I never stopped thinking I should pray, however, so eventually I started praying about praying. I asked God to give me an understanding of prayer that would help me pray. I knew that part of my problem was that intercessory prayer had always been presented to me as an attempt to get God to do something. That didn’t make sense to me. If God was good, as praying people claimed, and if God had the power to act on our behalf, as praying people claimed, then it would be in God’s nature to do whatever was good for us, and I didn’t think God needed me to remind him what needed to be done or to twist his arm into doing it.
What I received as an answer to my prayer about prayer was a visual image of the spiritual realm. In this picture, there were thin wire tubes, not unlike electrical conduits, twisting and turning throughout the spiritual realm, connecting God with people and people with God and people with people (sometimes I see freeways and clover leafs). The loving, healing, transforming, embracing, challenging, pure power of God is flowing out from God all the time along these spiritual conduits (because it is, in fact, God’s nature to be always giving out what is good). But here’s the catch: the conduits along which God’s power flows are made of our prayers. Each prayer we pray creates another conduit along which the power of God can flow into the world that so desperately needs it. I don’t know why our prayers create the conduits. That God would choose to shrink his divine energy into bits of power tiny enough to fit the frail, twisted conduits of prayer we offer seems ludicrous. Perhaps God values teamwork and community far more than we realize. At any rate, according to the picture in my head, that’s just the way things work in the spiritual realm.
So I pray. This morning I sat on my bed, making marks in my journal as I prayed. Each mark was a name or a situation or an event about which I prayed. A friend facing a frightening meeting with her boss at work. A woman searching for a place to stay during a much-needed spiritual and emotional retreat. Another friend discovering the futility of a life lived far from God and family. A relative in a distant country facing homesickness. My son, on the road again. My daughter, facing transition at work. My husband, eyeball-deep in ministry. A young man I met in the grocery store battling with his life as a preacher’s kid.
Often I do not know how to pray for people; I mean, I do not know the particular words to say, the specific requests to make on their behalf. I do not need to know that. If God blesses me with specific words to pray for someone I will pray them. If not, I will simply hold that person in the presence of God, lifting them up into the flow of divine power, trusting God’s desire to flow his love through me and to the people I love and to those I hear of who are in need. If this perspective on prayer sounds heretical, or just immature, I’m sorry. Perhaps I ought to be even more embarrassed to reveal how my mind works in this regard than I am. But the fact remains that now I pray earnestly, with faith, believing that prayer makes a huge difference in the way the world operates. I believe, now, that life on earth would be radically different if more people prayed with greater frequency, not because our prayer somehow changes the mind of an indecisive, disinterested God, but because our prayers provide the pathways along which the loving, healing, convicting, transforming power of God can reach into the moments of our lives, can touch our bodies, our minds, our souls, our relationships, our work, our loving. I asked God for understanding and this is what God gave me. Maybe some of us don’t have what it takes to grasp the reality of the invisible realm so God gives us pictures. I’ll not reject the picture just because I wanted something more profound or theologically impressive.
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