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Sometimes my prayers seem...repetitive. I use the same words. The same patterns. The same requests. My prayers seem...boring. But this doesn't have to be the case: 1. Pray through a passage of Scripture. Use the words, stories, and imagery to worship and request. 2. Sing as part of prayer or sing your prayer. 3. Go somewhere special to pray or take a pray walk. 4. Write your prayers down -- as letters to God. 5. Pray over a specific topic or request from a ministry or situation. 6. Draw while you pray. 7. Change your position, kneel, get on your face, raise your hands. 8. Pray with a friend. Or text prayers to friends to let you know you are praying for them. 9. Fast from technology, a meal, or something else in order to pray. 10. Set a one-minute timer and pray for something specific one minute at a time.   1. Worship God in place of petitioning God.
2. Pray through a Psalm that reflects the situation or your emotions. 3. Ask for God to glorify Himself. 4. Pray that others will come to know Christ and walk more closely with Him. 5. Request God to soften your heart (or the hearts of others). 6. Ask God to help you (and others) to obey. 7. Pray for Godly character and wisdom in the lives of all involved. 8. Find a prayer in Scripture and pray it -- like Philippians 1:9-11 or Colossians 1:9-11. 9. Rehearse reasons to trust God -- both in the Bible and that you have personally experienced. 10. Thank God for every good thing. I was looking at a wart...a stubborn wart. I had tried multiple times to get rid of it and failed. Warts are caused by a virus. But instead of destroying the virus and the infected cells, the immune system tolerates it. The virus is merely walled off. So it continues to make its home in the skin...unless something happens to awaken the immune system. How spiritually applicable. Often we are blind to our pet sins. They are walled off and safe from our defenses until something happens that causes us to see our pride or our selfishness or our idolatry. And just like my immune system, we can acknowledge the presence of an invader and kill it – even though it means losing some cells in the process. Or we can choose to ignore the sin, wall it off again and have a wart. That can grow and spread. Our choice.  The park near myself is beautiful to run. But can be basically a mud run much of the year. The good news is that after you have run it once you know where the slip and slides are. And that is one option in life – you can do something more than once to figure out the best way to do it. That’s Option 1. Option 2 is to speak to someone who has “made that run” before and get their insight. The obvious issue that people have fault memories, different capacities and tolerances. For example, some people can run along four-inch landscaping timber and avoid the mud...others will fall in. But the best option in life is to speak with Jesus – Someone Who knows everything about everything and everything about us (whether you can run along the landscaping ties or this will cause you to end up face-down in the mud). “And yet,” I thought as I ran. “How often we ignore Option 3.”   The hyacinths came with my apartment. (For which I am grateful because there is no way I would have planted them.) For two Marchs they have blossomed, big and beautiful and BIG. So big that the weight of the flowers filled with water, pulls them into the dirt with the first substantial rain...and because it is often raining, the blooms are doomed to be forever horizontal.
“So sad.” I thought surveying the carnage. But then I smelled a fragrance I hadn’t smelled before. The crushed flowers smelled like a greenhouse. The damage made them sweeter. May the trials in our lives do likewise and make us sweeter in the face of what should destroy. And help us more fully fulfill the purposes Christ has given us -- even when bent under the weight of storms. Spring has sprung in the Pacific Northwest. It’s still rainy and gloomy, but things are blooming. Some things are green and leafy and expected to bloom. But other things are brown and dry. It’s startling. Luscious blossoms emerging from sticks. To the point where a tree that appears dead is cloaked in stunning color. This is the way God works. We look around and say, “Oh, this will end well. But that [person, situation, choice] is hopeless.” Not to a Savior Who makes sticks flower.  It was a perfect cherry blossom...and yet it would never make a cherry because it had let go of the tree. How appropriate Christ's analogy is: “I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in Me, and I in him, bears much fruit; for without Me you can do nothing." (John 15:5) My little flower would never be pollinated or fruit, because though it was lovely and fragrant -- without the tree it would never become what it was made it to be. In fact, it would even cease to be what it was because life comes through the tree. So, we too are granted life through Christ and to let go of Him is to choose to "do nothing" and give up our purpose to bear Him fruit. Or we can cling to the vine and allow the Vinedresser to bring forth the fruit of His choosing.   The child in front of me was doing what I wanted to do: Lay down on the pew and flop around in agony. The pastor has been preaching for...too long. My attention span was shot and watching him act on his impulses somehow made my self-restraint even harder. Because in my heart – I was him. But in Christ, I no longer have to be.
Outside of Jesus, I would continue to be self-absorbed. Unable to see anyone’s interests except my own. Controlled by my emotions, forced to act on how I feel in the moment – tired, angry, happy, scared. But inside Christ we are new creatures. The old man still pouts and whines, but we can choose lay him aside and instead obey and focus on Christ. And not roll around on the pew :0) I was sitting behind two little boys who had a treasure trove of activity books to help them survive Sunday service. And I was captured by the dot-to-dot puzzles. They skipped numbers, going where they thought they should and stopping in the middle of one picture to jump over to another. And I wondered how often God looks on our decisions and says: Why don’t you just follow the numbers? But we don’t, we often go our own way...1...3...4...9...123. We get distracted from God’s directions, decide our ways are faster/easier/better and plunge off course. So, the next time you see a child messing up a craft or a puzzle – take it as an opportunity to thank God. Thank you, God, for constantly being patient with us. Thank you for always being there, ready to turn us back and consistently encourage us – even when have missed more numbers than we’ve hit.   Kids sit in front of screens entranced, unmoving for hours. But sitting in church is clearly torture from the expressions on their faces and the constant wiggling. The whole ordeal is merely to be endured. In their worldview, church has no value or purpose or reward or payoff. How often we are just like that in life. We see hardship as something that is only meant to be endured. We squirm and complain and try to distract ourselves until it is mercifully over – oblivious to God’s purposes. It’s a struggle for us to step back and allow ourselves to believe God – He is good, and He has real reasons for everything He permits in the lives of His children. Like church. |
The AuthorCome with me as we grow in fellowship with each other and our Savior to whom belongs the Amazing Escape from sin and death and the Amazing Journey into glorious life. Archives
February 2025
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