Twinsight 43 of 50: Keep a Running Dialogue with God

Friends from a Westwood prayer group:
Rebecca (and Kingston who born within days of this photo), Mary, me and Crystal

I grew up going to church, and it grounded me in many ways. For one thing, the importance of being faithful to the God who created me and loves me unconditionally was modeled. My dad grew up in the days when dressing up for church was an important symbol of reverence. He always wore a suit, didn’t ever miss a Sunday that I can remember, and was never late. One Sunday when I was about 12, I overslept and he and mom just left without me in lieu of being late. (I think she felt a little bad about it.) I was never late again! I also learned how important it is to love and serve the people around you as Christ did. I can recount literally hundreds of ways that I saw people serve one another in quiet, humble, yet meaningful ways during my growing-up years. I am grateful for this underpinning in my life.

But for some reason, I didn’t quite get the prayer thing. To me, prayer was language that someone else had written that I could repeat while half asleep and it was often far, far from what was really going on inside me. It was tune-out time. I did, however, learn how to send up 911 prayers—you know, when there was an “emergency” and I desperately wanted to God to fix something—NOW!

I can’t remember the precise moment when I started genuinely desiring to pray and have a running dialogue with God during my day. Maybe it was when we were trying to figure out if adoption was right for our family or when I faced work situations in which I felt way over my head (and probably was). Or maybe it was when I was coming to grips with the fact that my parents weren’t long for this world or feeling flawed and ill-prepared to raise strong, godly girls in this crazy world. I guess my growth has been, and continues to be, a gradual process. And that’s how God is. He doesn’t hit us over the head and knock sense into us (although we probably all could use that treatment at times). He is patient, loving and merciful and redirects us over time as we seek His best for our lives and direction through the ebbs and flows of daily life. Wow, I love that about Him.

Through all these situations and more, prayer has become critically important in my life—my lifeline, in many ways. It:

·    Puts me in the flow of what God and His Spirit are doing around me. In The Me I Want to Be,  John Ortberg writes, “Prayer, more than any other single activity, is what places us in the flow of the Spirit. When we pray, hearts get convicted, sin gets confessed, believers get united, intentions get encouraged, people receive guidance, the church is strengthened, stubbornness gets melted, wills get surrendered, evil gets defeated, grace gets released, illness gets healed, sorrows are comforted, faith is born, hope is grown, and love triumphs. In prayer—in the presence of God—we come closest to being fully ourselves.”

·    Gives me moment-to-moment strength and grounds me in his presence. In a little book called Perfect Trust, Chuck Swindoll writes, “Strength comes from choosing to fully trust, pray, and praise. Our circumstances may not change, but in the process we change.”  Some days—even this morning—I wake up and start to go into panic mode about something that’s concerning me about my day or have an ongoing uneasiness about something that’s lurking under surface of my life. Because I can fall out of trust so easily, I have learned that I need to discipline myself to wake up and immediately start my day praying about what He wants to accomplish through me in my day and for specific people He has put in my path. I put a daily alert on my phone with my prayer list so I don’t forget, and often write out my prayers and what I’m sensing God is saying so I don’t get distracted. I’ve been very high maintenance for God to train!

·    Bonds me with others like nothing else can. One of the deepest joys in my life comes from praying with others—one-on-one with a friend, more formally with a group, or with an attender who wants someone to pray with after services at our church.  When I think about some of our best times as a family, my mind’s eye goes to the four of us spralled out on our bed or sitting in our living room praying about something—a decision, a project, a friend…and together waiting and trusting.

Sometimes I am amazed at how the God of the universe wants to have a moment-to-moment relationship with me. I can’t see Him, but I know He’s there. And when He feels really far away, I know it’s more important than ever to restart the dialogue since He's not the one who has moved.

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