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A sense of spiritual frustration, coupled with the longing for spiritual fulfillment, is common among devout Christians all over the world. Our disappointment is precipitated by the difficulties that we experience in prayer and in our personal devotional life. Here we experience the biggest gap between the way things should be and the way things actually are.
Our sense of failure in prayer is worsened by much of the teaching on prayer in the Church. This teaching implies that if only we were more disciplined and more methodical and more spiritual we would succeed and become spiritual dynamos. Yet, not matter how hard we try, we just can't seem to meet our spiritual goals. Again and again we set out to improve and develop a disciplined practice of regular daily prayer. We might have success for a while, but it does not seem to last. Again and again we fail to achieve our goals, and a sense of disappointment sets in. Others may be good at praying, but we aren't. It may be right for them, but not for us. Worst of all, we feel guilty about our failure to be people of prayer. The guiltier we feel, the harder it is to pray. Satan uses our guilt to undermine our faith so that we give up on daily prayer. (152)
I am finally there, finally at Kleinig's chapter on prayer. And I am confused. Already.
I would never say that prayer is where I experience the biggest spiritual gap. Nope. Not at all, though I have despaired here how unbalanced, off-kilter I have been about prayer of late. All my spiritual life I have thought one thing, I heard...or thought I heard...another this past summer and the roller coaster ride began.
I actually think the gap between the way things should be and how they are is really any place else but prayer...for me. Nor, really, was disappointment ever a thing I associated with prayer. Perhaps because at times prayer is all I had? Or...was it...is it...because despite the things I experienced when I was young, I never prayed for rescue, not specifically that is...not believing that rescue was possible. Life was what it was.
Perhaps that was my error? Prayer was always thanksgiving and praise and an opportunity to lift up others. The bits about my life were more conversation, this is who I am, where I am, but, hey, you know all that, you know all George's suffering, too, but I want to bring him before You anyway. He needs You.
Prayer was fellowship...with God...with other Christians. Prayer, more often than any other time in my life, was a time when I was not alone.
My frustrations in prayer came more from being the outlier, the spiritual oaf who, during requests for prayer, actually shared her own personal struggles, instead of the friend's husband's co-worker's mother who was ill. After all the prayer requests were laid out before the group, the leader would then start to divvy them up. Who will take Flo? And Cyrus? How about Emily? And Myrtle? Ah, the last was always met with uncomfortable silence. I was the one who dared speak of her own sin!
The spiritual oaf who prayed all the time, for others, in all things...out and about, in church, in bible study, with friends, alone in the car, in the grocery store.
The spiritual oaf who reveled in every opportunity to join hands and come before the Lord with others.
I miss that.
So, uhm, I really and truly do not get this opening bit of Kleinig's message and am a bit fearful that all this time of plowing through the first part to get to prayer will actually have been in vain...so dense am I....
Try as I might, I am not sure I had any spiritual goals with prayer. Oh, my greatest goal was to build my faith enough to lay aside my struggles, to trust enough, to "let go and let God." Failed miserably at that one. But prayer goals? I am not sure I ever had that pressure.
Perhaps...I mean, could it be that this was so because I never saw/do not see prayer as a work? How could it be when prayer is, essentially as I understood it to be, a conversation between God and I, lead by Christ, facilitated by the Holy Spirit? Even the poorest, meanest, most miserable wretch of a sinner can pray, can cry out to God.
Part of what I have learned from Luther's Large Catechism is that the bible actually has all these promises tied to prayer. I am not sure I had ever considered a one of them. Of the verses I have encountered thus far, most of them certainly have never been taught to me as a promise concerning prayer. Yet the strange thing is that the most promises I learn, the more I feel as if I do not know anything all about prayer.
Why is it that I will call Bettina and ask her to pray for me when I do not pray for myself? Doesn't that make no sense at all?
Why is it that God would bring me to a pastor for whom prayer, apart from the written prayers of the liturgy and heritage of faith, is a primarily a silent, private act? Try as I might to ask for prayer, unless I speak the word now, he thinks I am asking him to go off and prayer elsewhere, elsewhen. If I leave a voice mail or email or text message, asking for prayer, he does not call and pray with me, perhaps because it is past the time in which came my request. Not, mind you, that I do not covet his private prayers, but I ask him to pray for me or for a certain situation in my life because I cannot. I ask him to speak the words that I long to hear, that his tongue and lips be mine if but for a while. From time to time, he has understood the now, but not really. It is not inherent with him. Never once, aside from the two part written prayers of the liturgy or the Psalter, has he asked me if I would like to pray with him, to join my voice to his as he goes before our Father.
Prayer is the one way in which I feel as if I stand completely apart from the Lutheran confession. Oh, how I have come to cherish those written prayers of liturgy and heritage. They teach me, they sustain me, even when I dare not voice them in prayer but merely read them silently. They are a beacon of truth and a constant reminder of the relationship between the Creator and His created. I savor them, I cherish them, and I rather greedily ask others to pray those liturgical, historical prayers with me.
Still, I long to sit down with others, join hands, and go around the circle, the room, lifting our voices to our God and King. I long for Pastor to pray with me, not just for me, so that I might learn more of what I lack in the knowledge and understanding of my faith, so that I might rehearse the truths that I have been given thus far. I long for the fellowship I have lost, save but here and there when Bettina picks up the phone and joins with me in approaching our Father in Heaven.
What do I understand of Kleinig, what does make sense to me from this opening passage?
That satan is crafty in every way, ever on the prowl, ready to pounce and separate us from our Father, using others and even ourselves to twist and turn us about so thoroughly so as to keep us from seeing what is up and down, right and left, is most certainly true. Have you not see such spread across these virtual pages in my struggles magnified so greatly of late even though I have finally found doctrine I can claim as home?
Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief!
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