Minister's Letter

I remember some years ago being in a conversation where someone said, the one question you could not ask in their church and town was ‘How much do you earn?’. Apparently this was too personal a question and not to be approached. Recently reading something about prayer, the writer talked about the difficulty people often have in talking about their prayer life and I found myself wondering if the question you cannot ask now is ‘How is your praying?’ So I thought I would ask it.

The question about earnings may be avoided for a number of reasons, but the question about prayer is usually avoided because we think we aren’t good enough, and we add to that the assumption that everyone else will be perfect at this and we will look silly if we answer the question.

So let’s begin by debunking the myth. The people who are good at prayer always believe they are hopeless at it and would not judge the rest of us. And the rest of us struggle, have good days and bad, and regularly repeat the experience of thinking we may have an idea of what it’s about, only for it to slip through our fingers. Does that sound familiar at all?

God seeks honesty, no polish, heart response, not fancy words. Read the Psalms and remember they are prayers and we find words we wouldn’t expect to use in prayer. We don’t often use prayers for vengeance on our enemies, and some of the cries from positions of need would be uncomfortable to us. But they remind us to be who we really are before God, and to express what matters to us. They also remind us that when we pray we are responding to God. God has already addressed us. We are not initiating the conversation. The fact that God has already addressed us is an indicator of God’s love for us, inviting us from wherever we start to meet with God, inviting us also to pray as we can and not as we can’t.

So how is your praying? What works? What doesn’t? How has it changed over the years, or even over the last days or weeks? Change is part of prayer too. What worked once runs its course and we need something else. Is there something, some way of praying you would like to try but don’t know where to begin? Perhaps we can begin to use our experience for each other, and find new things. The most important thing is to keep trying. It doesn’t have to be neat and tidy, but simply enable us to hear God and to be heard by God.

God bless,
Chris