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.

The Grand Unfolding

 Hezekiah received the letter from the hand of the messengers, and read it; and Hezekiah went up to the house of the LORD, and spread it before the LORD.  And Hezekiah prayed to the LORD…  Isaiah 37. 14

Not telling God an acceptable solution, or determining a particular answer, but spreading it before Him and seeking God in this.

When we lay it out all the pieces before the LORD, when we seek Him, God opens not just our eyes to opportunities that were not yet on our radar, He opens our hearts to His.  Not just “this is the way,” but walk with Me.  And in the walking, God unfolds something much larger.

When I began to write this posting, I had something very different in mind.  Great story, but I kept tripping up on it.  It just didn’t work.  My point felt forced. 

I scratched out what I thought, opened not just a new blank page to start over, but I opened my heart and listened.  You know, the parts of praying we all too often forget:  listening and responding.

Hezekiah put into words his despair, fear and worries about his distressing situation to the LORD.  God even worked on Hezekiah’s heart as he prayed.  By the end of his prayer, the only particular thing he asked was that God would be glorified “…that all the kingdoms of the earth may know that You alone are the LORD.”  Isaiah 37. 20

That kind of praying begins to align our hearts with His.  And sometimes when it all plays out, that even we would know that above all else, He is God and we are not.  His glory does that.

It does not mean sit back, do nothing, let God do all the heavy lifting, and lay something on the doorstep like an Amazon order.  But follow Me into this.

Because you have prayed to Me…. Isaiah 37. 21 Everything is different now.  No matter the outcome.

How much do we miss in our experience of praying because we are seeking specific answers, and not necessarily God Himself?

In one season in our lives, when Bill was looking for work, as the weeks became months, our prayers radically changed from trying to find the right answer to seeking God in the process. We began to pray differently and to trust Him more.

 And that made all the difference in how we saw God, how we navigated our circumstances, how we saw others, and how we saw ourselves.  And how we saw His fingerprints all over what seemed like a million interviews, and rejections, and finally, a surprise at the end of that chapter, something we would not have even considered had we determined our own path.

God tweaked our hearts.  We were totally surprised by how He revealed Himself.  And continued to be blessed even in what we did not expect, even in unlikely places.  God never works in singular outcomes. We still experience new layers of His redeeming, now twenty years ago, paths we could not have ever imagined.

In the midst of that long, long year, I heard a sermon on the Minor Prophets in which the pastor’s “practical application” was, When you get to the end of this, you will have a story of God’s faithfulness.

Oh wow.  I wrote down those words on an index card as a promise and reminder of God’s redeeming.  The next morning, our twelve-year-old daughter came down to breakfast.  She hesitated by the card as she read it.  What a witness those words will be to her young heart, I thought.

She turned to me and said, “But Mom, that’s not true.  Every day is a story of God’s faithfulness.”

I clung to those words through that very hard season.  After all these years, I can still hear her voice, saying those words.

Praying helps us to understand that, no matter if we ever see an outcome, He is with us. His narrative is so much bigger than we can even wrap our prayers around.

Prayer is about our relationship with Him, not just seeing His hand, but seeking Him.

Hear, O LORD, when I cry aloud, be gracious to me and answer me!  You have said, “Seek My face.”  My heart says to you, “Your face do I seek.”  Psalm 27. 7-8

But Who's Counting?

Seven times a day I praise You

     for Your righteous rules.

                      Psalm 119. 164

Anything we do seven times a day will definitely change us.  If we ate seven donuts a day, if we practiced the piano seven times a day, if we exercised seven hours a day, the repetition and continuity would engrave patterns in our lives, for better or for worse.

But how many times a day do we praise God?  We pray to Him, but do we praise Him?  We certainly don’t come even close to seven times a day.

How different would our lives look if we praised God that much?

How different would we look at life? 

How differently would we pray?

When our oldest daughter was starting high school, we moved to Iowa City.  Our very outgoing girl suddenly knew no one.  And that black hole of relationships really de-railed her emotionally.  I would sneak down to her room in the evenings, just to talk.  She would burst into tears.  What’s the matter, sweetie?   “I don’t know!” she would wail.

“Ok, tomorrow,” I suggested, “look for the joy.  God will reveal it to you in some shape or size.  But you have to look for it.”

That next day, someone she met at church simply said “hi” in the hallway.  That was enough to trigger her pursuit.  One little joy, and then the next day, another rose to the surface.  Day by day, she looked for the joy.  And day by day, she praised God for it.

The praise didn’t change her circumstances, but that daily exercise strengthened her heart and focused all her senses on His Presence. 

Seven times a day praise.  Not despair.  Nor anxious thoughts.  Nor complaining or grumbling.  When we praise seven times a day, there’s no room for those termites of our souls.

Praise pushes back against the darkness, caulks the cracks that worries squeeze through, and bolts the doors to the beasts of our own fearful imaginations.

When Bill and I are hiking in the wilds, we often find cairns to guide our way when the trail is not marked well.  The cairns are simply small stones that previous hikers stack one upon another to reveal the way to go. 

Praise does the same for us.  This is how to approach, navigate and respond to our circumstances.  And in turn, our praise constructs a cairn for others. Praise leaves a trace of His Presence for those who come after us.

How do we turn this hard situation into praise?  How do we rewrite this scene, not into a Pollyanna kind of story, but to reveal an Almighty God narrative?

Praying our praise, verbalizing our praise, and acting on it, allows us the time –or margins—for contemplating His goodness in this very broken world.

In Tish Harrison Warren’s classic book Prayer In The Night, she notes, “One reason we pray is so that the love of God might cease to be a spent and musty idea and instead become our light – the illumination by which we see everything.”  She goes on to recall that “all the categories of suffering on earth are real and horrifying.  But I also remember that they cannot separate us from the love of God.”

Praise holds us on that sacred ground.

God is not just the recipient of praise.  But the reflector of it.  He provides a huge side order of tremendous strength to us through it.

When I first read this verse, I misread the second part.  Instead of reading “for Your righteous rules,” I saw, “for Your righteousness rules.”

His righteousness prevails every moment we praise Him. 

We praise God for who He is, not just what He does.  How he reveals Himself.  How He unfolds His majesty, even in the ordinary.  How He loves us so very much.  His protection, provision and His Presence.

Sometimes He says, “Come sit with Me.”  And sometimes, “Let’s go for a run together.”  He goes behind, He goes before.  His faithfulness is rooted even in the hard stuff.  His forgiveness always embraces us to lift us back up again.

As Rebecca McLaughlin says, “Look up at the night sky and you will see much darkness.  But train a telescope on the blackest patch, and a million galaxies explode into view.”

One joy we didn’t see before, and then, far more than we can imagine, even in the darkness and the hard stuff, the brilliance of His love.

Seven times a day I praise You.

May we lose count.