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.

Still Afraid

So Best Friend* told me that she thought I was strong and brave for writing this blog. I don't feel strong and brave, mostly I feel bruised and fragile and a bit lost and I've realize I'm really really scared, I'm avoiding prayer because what if I go to God and he doesn't like me?

What if all the bad things I learnt about myself and God while growing up are actually true? What if god is disgusted by me, what if he does think i'm a terrible, horrible, selfish, manipulative person?  what if he does think I just deserve to go straight to hell, that I am totally unlovable. What if I deserved all the screaming, and viciousness and rejection? What if he thinks what my father did to me is my fault because I'm a bad girl who tempted him? What if hes ashamed and angry with me   because I've done nothing with my life except survive it?

And I hate feeling like this, I just want to walk away from it. I thought I was done processing this particular bit of crap, but I'd never worked through the spiritual aspect of it before

It would be so easy to pack everything back up and pretend it isn't there, sew my rib cage back together pretend that me and God still aren't on speaking terms, pretend that I still don't want to be on speaking terms with God, pretend that all the  bruising that I didn't realize was still there isn't actually there.

But that wouldn't fix anything because you can't put stuff back in the box, once you get to a certain layer of trauma that needs processing you have to process it or you just get sick. And I really want a relationship with God, I want to have him in my life, I want to feel safe enough to pray to him, to talk to him about everything, to shape my life in a way he thinks is good for me


One of my most awesome friends who I discuss a lot of the deep stuff of my life with sent me a message the other day saying:

I've been thinking about your worry that you're not good enough for God. It strikes me that you've suffered neglect and violence and pain and hardship, much of which was at the hands of people who professed to love Him, and they drove you away from Him. Yet you came back to God of your own accord, lovingly, even though you were scared. From my (admittedly limited) understanding of Christianity, that's like... The fucking pinnacle of what constitutes good enough

And the other Christians in my life keep telling me it will be okay, that God isn't disgusted by me, that he does love me, but it's so hard to believe. And it's so easy to have my parents voices and all the things they told me going round and round my head without interrupting or challenging them. It's so easy to dwell on these messages and memories that make me feel worthless and not good enough for God, rather than other messages and even memories that make me realize maybe I am ok, maybe God does want a relationship with me. Maybe I need to concentrate on those rather than the negative stuff, or even talk back to the negative stuff telling it its wrong. And that's all going to take time and work, and it's going to take longer than I want it to.

But what if I went to him now anyway?  Even on the days I'm terrified. Isn't that what faith is?Trusting that it will be okay even if you are not really feeling it? Trusting that all the things God promised are real and true, trusting that God loves me in all the good ways people tell me he does.

 

*which is clearly not her actual name, but I need this blog to be somewhat anonymous, so people are going to get lables or nicknames

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