Introduction, Part 2
In his book, How to Pray, Pete Greig writes that he began a 24/7 prayer movement based on two discoveries. The first was the realization that prayer was probably the most important thing in the world. The second was the realization that he was terribly poor at it. These are the same realizations that my friends and I had in our Friday night Bible studies almost 40 years ago.
I have heard prayer described as our soul’s native language or our native tongue. Why then does it feel so foreign? Emile Griffin in her beautiful little book, Doors Into Prayer, writes that we all cry out in emergencies and in difficulty, which shows how prayer is deeply embedded in us. The Psalmist David wrote that “Deep cries out to deep.” Why is it that we resist? I believe this is just part of the mystery and wonder of our human experience. We are spirit and soul, mind and body, flesh and bone.
So why would I venture writing about prayer when most of the time I begin to pray, I don’t like the prayer though I love the God to whom I am praying? Prayer and writing are both excavations. Cecil Murphey wrote that “passion flows when you discover what you didn’t yet know. It’s like finding a wrapped gift at your front door with your name on it, and you can hardly wait to open the box. One woman called writing an excavation. Sentence by sentence, what she needed to say came out of vast searching in underground caverns (her inner self). If writing is excavation, you learn deeper meanings, and the intensity increases through the simple act of rapping the keyboard (Unleash the Write Within, Chapter 26).”
Therefore, as I write these words, my heart’s longing is to excavate, uncovering more of the mystery and the wonder of prayer, the language God has provided for us to know him, to talk with him and to grow closer to him. As I wrote previously in What Matters Most,
“My feelings of inadequacy have been one obstacle to pursuing faithfulness in prayer. Another is attempts at prayer that don’t resonate with my heart. Having grown up in church, I’ve been in many prayer meetings and involved with thousands of prayers. Many of those have seemed heartfelt and authentic, others contrived and hollow. Some have grated on me and left me wanting to run. It’s a poor excuse, but true nonetheless, that I have allowed those feeble attempts to hinder an authentic life of prayer of my own.”
As I dig into these pages, wrestling with all of my inadequacies and shortcomings, my longings and desires and all of God’s great mercies, all the while pondering the mysteries and the wonder, soul and spirit, flesh and bone, things known and unknown, my hope is that our hearts will be stirred toward prayer, reminded of its importance, and as Richard Foster wrote, that in prayer, we may find our heart’s true home.
