Can you hear me now?

Out of the depths I cry to You, O LORD!  O Lord, hear my voice!  Let Your ears be attentive to the voice of my pleas for mercy!  Psalm 130. 1-2

God is listening.  It is not a matter of us waving our hands or shouting loud enough to get His attention, “Can you hear me now?”

I can remember my grandmother saying, “You don’t have to raise your voice.  I’m right here.”

Particularly in crisis, we suddenly want to hear from God.  We want to hear His voice now.  “Generally it is much more important to cultivate the quiet, inward space of a constant listening than to always be approaching God for specific direction,” notes Dallas Willard in his book Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God.

After all, praying is a conversation with God, not based on words draped in some kind of sacred vestments.  Praying is the lifeblood of our relationship. Not demanding God, “Talk to me!!”  He has been.  We are the ones who have muted Him, or blocked His voice with our noise-cancelling earphones.

Have we taken time to listen and pay attention to how God is speaking into our lives on a daily basis?  A loving relationship is based on talking together and listening.

We don’t have to wait until something goes wrong. It is not a matter of needing directions, but God nudging us in His direction.

Early 1900s speaker and pastor Frederick B. Meyer suggests, “Be still each day for a short time, sitting before God in meditation…”  That is how we learn not just to listen for God or to God, but how to pray.

Those quiet daily moments increase our desire to hear His voice, “when life is uneventful just as much as [we] want to hear it when [we] are facing trouble or big decisions…our failure to hear His voice when we want to is due to the fact that we do not in general want to hear it, that we want it only when we think we need it,” Meyer said.

In daily conversation, we come to know and recognize His voice.  Wherever we may be.   “…before the LORD, where I will meet with you, to speak to you there.”  Exodus 29. 42   Listen to Me.

The focus of our praying is to be with Him, talk, and walk with Him through the ordinary parts of life that are never so ordinary.  His voice always with us, not just on special occasions, or for disastrous events, or because we messed up or procrastinated and maybe God can get me out of this quagmire.  Our conversations with God are not limited to 911 calls in the middle of crisis.  He leads us by the still waters, He makes us lie down in green pastures, He restores our souls.

And He surprises us by His Presence.

And he said, “Go out and stand on the mount before the LORD.” And behold, the LORD passed by, and a great strong wind tore the mountains and broke in pieces the rocks before the LORD, but the LORD was not in the wind.  And after the wind an earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake.  And after the earthquake a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire.  And after the fire the sound of a low whisper.  And Elijah heard it…  1 Kings 19. 11-13

God speaks to us in ways we may not expect.

Can you hear Me now?

Hole In One

 [Today would have been my father's 102nd birthday.  In honor of him, I am posting a small true story about an incident in his childhood.  It reflects the kind of clever and inventive ways he approached life and navigated difficulties.]

 

Bobby grew up in a brick and grey concrete world called Brooklyn, the sooty streets shimmering with waves of heat in summer, slick as the Arctic in winter, and devoid of hope when the Great Depression descended like a train wreck.  They were poor before, but this new despair added even more water to the soup and rubbed bigger holes in the bottom of their shoes. 

His mom, dad and seven-year-old brother rented a walk-up apartment in a three-flat building so narrow that one large tree, two houses down, shaded all the backyards on the block. His mother was one of the fortunate ones.  She got up early every morning, put the soup pot on the back burner, and took the streetcar to work.  She taught public kindergarten, thirty kids in the morning and thirty more after lunch. Teaching was considered a solid job, but provided a meager paycheck only nine months of the year. His father loved to fix things, and in that broken world, there were always friends, family or strangers who struggled with life and needed his help.  They just couldn’t always pay him.

There was no money.  Life was hard.  And then harder still.  There was talk of sending the boys to live with their great aunt Albertina who lived above a noisy tavern.  The boys’ nightly prayers changed from “Now I lay me down to sleep” to “Please, dear God, anything but that.”

“There has to be an answer to these problems,” Bobby said to his mom.  “There always is. We just have to solve it.”

“Son, I know you love problems.  There is no one around like you who does math problems just for fun.  But this is your world,” his mom replied.  “This is where you live and breathe and have your being. Why do you always think you can do anything different? This won’t be the last time when your life is going to be hard.  Learn to live with it.”  His mom rolled her eyes and looked away.  His dad looked right at him and winked.

Bobby turned to his brother Donnie, now the only one left in the room, “We have to do something to make some money.” But there were no jobs for able-bodied men, even for his dad, let alone young boys with no skills.

A week later, yet on another day with nothing to do, Bobby stared out the cracked back window at their tiny bleak yard where weeds would not even grow. He watched his brother swinging a big stick that had blown out of the neighboring tree in a storm.  Donnie was hitting rocks on the ground with it.  With a regular drum beat, the rocks ricocheted off the tall wood fence.  A stick and a rock.  “That’s it,” Bobby said out loud. “Thank you, little brother.  We’re gonna be as rich as the Rockefellers.”

That night after their parents went to bed, and they could hear their dad snoring through the paper-thin walls, Bobby told Donnie his crazy plan to transform their yard into an elaborate putt-putt golf course for the neighborhood children to play. “You’re nuts,” his brother said.  “Do you know that?” 

And then, Donnie grinned his toothless smile.  “When do we start?”

There was no money to build it.  So, they scrounged through the garbage piled up in the alleys, found bricks and discarded wood where houses had been condemned, and scoured the dump for anything usable, tin cans, rusty nails, and once, two bent wheels from a broken baby carriage. The heap in the back yard grew.  Mom and Dad were either too busy to notice, or overjoyed that the boys were staying out of trouble. The way through the maze was not always obvious, and sometimes stuff didn’t fit together at all, but they tried out and dismantled dozens of designs and then went back to the drawing board again.

Over the space of many late nights, the pile of junk took shape like a piecemeal medieval castle with moats, ramps and secret passageways, a spectacular golf course of sorts, emerging from the rubble.

Word traveled fast.  The kids in the neighborhood began jostling each other in line, anxious to play.  But there was still no money.  The other children had no more cash than the boys did.  Yet as Bobby often surmised, every problem had a path through it.  He just had to find it, like the physics problems in his dad’s old textbook.

After another long and lean weekend, no answer in sight, Bobby and Donnie stood at the back door, overlooking their forlorn kingdom.  As it was Monday morning --laundry day-- the boys watched mothers and grandmothers clipping their weekly wash on the clotheslines zigzagged above the yards, sheets and colorful shirts flapping like national flags, vying for their attention.  The boys looked at each other.  “You’re nuts,” Donnie remarked.  And by noon, the boys were open for business.

All week, to the delight of the neighbor kids, even those as far away as Delancey Street, Bobby and Donnie charged the children just a few clothespins to play a round of golf, dropping them like gold coins, one by one into large cloth bags. 

And then, early every Monday morning, two young smiling boys went knocking door to door and sold clothespins to unsuspecting moms. 

Like hitting a hole in one, every week.

 

Does It Even Matter?

When we ask does prayer matter, what are we really asking?  Does God matter?  Is there really a God?  Wouldn’t it just happen anyway?

But are we really asking Do I matter?  Do I matter to God? 

The need to pray is such a natural reaction, a spiritual underpinning in every one of us, in whatever tradition we have been raised.  “O God!” are the first words that are spoken into disaster, even by those who deny His existence.

Help! is a crying out translated into every language on earth.

Only in Christ is there a response.  Not do this or do that.  Or a condemning you deserved it, or a turning away, or silence.

But always, “Come to Me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” Matthew 11. 28

And when we do, something happens.  It may or may not become visible to us right away.  Circumstances may or may not change.  God doesn’t change, but we do.

God doesn’t need to show up, but we do.  Before Him.

God gave us His Word.  He gave us prayer as a means to talk, to walk, to listen, to respond, to know that He is God.

When we pray to God, that which we pray matters a lot, even that we pray matters a lot, more than we can imagine.  God does not just supernaturally intervene.  He already has.  What does it take for us to realize that He even cares?  Well, He gave His life for us.

Would the answer have happened anyway?  But if we had not prayed and sought Him, we would have missed God’s glory in it entirely.  Because praying and His response magnifies His name, so that all the world may know.  Even us.

The adversary’s voice always says, prayer doesn’t matter.

But it matters more than we can know.  Not just when we see a glittery answer, but maybe even more so when we don’t.  His Presence is right here, even in what appears as His absence, that still small voice drawing us even closer to Him in unexpected ways and unlikely places.

In our desperation, we cry out what can I do?  We realize our overwhelming poverty before it.  And God whispers, Pray.

Anxiety is our desperate realization that we are not in control, that we cannot do life alone.  Praying is our response.

God does not just passively listen, but He unfolds, fills out, leads, completes His mighty work in ways we cannot even imagine.

Praying matters a lot.  A lot more than what we see is at stake.  God is not about to abandon us now, even when the road seems endless, or we have to double back because of a dead end, even in the wilderness when it appears useless and no one cares.  That is what faithfulness is all about.  Faithful in words and deeds.  Faithful in prayer. 

His strength helps us not just endure in this broken world, but to trust Him more.

On the day I called, You answered me, my strength of soul You increased.  Psalm 138.3

When we ask does prayer matter, are we really asking does God care about me?  Am I loved?  The cry of every human heart.

And God replies throughout His Word:  For I, the LORD your God, hold your right hand.  It is I who say to you, “Fear not, I am the One who helps you.”  Isaiah 41. 13

Come to Me.

Five W's and an H

 

Walk about Zion, go around her,

number her towers,

consider well her ramparts,

go through her citadels,

that you may tell the next generation

              that this is God,

our God forever and ever.

He will guide us forever.

                       Psalm 48. 12-14

 

That is how to pray.

In journalism school, I learned the fundamentals of gathering information for what I needed to write.  The five W’s and an H:  Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How.  Those six questions helped me to discover the truth of a matter, uncover the solutions, examine what was before me, and create a response.  I could not just sit down and write what I thought. 

I learned firsthand the importance of using those basic questions when interviewing, because sometimes I had only one opportunity, one interview, one shot at covering a subject.  I needed to cover all my bases.  More than once I forgot to ask an obvious question. 

And in the process of asking all the questions, more often than not, something deeper would be revealed that I hadn’t considered, and I didn’t even know to ask – the most interesting aspect, the underlying reason, the fascinating story behind it.

Do we pray on all those layers? Numbering the towers, going through the citadels. Seeking not particular answers of our own choosing, but seeking God?  God savors our questions.  Ask Me. He cherishes our prayers in golden bowls.

Have we prayed all around this situation?  Observing, thinking about all of the angles, praying our way through, turning over every rock, opening closet doors.  God guides us even as we pray.  Who does this impact? Where have You strategically placed me?  Have I considered that You are in this?  These questions help us to realize that God is not just about the parts, but the whole story, leaving nothing out, in what we consider significant and even in what we dismiss as insignificant.  We will never fully know how eternal are the tiniest details.

When we pray though every dimension, we become aware of what has been there all along.  Consider well her ramparts.  We may never have noticed that dimension of God’s love and grace before.  Right there in front of us. 

Who does this impact?

What is God directing us to do about it?

Where do we go from here?

When is God’s timing in this?  Shoes tied on, ready to roll or faithful to stay.

Why are we praying about this?

And then, if we have worked our way through all of the W’s, then and only then, God leads us to the big H.  How do we do it?   God never abandons us on the side of the road.  Follow Me into this. 

Prayer is how God reveals Himself to us.  And sometimes as we seek Him, He leads us through layers of complexity to a more comprehensive realization.  God is never done telling us how much He loves us.

There is an ongoing completeness in prayer that is not about “answers” at all.

In 1967, when seventeen year old Joni Eareckson dove into a lake, she came back to the surface as a quadriplegic.  After months recuperating in the hospital, the biggest change came when she stopped crying out “Why, God?”  and started praying, “What, God?”   And over time, inch by inch, God revealed Himself and unfolded the “what.”  She is now 73 years old, an active advocate for disability rights, author, artist, and founder of an international organization for the disabled community.

“What, God?” is almost always beyond our radar.  Are we trying to pray away those hard things God is using to actually mold and strengthen us spiritually?   And how He is revealing Himself to us?  When we pray, God enlarges our universe. 

Prayer is not telling God what to do, nor just throwing Him a quick and impersonal “Just show me what to do.”  But responding to Him, walking all around it, seeking, peeking, letting God reveal Himself.  Asking all the questions.  What is the real situation here?  Am I walking around it or walking away?  What is my attitude toward it...or them?  Am I willing to serve and honor God in this?  Am I prepared to forgive?  Is it a matter of my own faithfulness or selfishness?  What is one thing I can do?  Have I considered not just the difficulty or the solution, but God’s hand in this?  Your will, O Lord, not mine.

Everything is not obvious at first glance.  Prayer is walking with God through it.  He reveals not just the details, but Himself along the way.  And changes our hearts.  Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.  Philippians 4. 8

Pray about these things.  There is a lot more at stake.  There always is.

We pray, not just to point out to others or tell the next generation what God has done, what God is doing, and that this is God.  But that we ourselves would more fully realize who He is.

There is so much more that we can know about God.  But we can grasp this much:

“God is vaster and more mysterious than we can fathom, and yet He has revealed Himself.  He showed up and told us who He is.  God has spoken.  And what He has said, in Christ, is that He loves us and is for us.  This is the fundamental poetry that orders all of our lives,” writes Tish Harrison Warren in her book Prayer in the Night.

And on that reality, we can stake our lives.