Be Still, And Know That God Is God

Someone once suggested to me that most of us work too hard on prayer. That threw me for a loop at first. How is it possible to work too hard at prayer? I always thought most of us didn't work hard enough at it.

Yet the same person said that all too often people who pray act as though all the impact of prayer depends on us. We have to get the right formula of words, the right frequency, the right posture, and the right effort for prayer to work. It's as if God is an ATM machine, and we just have to enter the right debit card and pin number to get the Machine to give us what we want. No wonder people give up on prayer.

This individual suggested that essentially God initiates prayer. The very fact that we want to take the first halting steps toward prayer is God at work in and around us already. Before God wants words and requests from us, God wants us. Prayer is first and foremost about being in the presence of God.

Prayer begins with being still before God...no agenda, no requests, no formulas; just being quiet and with God. That's hard to come by in our noise/distraction/stimulation-addicted world. As we begin to pray for our churches and communities, asking God to reveal what God is doing and God wants us to join in, the first thing to do is to just be quiet and to let God be God.

Let's just float for a while. I'll see you around the next bend in the river.