Take It to the Lord
Have you ever stayed up all night talking to someone? I remember back when I was a counselor at Echo Ranch spending weekend nights hanging out in cabins with fellow counselors, talking for hours in the dark about every topic imaginable, sometimes until the summer sunrise would start to light up the world outside. It’s striking to me how it can be so easy to talk with another person for such a long time, and yet often when I try to spend extended time with God in prayer, I find myself completely distracted or out of things to say after five or ten minutes.
Prayer has been on my mind a lot this year. It might have begun to occupy me back in the winter when I was reading an account of the founding of a Presbyterian church in New York City in the early ‘90s, which held all-night prayer meetings every Friday night from 9:00pm to 6:00am. They drew this practice from Korean Christians during the revivals there in the early 20th century, for whom all-night prayer vigils and daily prayer gatherings at 5:00am were normal and frequent. I can’t speak for you, but my reaction, which I suspect many in my culture share, to hearing about these practices goes something like: All night? Isn’t that a little excessive? Who has the time? How do you stay alert that long? What about sleep? And yet, none of these thoughts prevented me from staying up talking to my friends all night.
Many – maybe all – Christians often struggle with letting their prayer lives deteriorate when life gets busy. That deterioration can look like not remembering to pray at all; turning prayer into a perfunctory checklist item that lacks any real intimacy with or praise to God; praying nothing but superstitious, repetitious requests to ward off sickness and calamity, as if prayer were a magic spell; and probably other distortions of the vital connection between man and God that He intended prayer to be. But maybe the real problem underlying many of our anemic prayer lives is not lack of time or energy to pray, but lack of faith that prayer really matters. If we really believed that the God who created and reigns sovereign over every particle in the universe stoops down to hear us, wouldn’t we call out to Him more? If we really believed that He rejoices to hear our voices, as much as a father loves hearing the babbling of his infant child, wouldn’t we take more delight in speaking to Him?
On our end, James tells us that “the prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working” (James 5:16), and Jesus tells us to ask, seek, and knock for the things we need (Matthew 7:7), even though God already knows we need them. On God’s end, our prayers are described as sweet-smelling incense rising up to Him (Revelation 5:8); He really, truly enjoys our prayers. I don’t pretend to fully understand the mystery of prayer, nor can I untangle the dilemma of how exactly our requests made in prayer affect God’s sovereign will, but I know this: God commands us to pray, He loves when we pray, and He responds when we pray. Even here at camp, there have been a number of needs lately - funds for upcoming construction projects, staffing for certain departments of camp, summer staff slots that needed to be filled - that we saw provided for us only after we prayed for them as a team, often over and over.
To that end, I’ve been trying to be more intentional about praying this summer. For myself, for others, for our needs as a camp, for the world - really, I’ve found that when you start to make the time for it, and start to realize that all our needs are important to bring before our caring God, you’ll realize that there are far more things to pray about than you even have time for. But beyond seeing needs met and being obedient to God’s command, the other benefit of praying more is the peace it brings when you take your eyes off your problems and wants and fix them on God’s love for us secured in Christ. As someone with a tendency to let worries and frustrations rattle around my anxious brain, I need the release of surrendering my agenda to God’s will and leaving my petitions with him in prayer. As the hymn “What A Friend We Have in Jesus” says:
Are we weak and heavy laden? Cumbered with a load of care?
We should never be discouraged; take it to the Lord in prayer.
Do your friends despise, forsake you? Take it to the Lord in prayer -
In His arms He’ll take and shield you; You will find a solace there.