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