Culinary Misadventures and the Reality of Prayer

Our kitchen has been ground zero for many culinary misadventures, including baking with our grandchildren.  Their creativity often insists on its own way, but with disastrous results, let me count the ways.  Even from an early age, the kids are learning that maybe -- just maybe-- there is a different way of doing things that is not their own.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yes, it does matter that we use the ingredients listed in the recipe and in the right amounts.  And a cake does not just emerge from the oven when they think it might be ready. Whatever we are working on will not just turn out anyway...indeed, more often than not, not turn out at all.  Someone else --including that professionally trained chef -- may indeed know a lot more than we do.  What does it take to realize that?

And each one of the children have learned in real time:  For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways and My thoughts than your thoughts.  Isaiah 55. 9

Relinquishment of our own set ways is not a matter of letting go, but holding even tighter to something else.  And that would be God.  He has another way of approaching and navigating these challenges right before us.  He always does.

Praying is a lot about making choices.  Not my will, but Yours.  And that way of praying changes not just our hearts, but the trajectory of our lives.  Make me know Your ways, O LORD, teach me Your paths. Psalm 25. 4  As in any of our own pursuits, what if we prayed differently about it? What if we prayed at all?

Not my schemes, but Your incredible plans.

Not what's on my radar, but Your incomprehensible imagination.

Not my control, but Your steadfast hand.

Not my feelings, but Your Presence.

Not my performance, but Your grace.

Not my patching together, but Your redeeming.

Not my fictions, but Your truth.

Not my adding, but Your multiplying.

Not my prescription for how it should be written, but Your grand narrative.

Not my fears of "what if...", but Your faithfulness of "what is."

Not my obsession with "what's next," but Your strength in "what's now."

Not my myopic vision, but Your eternal perspective.

Not my comfort, but Your Kingdom.

Not my glory, but Yours.

Not me, but You.

  

 

Not All Who Wander Are Lost

 

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.

That Is Why We Pray

 

There is a God out there.  That is why we pray.

In awe or despair, we can’t help but cry out, “Oh, God!”  We need Him.

And when it comes down to it, that is why we pray.  He is there, waiting for us to realize that.

By simply praying, we are changed.  We cannot help but be made new, one prayer, one cry of the heart, one word at a time.

When we pray, life begins to look very different.  We remain in the same place, but with a new heart.  Even in those really difficult, dark, scary places, through prayer, God empowers us to walk towards the light.  We walk through the darkness, but we need not dwell there.  He is bringing us to another dimension in Him.

God whispers for us to enter in.  The porch light is on, the door not just unlocked but wide open, the coffee already brewing.  In prayer, there are no tricks of the trade, no secret ways, no magic words to gain entrance or His favor. We already have His attention. We don’t need to earn anything, nor need to perform, nor to be perfect, but just to come to Him.

The point is not getting results or self-conceived outcomes, but our relationship with Him.  Answers to prayer are not intended to be trophies, nor idols, on our shelf.

Prayer is also not defined by lists with columns to check off answered and not answered.  God is always working and His responses cannot be contained by a simple yes and no, but spread so far over generations that we cannot exactly know who prayed, or who was moved to pray, perhaps hundreds of years ago wandering in their own wilderness.  Prayer is not bound by time as we know it, but released into eternity.  We pray not knowing how, nor where, nor who will be impacted by it.

There is a God not just out there, but right here. 

“Draw near to me, hear this:  From the beginning I have not spoken in secret, from the time it came to be I have been there.”  Isaiah 48. 16

That is why we pray.

We are seen. We are heard. We are loved.

God wants us not just to grasp that, nor just believe that, but to practice that reality.

For an assignment, I have spent the past fifty-two weeks searching and researching prayer, and posting about it.  I do not now just view prayer differently, but I am praying differently.

I did not learn something more about prayer, but God changing me.  I have not come to the end of that. 

I never will.

Mark Those People

Every once in a while, God places ordinary people on our paths who live extraordinary lives of faith.   The first thing we notice about these “heroes of the faith” is that they know they are only ordinary people.  The difference about them is in what they love, the choices they make, the patterns and habits and practices that mold them.

They are not just “special people,” born with extraordinary abilities and giftedness.  But they make choices and are willing to respond differently.

Mark the faithful ones.  Psalm 37. 37   Watch carefully what they do.  How do they strengthen themselves spiritually? 

How would that look in our own everyday lives?

Tim Keller was one of those people.  He connected the dots between God’s Word and prayer as if his life depended on it.  Because it did.  He would be the first person to admit that.

For we are powerless against this great horde that is coming against us.  We do not know what to do, but our eyes are on You.  2 Chronicles 20.12

One of Keller’s spiritual secrets is no secret.  For about the past 20 years, he read through the book of Psalms every month.   In what sounds like an impossible venture, Keller was only following a morning and evening schedule first published in 1549 in The Book of Common Prayer.  Keller followed the schedule, covering about five psalms a day, morning and night, the bookends of his day.

…but his delight is in the law of the LORD, and on His law He meditates day and night.  Psalm 1.2

Keller knew what it was doing to him.  God’s Word was shaping him.  Not just memorizing or praying the psalms, but his own prayers were engraved by the psalms. 

In a podcast, Keller noted that in the Psalms, we find ways to express our particular emotions before God.  “In the Psalms, you have every possible situation.  The more you read the Psalms, the more you will know how to pray.”

Through the decades, Keller experienced that impact on his life.  “When the psalms are coming through 150 every 30 days, there are going to be psalms that grab you….When I feel anxiety, I keep my psalms up and my exercise up,” said Keller in an interview eight months ago.   

One hundred fifty psalms every 30 days – a few in the morning, a few at night -- can be accomplished in less time than checking your Instagram account.  What is strengthening us?  What is lulling us into the mundane?  What is changing what we pray, how we pray, altering the patterns of our lives, and being changed by it?

Mark those faithful ones.  What has shaped them?  What is molding us?

 

How differently would we pray?  How differently would we live?