, desperate needs, new jobs, new hearts in old jobs, difficult relationships, anxieties, and downright fears. 

I was not impacted by the “results,” but God’s faithfulness to that group, even when we could not yet see His hand.  And all the while, all that time, even now, God has been working.  The waiting is part of God’s gentle simmering. 

How long, O LORD?  (Psalm 13. 1)  His love extends as long as it takes.  We cannot measure the time it takes for a prodigal heart to soften – or maybe our own.  This feast may not be for us – or about us—after all.  But for a thousand generations.

The things we pray may never see the light of day in our lifetime, but that does not diminish the significance that we pray.  We have been entrusted to faithfully come before the Lord.  We may never taste the outcome.  Perhaps for us, to pray is just being embraced by the aroma of the Almighty.  That would be enough.

In slow prayer, the impossibly tough cuts of meat become amazingly tender.  The ordinary vegetables orphaned in the bottom of the fridge become royalty. The flavors join together seamlessly.  Every ingredient adds to the final result.  And when it seems like God is taking His sweet time – well, God has all the time in the world. 

At some point, we just have to trust. 

There are no secrets of slow praying.  Just that we pray.

The prayer of the righteous has great power as it simmers. 

                             James 5. 16

 

When Prayer Disappoints

She prayed.  She prayed fervently.  And she was sure that God would abundantly provide in His precious and unexpected ways.  She was so excited.  She trusted Him for His answer.

And God did provide in an unexpected way.  But not as she anticipated. 

She had already prepared for what she thought would happen.  But instead of joy, she was left with a cavernous hole in her heart and what appeared as a train wreck.  She was devastated.

But I trusted You, O God. 

And in her pain, she just stopped praying altogether, resulting in months of silence.  Why bother?

Yesterday, she shared a monumental situation about her young daughter, resounding the cry and fear of every parent in a myriad of impossible situations.  What in the world can I do about this?

Pray, I said. Pray a lot. 

And in that moment, my words still hanging in the air, I could see it on her face, as it dawned on her, I can’t do this without God.

Perhaps in that other situation, her disappointment was really an appointment to prepare her for this difficulty – to trust God on an even deeper level.  She trusted God before.  Now she needed to trust Him radically more.  Not just for answers, but seeking Him. 

God provides in ways we cannot possibly understand.  He withholds for reasons we cannot comprehend.  He unfolds in ways beyond our vision. While we cannot know why, we can know there is always a why. God has incredible purposes for it.  He always responds when we cry out to Him. But not always in what we can see.  Not always defined by our expectations or desires or timing.  And oftentimes, because we are the ones not ready for it yet.

His faithfulness is deeper than our myopic eyesight, His fulfillment farther than our imagination, and His fruitfulness always beyond our pay grade.  We look for a tiny solitary seed sprouting.  And all the while, God plants a forest of sequoias.  God redeems, even the pain.

God knows what we need.  Sometimes we don’t.  But what we can know is this:

The steadfast love of God endures all the day. 

                                      Psalm 52. 1

And His love does not depend on favorable circumstances, or getting exactly what we pray for, and is seamlessly woven even in hardship, even in what we are not able to see,

But we can trust Him.  Just because it is hard does not mean that God is not in it. 

He weeps with us in our pain as One who knows suffering far more than we. God is not “teaching us” anything, but drawing us incredibly closer to Him.  So much more hangs on this than a singular answer, but resounds to a thousand generations in a million diverse ways, encompassing the earth and eternity.

Nothing in His economy is subject to random chance.   I cannot know what is up His sleeve, but I can know Him. 

For we are powerless against this great horde that is coming against us.  We do not know what to do, but our eyes are on You.  2 Chronicles 20. 12

This barrage of difficulties does not mean spiritual warfare against us, a hail of bullets, and impossibly surrounded by foes.  The adversary tries to confuse us and seal our defeat.

               But instead this calls for spiritual warfare.

               And that would be prayer.

We cannot know God’s mind nor purposes in what is ahead of us, even in what is right in front of us.  But this too is sacred ground.

Many things we cannot do, or change, or control.  But we can pray.  We can pray all we want.

             And God takes it from there.

It is not that God disappoints, nor that our prayers are ineffective, but a far grander narrative is unfolding.  And we are part of it, even in what does not appear to fit.  Of that we can be assured.  On God we can stake our lives. And our prayers.  There is always grace in what we do not yet know and far more at stake than we can imagine.  May we treasure Jesus more no matter the outcome.

Someday on the other side, we will know and gasp, “So that’s why it happened like that!”  And we will realize God’s eternal ramifications even in what we consider a disappointment, failure, or “not working out.”

God responds all along – past, present and future tense.  What may appear as His absence is only His boundless Presence beckoning us deeper still.

All we have to do is pray. 

Just try.