Do you ever feel a tightening in your chest? A rapid heart rate? Difficulty breathing? A looming cloud of dread making you weary and angry as you check your calendar?
The fall can bring it on. Autumn, that is---the season so named by our British forebears and shortened from “the fall of the leaf.” Not the theological tragedy (aka ”the Fall”) from primeval history that served as a catalyst for all things sorrowful, aggravating, alienating or grim. I’m speaking about this season of the year---the start of things.
New things. Good things. But always many things.
A Somatic Text Alert
The tightness in your chest is a somatic text alert that you have overdrawn your account. It is a check-engine light reminding us that we are on the verge of running faster, harder, and longer than designed. It’s a robotic voice on our body’s GPS that nearly screams at us, not that we should turn left in .3.2 miles, but more starkly, if we listen, “God alone stays up all night and labors all day, but you are just a measly person, fashioned from dust.” We cannot be everywhere at once, and cannot exist without patterns of work and rest, duty and delight.
But we are tempted to be everywhere at once. Our phones swear to us on electronic oath that it is a live possibility. And we’ve come to wear busyness as a badge. Nothing, in fact, is more intoxicating, is it, than to have someone approach and say, “I hate to bother you. I know how busy you are.”
Add to our own insecurities, desires, and the prevalence of enticing opportunities, the fact that all the gnats of responsibility swarming around your calendar seem like real, unavoidable matters. As much as we might like to be prayerful people with a measure of solitude in our lives, the frenetic deck seems stacked against us.
After all, when there’s a staff meeting you have to make, children to get to school, a new water heater to get installed, a grandma to visit, your dad to have dinner with, a meeting with a client in Birmingham, and research you have to complete, prayer seems irresponsible.
And when you have a committee assignment to finish, a doctor’s appointment to schedule, little Jimmy’s tennis match to watch, a yard to mow, and you still have to return calls to the lady from the PTA as well as the customer from last Tuesday, who are BOTH upset with you, prayer seems a little like a woman who insists on getting a facial while she’s in labor.
But There’s REAL Work to Be Done!
In the face of all the tangible, dollars-are-on-the-line, this-is-going-to-count-on-my-college-transcript “issues” that pop up, prayer can sometimes seem, well, dumb.
But we’re polite. We wouldn’t, not most of us, call prayer dumb. It’s sweet, but peripheral. Lovely, but easily discardable.
I want to propose today though that it isn’t prayer in the middle of an obese September that is dumb. Not praying when there’s so much to do is.
We believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth, and in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord...We believe in Him who is able to do more than we could daydream on a hundred Friday afternoons. And we believe that He has invited us to pray.
So a steady refusing of the invitation, no matter the reason, is quite simply, dumb.
That’s theology you can live by.
Paul Miller says it far more eloquently:
"If you are not praying, then you are quietly confident that time, money, and talent are all you need in life.”
In other words, if you are not praying, you are a closet atheist. And atheists, opined King David of old, are fools. “The fool says in his heart there is no God.”
Functional Foolishness
Not praying is functional foolishness that has erased conscious trust in Christ from the scene of our moments and meetings. It’s self-amputation that cuts ourselves off from Him who means to benevolently sustain, enliven, guide, heal, carry, help, and change us and the planet upon which we dwell.
Miller continues, “You'll always be little too tired, a little too busy. But if, like Jesus, you realize you can't do life on your own, then no matter how busy, no matter how tired you are, you will find the time to pray. Time in prayer makes you even more dependent on God because you don't have as much time to get things done. Every minute spent in prayer is one less minute where you can be doing something 'productive.'"
I use to think the tales of Martin Luther saying inane things like, “I’ve got way too much to do today to pray less than three-hours” were just a bunch of apocryphal hagiography–fictitious, pious, propaganda spun to prop up a hero in the faith. Nobody in their right mind could say or practice things like that. No one with a functioning noodle would do time-management like that.
But I’ve changed my mind over the years. Or it has been changed.
Prayer Doesn’t Substitute but Prepares for Action
I’ve actually drunk a watered down, but still stiff version of Luther’s Kool-Aid, because I’ve been privileged, like my hero in the faith, Luther, to see God astound me as a result of prayer. I’ve discovered that Augustine was wise when assuring that in prayer, “God constructs us while we think we are instructing Him.”
And of course, I’ve seen my meandering path mysteriously directed while at prayer, as well as circumstances, events, and attitudes altered. Prayer has come to seem like an actual preparation for and engagement with life and not a replacement for it.
John Perkins, while speaking in Chattanooga, once said, “Whenever anybody tells me they’re going to pray for me, that means I know for sure I ain’t gonna get anything!” He’d learned that Christians often think of prayer as a substitute for action, not as a preparation for it, and so any advertised prayer support had come to be synonymous in his experience with the withholding of funds.
But if you’ve done some serious praying at times, you realize nothing could be further from the truth. Prayer isn’t hide-and-seek from the “real” business of daily living. It is high-level interaction with it.
None of means of grace are substitutes for action, although all of them, in their own ways, can feel like the laziest, most useless form of inaction in a land that esteems productivity.
Following a Hankering for God
In fact, it could be said that a people dependent on God’s grace, which is to say, a people who hanker for God’s constant gifts of himself, his vision, his affection, his competency, his direction, and his courage, are going to be constantly putting themselves in the distribution channels most likely to receive these things. Especially if we long to represent Him in politics, education, health-care, family life, law, and business.
It could even be said, as Haddon Robinson once did, that when you look at the practices of our Savior, say, in the gloomy garden of Gethsemane “that active engagement with God is the ultimate preparation for God-obeying, world-changing action.”
Where to Fall Apart
It’s better to fall apart with God in prayer, so you don’t fall apart in the actual moment of crises. It was in mud, fighting it out with God in the dark that Jesus was somehow resourced to courageously walk into the calamitous and jaded legal proceedings which culminated in his shameful, God-less, death. His effort at prayer got him in touch with the grace necessary to save the world.
Over and over of course, we see Jesus disappearing to pray even while the ticker tape has already started. After the markets have already opened for the day (and before), there he is seeking his Father, being available to the One he’d learned to trust alone. For some reason he never could learn that time was money. He was much too inefficient to do much useful in the world, like amass a fortune, develop a beautiful city, or have a perfectly appointed living room.
Oh, but he did, in his inefficiency, somehow work such a herculean task that we’re talking and thinking about him today. God often works in backwards ways so it will be clear that the work has his insignia on it. And the homeless man who reclaimed earth as home for God is an advertisement for such. The One whose pummeling on the Cross means our peace parade with God showcases it more stunningly than anyone.
That’s why we must refuse the prayerless “dumbness” of wearing our busyness like a badge, and give ourselves to the sometimes tedious and mostly secret action of prayer--that magnificent little something that can feel like an absolute nothing.
We reject the dumbness of prayerlessness to get back on God’s page. We want to be sunning in His light, so that when we enter back into the world as His workmanship, the marks of His artistry will come cascading off us in stunning ways.
Our world majors in dumb, inexplicable, trivial pursuits. We contribute our fair share. I know I do. Perhaps not praying will be one of dumb activities we give up from our bloated to-do lists this fall. And perhaps in its place we’ll adopt the wisdom of speaking and offering ourselves regularly to Him “who gives orders to the morning.”
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Eric Youngblood is the senior pastor at Rock Creek Fellowship (PCA) on Lookout Mountain. Please feel free to contact him at eric@rockcreekfellowship.org or follow him on Twitter @GEricYoungblood.