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.