Sunday, March 22 - Fifth Sunday in Lent

For me, prayer has always carried with it a spiritual “side-kick”: struggle! It has been a battle between my view of what a praying Christian ought to look and act like, and the reality of who I actually am, a reality which consistently has fallen short of my view of what faithfulness in prayer should look like! Looking back, it’s really been quite humorous! Getting up way early to hear God’s “still small voice” and falling asleep; settling into a safe prayer place and losing the battle to my mind racing through my “to do list”; and setting numerous “prayer goals” all for naught!

So, I am grateful beyond words for God’s call upon my life to 40 years of active pastoral ministry, because the pressures and demands of that call had an uncanny way of driving me to pray simply out of my own sheer need. And it was there at the intersection of my own need and God’s always available presence that I discovered the simplicity and power of prayer! I love the way Saint Paul puts it: “God can do anything, you know - far more than you could ever imagine or guess or request in your wildest dreams! God does it not by pushing us around, but by working within us, God’s Spirit deeply and gently within us.” (Ephesians 3:20, The Message)

I’ve not totally made peace or become guilt-free when it comes to the gulf between my prayer expectations and realities. But, I’ve been blessed by the keen incites of Charles Keating in a gem of a book called Who We Are is How We Pray! He makes the point that it’s like swimming-­up-­stream to ditch our (Myers-Briggs) personality type when it comes to the way we pray. Our prayer preferences flow out of the person God infinitely loved and created us to be in Christ! In the struggle for real self-acceptance I’m discovering that praying is far more important than the way we pray!

PRAYER: Thank you, Dear God, for the awesome gift of talking to you and the unimaginable joy of hearing you speak to us alone and with others at our side! We ask you to use the frailty of our prayers, so that your will may be done on earth as it is in heaven! AMEN.

Craig Peel