Observations on Prayer

For some reason, we treat prayer as eating unpleasant vegetables.  We know it’s good for us, but we’d rather dawdle over it rather than consume it.  We contemplate and toy with prayer, like moving around bits of unappealing broccoli on our plate.  Or we muscle up the courage to choke it down with a glass of milk to ease its mushiness rather than develop a taste for it.  Or put another way, prayer is sometimes like going to the gym.  You don’t want to go, but once it’s over you’re really glad you did.

 To our detriment we resist prayer.  Be honest - - it has often been laborious and inconvenient from the other things that you want to do.  And like eating vegetables or working out, you rarely see immediate results, and so it has sometimes been to us a misinterpreted source of discouragement.  And further, if done properly, the labor to seek God during prayer exposes us for what we are, and forces us into submission…and that is not comfortable.  At least not at the beginning.

 This is vastly over-simplifying prayer, and analogies always break down if microscopically correlated across every letter, but the basic point I’m making is that foregoing prayer, like not eating well or not exercising regularly, makes you unhealthy on superficial and systemic levels and results in bad things.

 If we actually understood prayer in all its goodness, we would want to never cease from it.  In fact, in the fullness of being like Christ, we could not cease from it because it is the artery to our heart, which is probably a better analogy, because I can go a month without broccoli or going to the gym, but I’d have a hard time going for a minute with cardiac arrest.