the time I prayed for strength

I found myselfbroken on the floor in tears. I did not know what to do or where to go who I had become.

So I asked for strength for wisdom.

Rarely do I ask for much I am more content to pursue intimacy than to ask for things

brokenness makes you ask for things

I started asking and I waited...

........

........

I listened until I was frustrated with the silence Just before I fell asleep, I lay there with dried up eyes and I heard:

"I am not a genie. I am your God, and I love you. If you want strength, I am not just going to GIVE you strength. It will start to get really difficult now. Will you be strong in those times or not. I am not a genie; I am your God who loves you."

Bi-lingual prayer

It's really no wonder that a lot of non-Christians, new Christians and others are uncomfortable prayer.  They do not speak the native tongue of formalized prayer.  That is why prayer seems like such a daunting task to so many people.  There are so many unnecessary formalities to common prayer today.  We use certain language that NOBODY actually uses in common communication.  We pray like God is preoccupied with a foreign language; like he is preoccupied with our fine form and technique. We pray as if we have no personality.  We pray as though we were robots programmed by some old English scientist.

Why would God give us a distinct personality and then require us to pray apart from it?  Why would he make us unique and make us pray uniform and unnatural?

Prayer is only so awkward and daunting to people because they're afraid they'll mess it up; afraid they do not speak this language well enough.

Prayer is not a foreign language.

Somehow

If I am honest, I seldom feel the presence of God in prayer or elsewhere.  If I am genuine, I often come to prayer to the absence of a sense that God met me tenderly in return.  If I am sincere, I frequently come to  meet with God in a hidden place. Yet here is the crazy part!  My heart is continually drawn to that hidden place.  I constantly desire to meet with God in prayer.  Though I rarely feel the presence of God like I do a hug from my wife or the voice of a friend, my heart...SOMETHING within me yearns for prayer.  Though I cannot point to a particular sensible feeling of God's consistent presence, I know, SOMEHOW, that when I come to God and expose my senses, my thoughts, feelings, and circumstances without any cosmetic, God smiles.

I cannot pinpoint it, but somewhere and somehow I know that my Father loves me.  I realize that God is beyond my senses. He is beyond my mind.  But when my heart yearns for and desires to keep coming back to that hidden and shrouded place, I realize SOMETHING is happening that is so deep and far enough beyond me that my prayers are always being heard whether or not I FEEL Abba's embrace.

Words to God

I once preached a sermon in a series about the various distorted images we have of God. It was intended to recognize the images we have of God that we create out of our experiences, relationships, and circumstances instead of the true images of God we see in Scripture. Once you recognize them, you can replace them with truth.

This particular night I was revealing the distorted image of the 'disinterested God'. We took a look at those distortions that make us doubt God, in his immense realities, could actually be interested in me personally, intimately, and truthfully.

We looked at the true image of God who knows me far more than I could imagine. This is a God who is Immanuel, God with us. This is the God who knows when I sit and when I rise. The true God is one who knows my deepest thoughts, desires, and imaginations. (Psalm 139)

At this point, a strong quote by Matthew Henry came to the forefront.

"Our thoughts are words to God."

It was a beautiful answer to those of us who may struggle from time to time with a distorted image in our heart of a God who is aloof or disinterested in my tiny individual life. To someone who struggles to pray to an immense God, this quote soothes the soul a bit and frees the heart a lot more to rest in prayer.

On the way home, Tonya shared with me the shadow of the quote. She was challenged to recognize how scary it can be when we really think about the thoughts we commonly have. There are a lot of thoughts we have in the course of a day we certainly would not want God to hear or know.

If our thoughts are words to God, there is a risk to that, of course, but I would say with risks included, it STILL means our God is close. Even if it must include all our thoughts, it still means God is interested in you personally and intimately.