Deep Knee Bends

Regular exercise conditions our bodies to be able to respond to the demands that even everyday life places upon it.  It teaches the muscles how to move differently, it strengthens the tendons and ligaments that hold everything all together, it increases bone strength, all in ways that we cannot see, until the challenges come.

We have been trained and equipped with a new energy, an abiding strength, to be able to respond and not be defeated. Our circumstances may not change, but we have. 

We admire and even honor athletes who bring their best game.  But they are not just naturally good at it. They don’t just excel.  They have worked hard, long hours to get there.  It doesn’t just happen.

I have long admired the many people I have known who respond differently to the struggles and sufferings of life, because of how they pursue God. They come from all different walks of life, all different ages and stages, but one common thread appears.  Their posture in prayer has incrementally increased their strength, long before the struggles appear, step by step, day after day.

Prayer is quite simply learning to pay attention, and not just reacting to the horizontal at eye level, but responding to a vertical dimension that comes only from God, that which the world does not comprehend. There is something deeper here. 

And that would be the deep knee bends of prayer.

Therefore lift your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees, and make straight paths for your feet, so that what is lame may not be put out of joint but rather be healed. (Hebrews 12. 12)

It is not that life becomes suddenly easier, but we know that we are not alone. 

And so, with prayer, faced with serious decisions, the ordinary or the overwhelming, does it even occur to us to pray about it?  Or are we so used to driving in the dark without headlights and wondering why we are having such a hard time, buying into our culture of despair, that we forget or ignore praying about it?  It doesn’t have to be like this.  There is a vertical dimension that the world does not recognize.

We are still walking through impossible situations with enormous degrees of difficulty, and the really hard stuff is still really hard.  But somehow differently now.

A heart stretched by prayer will never see the world or face difficulties in the same way.

We cannot imagine the enormity of God, but now and then, we capture a glimpse by praying.  That which should defeat and stop us in our tracks is like moving from a flat two-dimensional existence to walking into the soaring grandeur of a cathedral that we didn’t even know existed.

“O God, I didn’t realize.”

And He replies, “I didn’t think you did.  I’ve been trying to show you all along.”

Not the possibility of a bigger universe, but the reality of God. 

Trust Me in this.

“Daniel got down on his knees three times a day and prayed and gave thanks before his God, as he had done previously.”  (Daniel 6. 10) 

Daniel was not just prepared for the crisis or the unexpected, but even in the familiar and the ordinary.  Praying was not just a habit to him, but a pattern engraved and treasured in the every days.  To Daniel, prayer was not a have to, but a get to.

Daniel had been conversing with God for a very long time.  Daniel knew his knee exercises had changed the course of his life…..and continued to do so.  No matter the consequences.  And helped him see it all from a different perspective, that which is eternal and lurks beneath the obvious. 

It is not that treasures appear suddenly when we pray, but we can gradually see what is already there.  And that would be God in this.

One of our granddaughters finished yet another novel last night.  She couldn’t wait to tell me about it, as we were getting the grandkids ready for school.  A voracious reader, she told me she was really surprised by it.  Set in medieval times, when the main character, who was an orphaned young man, didn’t know what to do or where to go, he prayed.

She looked me in the eye and said, “I want to be like that.”

It is as if she knows even at this young age, how different her life can be.

Even in this fairly short tale, she recognized prayer not as a 911 call, or the recitation of spiritual words, nor about getting answers, but as a response to what is going on, what is unfolding all around us. 

How can we respond?  On our knees.