The writers of fiction tend to fall into two camps. The first (and typically more vocal) group sketch out their entire stories, outline their plots from beginning to end, knowing their characters, their names and quirky behaviors. Other writers just travel through, not knowing where the story is headed, surprised by the turns, but sometimes stuck in places with no obvious way to go. Like staring at a blank screen or a sheet of paper for a very long time, and the first sentence is nowhere in sight.
When we don’t even know how to get started, a wise friend of mine advises, write from the middle. Just start right where you are, what you can see, what you do know. And let the story unfold. Follow the thread.
And when we pray that way – when we pray from the middle – God take us places in praying we could never have foreseen. God does not conform to our own carefully conceived plots, but opens us up to His ways in this. We suddenly see that little trail through the thicket. We are aware of unseen and unspoken needs, and even to pray about what we might never have considered.
Praying from the middle allows us to think prayerfully about everything.
God’s Word talks a lot about the middle of things. Because He is right here in the midst of us. Be strong and courageous. Do not fear or be in dread of them, for it is the Lord your God who goes with you; He will not leave you or forsake you. Deuteronomy 31. 6
God does not hear prayers with great impressive poetic words anymore than the small everyday prayers of ordinary folk. And that would be us. We come before Him with praises and thanks and cries of our hearts, one prayer building on another. Our prayers are never so small or ordinary at all. The power in prayer comes not in fancy words, or figuring out life, but because we are in conversation with the Almighty.
In praying, we need not advise God how to behave or what to devise, nor spell out a pre-conceived outcome, nor know how the narrative should unfold. Prayer draws us to Him and into His story even more. Our experience right now is just another page, right in the middle of the story. What is happening actually was founded on what God put in place so many pages ago, and we didn’t realize it at the time.
And surely, I am with you always, to the very end of the age. Matthew 28. 20
Even when we are right in the middle of the confusing parts, He is with us, even now, even in this. To the bottom of the page, to the end of the chapter, and then the next. All the way through our story and God’s grander narrative, world without end.
We are only in the middle of our story. That’s why we don’t comprehend where we stand. We can’t expect to know the rest. Before God leads us through, He leads us in, and perhaps, He leads in us.
We may not know how to begin praying, or understand what it is swirling about, but we can pray from the middle. Pray from what we do know. Pray from where we are. Pray when that is the only thing we know to do. Pray from the middle, even when we don’t realize where God is going with this.
The middle is not just part of the story, the mystery, or where we wander, but where our lives continue to move towards Jesus. We are now just getting to the exciting part. How differently would we pray if we realized that?
We may feel like we are wandering – and wondering – but we are not lost. We are just in the middle. What we are experiencing right now is not the end, no need to panic or despair, but a passage, a preparing, an equipping into another chapter. Even when we are surrounded by what we do not understand doesn’t mean it doesn’t make sense. Even with all those confusing details – why in the world did that happen? – the Author knows the way through. Those details are not random but comprise the vital components of God’s narrative that also impact everyone around us.
Without a middle, there is no story. This is not just a miry bog to slog through, but pray into.
We are not lost or abandoned after all, not the middle of nowhere, but the middle of somewhere very carefully designed. “O Lord GOD, you know.” Ezekiel 37. 3
In the middle kind of prayers recognize that we are not in a place where God is unfolding our stories in incredible ways. We have no idea how it all fits together, but we can trust Him, not for a specific outcome, or if we are going to be ok, or even happily ever after, but we can trust Him. And praying gets us there. The scarlet thread all the way through is His steadfast love. In the latter days, you will understand it clearly. Jeremiah 23. 20
Our story is going somewhere. Right to Him. Praying helps us realize that.
In the middle kind of prayers, God whispers in the dark, “Just follow Me. Even in this.” Would we have that courage if we hadn’t prayed?
Praying sustains us, right in the middle, when we cannot fathom that there is a next page or chapter or how to endure the next few minutes ahead of us.
All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us, says the character Gandalf in the middle of the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
And that would be to pray from right where we are.
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