On my way through the gritty Hoboken train terminal last Friday evening, I walked past a table stacked with boxes of Girl Scout cookies and a throng of young scouts and customers crowded around.
Despite the happy smiles that this annual vending moment inspires in passersby, what especially caught my eye was the troop mom there helping the girls sell their cookies.
She was there, it seemed to me, as the sole adult, a look of tired peacefulness yet resolute energy emanating from her face. She was a woman who hadn’t been to a hairdresser in a good while, was wearing little or no makeup, and had donned comfortable, functional clothes that fit a little too loosely.
There was nothing particularly sacrificial about her outward appearance. It was more of a sacrifice of presence that suddenly wedged in my mind. I had seen it before.
She was standing there for every kid whoever saw their mother as a bit nerdy or out of touch, and for every husband who mistakenly thought his wife was somehow too distracted.
She was a woman who paid little mind to her appearance. She did so naturally, through inward priorities that she learned maybe at Sunday school, or through something she’d not given much deliberate thought to except that perhaps her own mother modeled it for her. That is, to be there for her children, and other people’s children, here, in a crumbling and rusting rail station. A backdrop to the cheerful faces and hopeful spirits of the vested scouts around her.
I could see all this because this is exactly what my wife does. She’s a troop mom. And I suddenly knew her in a new way, and gave God thanks for showing that to me.
God is the one who knows you completely. As Luke 12:7 reminds us, God even knows the numbers of hairs on your head.
To some people I’m too quiet and hesitant, and to others too opinionated and forceful.
To some people I’m a careful planner and deliberate in my actions, and to others I’m too hasty and a bit reckless.
To some people I’m well educated and erudite, and to others I’m a little backward and doltish.
To some people I’m one of the kindest people they know, and to others I can be bitter and cranky.
To some people I’m someone they can count on no matter what, and to others maybe a little mysterious or unreliable.
One way or the other, those closest to me know most of these things about me, no matter how much I might try to tout one and hide the other.
But only God seems to know it all. Can handle it all. Will listen to it all. Will recognize it all when I bring it to prayer. God helps me stitch it all together, do it better, and make it into one meaningful whole.
For this year’s Super Bowl halftime show the honors went to the British rock band The Who to regale the stadium in Miami and the millions of television viewers with their 1970s anthem rock. You might not know or appreciate this band, but to me their music and the attitude behind it planted a rugged mile marker to the times we lived in then. All great bands do that, and if they do it well—connecting the universal human condition to the world in which we find ourselves—the music holds up years later.
One of the songs of The Who then, as now, is “Who Are You?”, the title of which is sung over and over like a contemplative plea, begging you lose yourself in it as much as you lose yourself in the power chords, thundering bass line, and enigmatic drumming. Ironically, the last thing I think about when I hear that song is whether or not I know anything about questions of my own identity. I’m just so thrilled to be ranting along with the words and music asking the question over and over again. Yes! Who are you? Exactly! Who are you? Absolutely! Who are you? Yes! Yes! Yes!
Listening to that refrain last Sunday reminded me that this is one of the most difficult questions we can ask ourselves these days, what with how we are pulled in so many different directions and yet given so little to hold on to. Who are we? Where do we come from? Where have we been? Where are we now? Where are we going? How am I different from you? How am I me?
I bring these ever present, subterranean questions with me whenever I enter into prayer with God. It’s like a moment when I’m being asked to give an answer in a journey of becoming, but one so difficult today that if I can’t put something down on the spiritual paper of my soul, I might cease to be.
Yet instead of ceasing to be, what I find is that God helps me just be in the moment. Content. Unapologetic. Forgiven. And that I am, indeed, something, and someone. Always. Maybe that’s who I am.
One of my favorite quotes about prayer, attributed to Martin Luther, is “I find these days that I am so busy, I have to spend at least four hours each morning in prayer."
The crazier and more hectic life becomes, the more we need God. Isn’t that true now more than ever? I find that many people I talk to today are so overloaded, they at times have trouble remembering where they are, what they are doing, and where they are going. In the working world, we are all taking on more. Our ranks are thinner, business isn’t as strong as it should be, and we’re trying especially hard to be all that more creative so that things can turn around.
It’s times like these that I find myself running to God. Now I don’t say that because I consider myself especially holy. In fact, I somehow doubt that even Martin Luther spent four hours every single day praying--at least in the conventional sense of the practice of prayer. By saying “running to God” I don’t exactly mean the amount of time I spend thinking, hoping, pleading, and pining in God’s presence. Rather, I’m referring to the act of breaking away from the rush of living, just shutting out all the chatter, almost desperately, to create a sacred space between me and God, nothing else.
How I do this, though, isn’t what you might normally think of as prayer. I actually do run to keep in shape. I tell myself I’m doing it for health, but there’s a spiritual benefit there as well. God’s running with me. I read a book as a daily devotional time with God, go to church, and teach Sunday school. That’s more formal, and includes silent and spoken prayer. I very much cling to that right now. Spending time with my wife and two kids—as much as I can sometimes be distracted even then—is another way I simply step outside of the ring of “busyness” and “business” and experience something otherworldly.
I run to these places, they are all my prayers, and the running holds me together.
Praying on the Rise? After a period of decline, reading is on the rise in America.
In January of last year, The National Endowment for the Arts released a report with findings that show how reading is on the rise for the first time in the 26 years that the NEA has been conducting a periodic survey on reading.
Being an editor of books, I'd heard of this trend, but I only recently took the chance to read this
study. In the report, one of the points made by Dana Gioia, the outgoing NEA Chairman, was that despite a growing sense that America is becoming less literate, the overwhelming evidence in the last six years show just the opposite trend. "Our faith in positive social and cultural change was not misplaced," Gioia writes.
Like having faith in reading, I began to wonder whether we have enough faith in praying. Has praying been on the decline or has it been rising? Are we encouraging prayer among others? Are we participating in prayer groups? Do we ourselves spend enough time in prayer?
If we can turn things around on whether people are investing their hearts and minds on
worthwhile pursuits such as reading books, what power do we have to keep ourselves praying?
Like reading, praying is often a private behavior. But that doesn't mean we should stop talking about it, finding ways to do it together, and acting in ways that keep it an important and essential part of our lives.
Faith is often presented as a matter of the head, a philosophical leap, a decision that’s settled once and for all. As an editor at Guideposts Books, however, I’ve found that it’s so much more. Faith is also a matter of the heart, of real-life living, and of being open to the unexpected.
One of the things I do is work on Extraordinary Answers to Prayer, a book series that compiles true stories of everyday experiences in prayer. We’ve received hundreds and hundreds of stories from all over the country about the extraordinary ways prayers have been answered. They range from action-packed thrillers and accounts of astonishing healings, to testimonies to God’s provision and quiet revelations of lessons in prayer.
When you read these stories, what you find inspiring isn’t so much the circumstances or events that happened, but rather the way people are changed by faith. And it’s always something unexpected.
One story that comes to mind is about a woman who joins a round-the-clock prayer vigil for a church member fighting cancer. Taking the 30-minute slot 4:30am each day, this woman falls into a regular routine of praying for healing. Oddly, after several days, she finds that she’s no longer sure who she’s praying for. In other words, she’s not sure who’s getting more out of the practice of prayer, herself or the other person. The experience is unexpected, and it changes her.
I love working on books that share these experiences. It’s like all the writers and readers are linked in real-life, and in something that if only they keep turning their attention to how God works in that life, they’ll find something they’d never have dreamed would happen: a change within.
Would you like to share your story too? Please send it to me at dmorris@guideposts.org.
I’ve always been impressed by Jesus’ instruction to not be a show-off about prayer. Instead, it’s better to go where you can shut the door and communicate with God alone (Matthew 6:5-6). I’m reminded of that saying, “Who are you when no one is looking?”
Who are you when it’s just you and God? Are you being honest and forthcoming? Do you show him all of you? Do you often forget to talk to God when you’re alone? These are good questions for every believer, and ones that drive us to create strong habits and disciplines for prayer.
One such habit about prayer that is relatively new to me is saying the Lord’s Prayer out loud in church. Not all churches say the Lord’s Prayer, including the tradition in which I grew up. So being new to this practice has perhaps made me truly think about what I was doing.
What strikes me is that saying the Lord’s Prayer in a large group is—technically speaking—not praying alone, and goes against Jesus’ instruction. Yet over time I’ve come to realize there’s so much more to this liturgical practice. When you recite the prayer in a group, you find that you can only hear two voices, yours and the voice of the group. I don’t know about others, but I find it hard to hear another person’s individual voice over my own, so the only other voice I hear is that of a group in unison.
The way the experience feels is that I am indeed alone. I can’t hear anyone else, yet I hear everyone. I am alone, but I’m not. We are all alone, there before God, but as a group. We are being alone together. We are showing our private selves before God, but doing it together.
Now that’s pretty powerful. And somehow, being alone with God doesn’t sound all that difficult.
Here’s a little blessing I wrote for our Thanksgiving dinner last week. While writing it, I wondered about how to bring in something for family members who come from a Protestant background, and others who come from a Catholic background:
Oh God, You are the One who brings us together today. You are the One in whom we put our trust. You are the One who brings us hope.
Each one of us knows what it means to face difficulty, to work hard and to struggle. Sometimes this means we become discouraged, lose sight of why we’re here and what life is about.
But today is a day where we put down our worries, stop, and come together to be reminded that even in our struggles there is life, there are small kindnesses and gratitude, there is laughter, and there are moments that bring us the peace that goes beyond our understanding.
So here we are to say thank you, and to join together and pray, Bless us O Lord, and these thy gifts which we are about to receive from Your bounty, through Christ our Lord, Amen.
As people who know me will tell you, I have a tendency to be an analytical person. What’s worse, I have a habit of taking on more and more, pressing myself into a hypothetical world of problems to solve. Most of the time, I don’t even know it’s happening.
Today, for example, my head just couldn’t let well enough alone. With many so-called important thoughts rattling around, I found myself wide awake before dawn. Okay, God, I’ll be there in a minute. Downstairs to the couch, turn on the light, and open my Bible. In the deep peace and quiet, I read.
I’m not sure I was touched by anything in particular in the passage of Acts I turned to, but somehow I did feel God’s presence. I found myself slipping into prayer. Before I knew it, my thoughts began to untangle, I could feel the comfort of sitting still in silence, and my breathing eased. A sweet moment of respite.
It reminds me of the hymn, “Sweet Hour of Prayer,” the version sung by Iris DeMent, one of my favorite performers. I wish I could pipe her mournful voice into your computer speakers right now. Instead, I’ll copy the opening lyrics here from the 1861 William B. Bradbury hymn:
Sweet hour of prayer! sweet hour of prayer!
That calls me from a world of care,
And bids me at my Father’s throne
Make all my wants and wishes known.
In seasons of distress and grief,
My soul has often found relief,
And oft escaped the tempter’s snare,
By thy return, sweet hour of prayer!
Does God answer my prayers? I’m not keen to admit it, but such a question can leave me at a loss. I may attend church, read the Bible, and even spend time in prayer, but that doesn’t mean I have a fast answer on how God speaks to me. It’s something I have to work at, something to spend time thinking about.
I recently read a story by a woman who had just lost her husband to an illness, and was struggling with the very thought of whether to pray. God very clearly didn’t give her the answer she was looking for, and as a result she had lost faith not so much in prayer itself—she always knew that God would be in her heart—but in her own ability to pray. She lost something in the connection between what she believed and her actual experience.
I wonder, how many times in my own life has this loss also been true? The distractions of disappointment often take us away from actively engaging what we know and believe in our own hearts. We lose contact with a simple trust that sustains us.
When I do think about how God’s answers my prayers, I have to go right back to that simple trust and, well, actually think. And right away I remember many times in my life that God has shown I’m cared for, both large and small. Relationships, children, career choices, community. Each area includes plenty of blessings I never could have imagined on my own.
I prayed, God answered. It amazes me when I work to put it together.
