Prayer leads you to see new paths and to hear new melodies in the air. Prayer is the breath of your life which gives you freedom to go and stay where you wish and to find the many signs which point out the way to a new land. Praying is not simply some necessary compartment in the daily schedule of a Christian or a source of support in time of need, nor is it restricted to Sunday morning or a as a frame to surround mealtimes. Praying is living.
- Henri J.M. Nouwen, from With Open Hands
I have struggled to make prayer a regular part of my life beyond mealtime grace and "arrow" prayers (the "help me!" and "thank you!" that come almost spontaneously at times during the day). I know that prayer helps to ground me in the reality of God's love as few other things can, and that I tend to act and speak more thoughtfully, less anxiously when I have regularly cultivated an awareness of God's presence. But like exercise, intentional prayer too often seems like one more thing to schedule into my already busy day, and I let it slide for too long. Then, when I feel overwhelmed or afraid or lonely or irritable, I realize that in addition to the external forces acting on me, I have not been connecting with God in a way that could ameliorate some of those forces. As a minister, I think that puts more than just my own wellbeing in jeopardy, and I am embarrassed to admit my falling-short in faithfulness. Thank God for grace.
Beyond this confession, I also want to share something I read recently that was a kind of "aha!" moment. I'm not sure where I read it, I think one of the 43 library books I have checked out at the moment (yes, 43), but the author says that the spiritual practices or disciplines that work for you now may not be the ones that fed you 5 years ago, or the ones that will nourish you 10 years down the road. It seems obvious once it's said, but somehow I had in my mind this idea that figuring out how to live "a spiritual life" meant finding a way of ordering my days and weeks and years that, once found, would continue to serve me consistently throughout my life. Okay, if you had asked me in those words, I might have thought about it enough to say, "Oh, probably not my whole life, since I expect to do different kinds of work and ministry about every 5-1o years..." but it wasn't something I had focused on enough to see the disconnect in my own thinking.
Now that I have, though, I have the same sense of relief I had when I realized God didn't necessarily have a scripted plan for my life that I had to figure out and follow or risk seriously disappointing God. If there's more than one way to live that's pleasing to God, if there's a way to order your spiritual life that may change in a couple years, it takes off the pressure of perfectionism, one of my great temptations. And this is what prayer can do for me, too: remind me that it's okay if I'm human, if I can't get everything just perfect on the first try - and if other people are human too. That's how we're supposed to be. Let God be perfect, try to love people, and do the best you can.
