Just Start

 A seasoned author recently admitted that sometimes he doesn’t know what he is going to write about until he actually just starts writing.  “And eventually, patterns emerge that I hadn’t even seen before,” he points out. 

In any creative endeavor, as we write, compose, paint or sculpt, we begin to see something different not just someday in a final product, but in the process now.

In the same way, sometimes we don’t know how to pray about a certain situation, but when we just start praying, God changes not just what we see but how we pray.

We are often so narrowly-focused and near-sighted that we “calculate too closely either the limits of the possible or the sneakiness of grace,” says Ted Loder in Guerillas of Grace:  Prayers for the Battle.

In our all-too-finite petitions, we miss His glory in the grander narrative, in how it is really playing out, and how God is unfolding an intricate sacred design, visible only from the other side of eternity. 

It is not a matter of enlarging our field of vision, but trusting God by praying differently.  His response to our prayers extends far beyond an “answer,” and is certainly never confined to a singular outcome of our own creation.

Bible teacher and theologian Nancy Guthrie challenges us to consider what we are praying for in her essay Praying Past Our Preferred Outcomes, published by The Gospel Coalition.  “Scripture provides us with a vocabulary for expanding our prayers for hurting people far beyond our predetermined positive outcomes,” she writes. “Instead of praying only for relief, we begin to pray that the glory of God’s character would be on display in our lives and the lives of those for whom we are praying.”  

When we don’t even know what to ask or how to pray, God whispers to us, “Just start praying.”  And as we pray and seek Him, God opens our hearts, thoughts, and prayers to a universe of which we are not even aware. 

Now to Him who is able
to do far more abundantly
than all that we ask or imagine
          --[or pray]--
according to the power at work
                         within us,
to Him be glory…..
                       Ephesians 3. 20-21