God is good. I mean, He is gooooood. Of all the things the camp sermons could have focused on this year, it had to be prayer. I mean, it would have been so much easier if it had been on perseverance through hardships (been there, done that); or relying on God through hard times (yep); or how to live in community (got that); or about sacrificial giving (nailed it). But, no, He had to go and have it be in an area I really needed to focus on at this time; on something that I have been struggling with for the past few years. He just had to go and break me down even more so that I will truly get serious about my prayer life again.
The truth is, my prayer life has become dull. Stale. It has become an obligatory item to check off my daily to-do list. I wrote a blog a long time ago about not wanting to plan God into my day, but having my day be planned around God (I'm too lazy to go back through them all and link to it). Well, here I am, trying to fit God in to my hectic schedule instead of having Him just be an integral part of my whole day. It became an absolute necessity during nursing school; otherwise, if I'm being frank, I wouldn't have prayed at all. But, this is never what I wanted my prayer life to look like.
Over the course of the past few years, my prayers have become static. Remember the old days when channel 3 would have the grainy screen with the annoying noise? Well, I feel as though that is what my prayers have turned into lately. It is almost as though I am praying just for the sake of praying, and not praying as if God was actually listening to my prayers. When had this happened and why?
During one of the camp sermons, the speaker said that one of the reasons people don't pray is because they afraid God will say no. Or that He won't answer at all. And I realized that this is what happened to me. I've felt a lot of "no" the past few years (definitely a lot of yeses, too, but strong nos just the same--the two biggest being Ezra and nursing school). But, prayer isn't just about asking God for things (or it shouldn't be, even though it had pretty much turned into that for me); prayer is dialogue with God. "That's all it is," claimed the speaker. So, when we see people interacting with Jesus in the Bible, each of those interactions is an example of prayer. I loved hearing that--no one had ever presented prayer to me in that way before. Yes, I know prayer is talking to God; and I know Jesus was God in the flesh. But, somehow, it didn't occur to me that every conversation, every interaction with Him as presented in the gospels, was, in fact, a prayer. This shined a whole new light for me in regards to prayer. There were times in the Bible when people didn't say anything, but merely touched Jesus, and those were prayers! I am speaking specifically about the woman in Matthew 9 (20-22) who had bled for 12 years and then was healed. She didn't say anything to Him. She just touched Him. How gracious He is! Having a "quiet" part of prayer had always been important to me. But, I let that quiet time go in the past few years, and I realized that perhaps that is why my prayers had become so static. I needed our quiet interactions back. I needed just to be still and know that He is God.
So, I'm bringing quiet back. And hoping I can finally get some good reception in this old prayer life of mine.
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