Revisiting prayer

                 

     

So I think about prayer a lot and I`m not very good at it and it still frightens me, but I'm also fascinated by it, and I want to be better at it so I think I'm going to talk about it  regularly.

I borrowed a book about praqyer called "Anyone can Pray" By Graeme Davidson . I haven't read much of it yet but I like it so far. He talks about prayer in really simple terms

"All you need to do is focus on God and let him reach out to you. It helps if you have the right attitude: humility and a genuine desire to communicate. That's all it takes"

I always thought of prayer as me reaching out to God, striving really hard to say the right things and  hoping he hears me. I never thought about it as me being in one place and God coming to me, that makes is seem so much more manageable.

The book also talks about why we pray, what the point of it is.

We Pray to God because he loves us and because we want to love him. People in love enjoy being close to each other.They want to know how their partner thinks and feels and what they can do to make him or her happy. if i tild you how much I love my wife and then added I hadnt bothered to communicate with her for the last couple of years, or that i only got in touch at a sunday function or when theres a crisis, youd doubt my sincerity.

I'm actually not one of the people who goes to God when there's a crisis or when I feel terrible. I'm fine and find it easy going to God when everything is good, when my life is going well, when the sun is shining, when my mental health is manageable, when my body doesn't hurt too much, I don't have any problem going to God then. Its when life isn't so good that I find it difficult, that I feel guilty for taking up Gods time and space, that I feel guilty for not being a happy grateful Christian all the time. Partly thats about the same thing i talked about in my depression post, growing up in an environment where if you struggle you are thought of as doing Christianity wrong and not having enough faith. But that doesn't make sense does it? God loves us on the good days and the bad days, he wants to hear from us even when everything is wrong and everything is hurting? God is big enough that we can go to him with everything

"You can share all your thoughts, feelings, and experiences - your joys, sorrows, problems, fears, hopes failures, embarrassments and thoughts - in the full knowledge that God will understand and love you."

One of the things I've been having a problem with i think is that I've always seen prayer as a sort of poetry. I was talking to Best Friend about this and she knows when i write poetry i draft and redraft, make sure all the exact words I want are in the exact places i want them, and she pointed out to me that while poetry can be prayers, and prayers can be poetry they don't have to be, if prayer is a conversation you can just say the words as they come to you, without worrying about it. And I didn't know this but she has recently joined the prayer team in her church and she sent me some of the ones shed written as examples that might be useful to me. Here's just a couple of them

Dear Lord, thank you that we can come to you with our cares, and forgive us when we forget this and spend more time and effort in worrying than in focusing on your word and the peace you so willingly and lovingly give us.

Thank you Lord that when we do turn to you, you are there, waiting, to listen and to take the burden of worries off our shoulders and to fill us again with your love. You have known us since the beginning and have a plan for us. Help us to remember that.

I think they are beautiful in their simplicity and are much more conversational than poetic. I use them when I am struggling with approaching God

 I've also started using christian themed adult coloring books as ways of doing meditative prayers. I used to think that adult colouring books were the Naffest Thing Ever, but about two years ago I realized that i actually have a really big issue with anxiety (I told Best Friend this and she laughed for about a week and said "But you are always anxious about everything!!" what can I say? My emotional literacy sucks!) And I found colouring books were a really good way of soothing some of my anxiety issues. So when I started thinking about prayer I bought some that I thought would be useful. I'm not very good at coloring but that's ok, I don't need to be, it just creates a space for me to calm myself and be with God. None of them are finished yet because I just pick whatever one I feel is most appropriate for that prayer session.

Thinking about Lent

Because I’ve never been involved in a church where Lent was a really big deal, I’d never really thought about it. I mean I really like pancakes, I notice people giving up things, and I always look forward to Easter eggs, but I’ve never really delved into the point of it (Easter  and the forty day corresponding to Jesus forty days in the desert I understand but I never really understood the connection between lent and Easter)

It seems that Lent is a time of waiting, reflecting, anticipation, and repentance. It’s a time of thinking on the sacrifice of Easter and a time of trying to become more aligned with God. This seems like a solid article on both the history and purpose of lent.

A lot of people give up things for Lent to help them be better people. I don't think that's the point of Lent, I think it’s a side effect of the point. Like the more aligned with God we become the more we become better people? And sometimes there are things in our lives that stop us being aligned with God as we could be and those things need to be given, up, given away, put down.

I thought about the usual things that people give up for lent but they are either irrelevant to me or don't seem like big issues as barriers between me and God. So I thought what is the one thing I could change in my life that would help me both know God better and become more aligned with him. And I think the answer to that is to stop wasting time.

I waste a lot of time, I watch trash TV, I play too many hours of computer games, I mooch around the house doing nothing. I am the world's best procrastinator.  And I know a lot of the time I am doing these things as avoidance tactics, to avoid things I should be doing (In case I am not good enough at them, in case they bring up negative emotions, in case they are harder work than I anticipated, because I feel guilty doing things that I like, that benefit me, and partly because I’m just lazy) I could use that time that I fritter away to learn more about God, to be more with God, which isn't just prayer and bible reading but about more fully engaging in life in ways that are healthy for myself and others

And the thing is this endeavor will involve me being scrupulously, savagely honest with myself. Because of my mental and physical health issues I need a lot of down time, more than a lot of people and from the outside, downtime looks a lot like wasting time I think. Which means I am the only person that can tell if I’m recuperating or wasting time so I’m going to have to hold myself to account, be really honest with myself on which I am doing and which I need to be doing. (And also exploring if there are more downtime activities that are more nurturing and good for me than I am currently engaging in)

With some of the time i save I will do more overtly obviously Christian things. I'm going to double up my Bible reading so I'm reading two Psalms and Two chapters of the gospels each day. I will spend more time in prayer (which I am kind of getting the hang of and getting more comfortable with) I also bought myself a lent devotional, Let Me Go There by Paula Gooder. I heard an interview with her and really liked what she was saying so I thought I'd really like this book

But as well as these things I want to use the time I'm not wasting to do things that maybe aren't seen as overtly christian but are still intimately tied up with my relationship with God: writing, gardening, crafting,cooking, volunteering, exercising, dealing with my emotional stuff. I think all of these things can be ways of engaging with God for me, and ways of learning more about both God and myself.

I know I'm going to fail at this endevour a lot of the time and I know I'm going to find it incredibly frustrating, both when I fail at it and when I succeed but I still think its something that is really worth doing.

Devoting time to God:Prayer

So I was going to write a long thing on what I thought prayer was, what it's for, what we get out of it, what God gets out of it and so on and so forth but like I don't actually really know? And that's not really something I can work out or teach myself in an afternoon. So I'm going back to that thing we teach kids. That prayer "is talking to God" which to be honest seems to be both the simplest and most all encapsulating definition.

Now I have all the same problems with setting aside prayer time that I wrote about in the post about setting aside bible reading time but a thing I learnt in my journey in to paganism is that I do contemplative devotion better when i'm using my body in some way, when I have something to focus on, when I bring my whole self and not just my brain to the prayer.

And I probably will do some nerdy research on the point of prayer but for now I'm going to spend  the next couple of months exploring practical creative ways of praying. Probably I will write about that once a week or once a fortnight, about how its going, whether its working or not, and what I'm learning from it about both myself and God

Devoting Time to God: Scripture

The church I grew up in, and pretty much every church I've ever spent any time in always suggested that setting aside part of every day for bible reading and prayer would be good for your spiritual life. I think this is an excellent idea, how else do you get to know some one other than spending time with them? The only thing is I am amazingly, unfailingly, phenomenally, bad at it.

Secretly I think most people are somewhat bad at it, we live in a culture that increasingly values busyness signaling, and doesn't really value taking time out of your day for quite spiritual practice. But I think because I am an emotionally and cognitively chaotic person I am extra bad at it.  I'm really bad at building and sticking to new habits. I have the impulse control of a drunk puppy, I get bored and impatient with things that don't have immediate results or trade offs. I get distracted by other shiny things and ideas, I always have great ideas for doing stuff that lasts about three days and then I jump around onto the next great idea, which is like totally going to change my life! and make my brain work properly! and make me happy! and organised! and not crazy!

I also have an obsessive streak so I have a habit of wanting to know All The Things!!! Right Now!, which often just leads to burn out and tying myself in knots

In the last year and a half though I have grown up and calmed down a lot and have managed to make sustainable changes and build habits that make my life work better than it did before so I think I can bring what I've learned from them to my devotional life.

There's still a lot of confusion and anxiety and fear and grief and  stumbling about in the dark with God, but I think the only way to work through all this is to give it time and patience, and know I can't know or understand everything now, or even ever, that I wont be a bad christian if i don't ever have all the answers.

I still have this enormous fear of Not Being Good Enough for God and I don't really understand how to work through that yet except that its probably something I have to chip away at day by day and the only way to do it is to actually do it and it's something i have to work on on both spiritual and psychological levels

One of my other problems with daily devotional stuff is the unfailing naffness of so many devotional resources, I find a lot of them just twee and shallow and they make me roll my eyes in annoyance. But I think I might have found some that make sense to me and that don't annoy me. I will report back on that sometime in the future

In the mean time i am going to try and incorporate my devotional time into my morning schedule. Which is basically: getting up, feeding the dogs, having breakfast, doing my shoulder exercises (I'm supposed to do basic shoulder exercises every morning to strengthen and protect my rotator cuffs because of all the rolling I do in my wheelchair.) Then  the plan is to read one psalm and one chapter of the gospels every day. A psalm because entering the bible through poetry is a safe thing for me, a way of communicating I understand. And a gospel chapter because I want to look at from where I am now, what they really say, what Jesus really did, what he really said

Probably I wont do it every day, probably I will fail at doing it more days than i manage it but I'm going to try it till Easter, and if I miss a day, or two, or even more, I'm just going to pick it back up when I can and see if it changes anything, see what I learn about God, myself, scripture. If it gets to Easter and I don't feel I've got anything from it, well then I'll try something else.