If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer. Matthew 21:22
I think we miss a crucial point in this. We know this verse, so we pray about a lot of things.
But I think we forget to ask.
I think we spend so much time praying over a situation that we forget to really ask God for something. And I think asking requires something more than a question mark. It requires acknowledging and understanding that you do not have. There is no point in asking if you already have it.
Acknowledging that you do not have requires humility. Asking the Lord for something requires a need. It requires confessing a need that we, ourselves, cannot meet. We do not like admitting that we cannot meet a need. We are okay when we pray about things are clearly not under our control. We pray for favor in an interviewer's eyes. We pray for open doors and direction when we aren't sure what to do. These are all good things to pray for. But they rarely require humility. Prayers with humility require an honest assessment of ourselves in the light of the situation. Prayers out of this assessment are the humble ones, the ones that require God to move. They require God to move because we have recognized that we cannot meet our own needs, sometimes in places that we feel that we should not need. Those are the hard prayers.
But it is in these hard prayers that we experience God's extravagant love for us. It is in these hard prayers that we find the Love of the One who came and dwelt among us.
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Saturday, April 10, 2010
Walking and Mission: Now
This is the way; walk in it. Isaiah 30:21b
Americans are driven people. Our culture is always looking for the bigger, better, cooler, more extreme, more intense thing. Our success is based on our achievements. We live the first 18 years of our life waiting for our high school graduation. But before you even make it there, from your sophomore year of high school, you are expected to start planning for college. Before you even take your last set of finals, you are supposed to know exactly where you are going to go to school, and of course, the only reason you are going to college is to get a degree in a certain area so that you grow up to be what you always wanted. Hooray! You've made it into college. Now you just have 4 more years until you get to go get a stellar internship or go to graduate school! But of course, along the way, you know that you have to publish papers, get into this society in order to be accepted there. Hooray, I've made it to grad school! Now I've just got 5 (or more...) more years until I can get a job. I have to impress my advisor, I have to join this society, I have to crank out this number of papers, and I have to meet this person and this person and go to this conference so I can meet that potential employer and get that job!
We are always focused on the next thing. We are consumed with the future--and American Christianity is not exempt from this. We are focused on milestones. That first step to find a church. That moment when someone makes a choice to follow Jesus. The moment when one breaks down and confesses a "great and hideous" sin. And, of course, that Call to Missions. We know that phrase in that verse in Matthew: "Go, and make disciples of all nations." We know it well.
As two wonderful people have pointed out to me as I've been wrestling with this whole idea over the past two months, the verb is more accurately translated as "as you go". We make calling this big, huge thing. We make calling out to be something you do in the future, that until God sends fire or something, or if you have the perfect set of skills to do church/ministry/mission work, you don't have A Calling. Os Guinness reminds us that "[o]ur primary calling as followers of Christ is by him, to him, and for him. First and foremost we are called to Someone (God), not to something (such as motherhood, politics, or teaching) or to somewhere (such as the inner city or Outer Mongolia)." Our Call is to follow Jesus. And I don't mean that one moment when you become a Christian for the first time and call yourself a follower of Jesus. I mean follow in every sense of the word. Follow is not a destination. Follow is not a moment. Follow is a sequence of moments. It is inclusive not just of your future, your Sundays and your Wednesdays, your job, your college choice, what church you belong to (besides, the church is merely a local expression of the Body of Christ; that's a cool post for another time). Following is inclusive of the minutes, of the seconds that you live and breathe now, and our Call is to love Jesus, and to be his hands and his feet, his eyes and his ears, and his pinkies and his elbows now. I might even say that we have to learn how to be his pinkies and his elbows before we learn how to be his eyes and his ears, and we have to learn how to be his eyes and his ears before we can be his hands and his feet (though I'm sure we learn them all in tandem to some degree).
And we will fail. We will fail at following. Not just in those "big" ways, when we confess our unchecked greed, our unbounded sexuality that we have been denying God's say in. We will fail at following. We fail when we don't trust Jesus to be enough for us. To steal a phrase from the lead singer of Tenth Avenue North, we live in a world of cheap thrills. We fail when we replace Jesus' sustaining grace and power and love with the cheap thrills this world offers us. The "big" failures are not the problems. The addictions to pornography, the drive to accumulate wealth at any cost, the consuming need to have a significant other at all times--those are not the problems. The problem is our tendency, as inherently sinful people, to deny in our daily moments that Jesus is enough for all our needs. We fail when we choose our own ways of meeting our needs--for affirmation, for intimacy, for success, for security, instead of trusting Jesus and what he has to offer us and what he calls us to do in our moments.
I remember one Retreat of Silence I had at IVLI after a particularly challenging week. We had gone on our outtrip to Mackinac, and God had shown me more of himself, and more of myself. I was rather a mess. I had a conversation with Jesus that went something like this:
Nothing you could do could ever make me love you less, because you have followed me.
But I can't even follow right!
Don't you think I know that? :)
And so I spent the rest of that ROS learning how to rest with Jesus, in the way you rest with a significant other. When you rest on the couch or in bed together, you don't justify yourselves to each other. You just rest with them. Regardless of how you yelled at each other that day, or neglected each other that week, when you cuddle with each other, you focus on just being with them. And you find the grace in each others' arms.
So before we follow Jesus across the ocean, we have to learn how to stay. We have to learn how to stay when nothing makes sense and the path seems to be going nowhere--or even in the wrong direction. God leads by steps, and we can't tell him what those steps are. This goes against everything our culture tells us: plan for the future now, otherwise you'll never get anywhere. We have to learn how to follow in our moments before we can follow Jesus in our futures. Following is not a goal. Following requires being a disciple. Disciples are not made. Disciples are. Even when Jesus' twelve original disciples were being dense, they were still disciples. The path in the verse I started this blog with is not the goal or the point; the path is not what matters. What matters is that we walk in it. Discipleship is not a goal. Discipleship happens along the way.
For me, personally, I no longer understand why I am in graduate school for chemistry. And that is frustrating to me--even though I now remember that I asked for it when I surrendered my plans to the Living God, time and time again. I'm learning how to live in the reality that God really has removed any sense of right to the control of my life, to be content with that, to surrender each step, to trust God's faithfulness. I'm learning how grad school might just be a grace period. A chance to learn how discipline forms rhythms of work and rest, and a chance for me to not worry about that next step. To realize that I've been blessed with a job that pays me sufficiently, that has flexible hours, and that by definition is exploratory. Most importantly, though, I think, is that it is a chance for me to heal. I very much feel like God is tearing down a lot of things in my life, dredging out hidden idols, and asking me to lean fully upon his grace. At IVLI, God showed me that my greatest strength as a leader is my heart. God also showed me that it is also my greatest weakness, and that it is in need of some major care. Chemistry has nothing to do with my heart; it is a purely intellectual pursuit. So, I do chemistry graduate work while God what he does best: restore. God is teaching me what I have always wanted to teach others: God is more interested in our hearts than what we do.
Americans are driven people. Our culture is always looking for the bigger, better, cooler, more extreme, more intense thing. Our success is based on our achievements. We live the first 18 years of our life waiting for our high school graduation. But before you even make it there, from your sophomore year of high school, you are expected to start planning for college. Before you even take your last set of finals, you are supposed to know exactly where you are going to go to school, and of course, the only reason you are going to college is to get a degree in a certain area so that you grow up to be what you always wanted. Hooray! You've made it into college. Now you just have 4 more years until you get to go get a stellar internship or go to graduate school! But of course, along the way, you know that you have to publish papers, get into this society in order to be accepted there. Hooray, I've made it to grad school! Now I've just got 5 (or more...) more years until I can get a job. I have to impress my advisor, I have to join this society, I have to crank out this number of papers, and I have to meet this person and this person and go to this conference so I can meet that potential employer and get that job!
We are always focused on the next thing. We are consumed with the future--and American Christianity is not exempt from this. We are focused on milestones. That first step to find a church. That moment when someone makes a choice to follow Jesus. The moment when one breaks down and confesses a "great and hideous" sin. And, of course, that Call to Missions. We know that phrase in that verse in Matthew: "Go, and make disciples of all nations." We know it well.
As two wonderful people have pointed out to me as I've been wrestling with this whole idea over the past two months, the verb is more accurately translated as "as you go". We make calling this big, huge thing. We make calling out to be something you do in the future, that until God sends fire or something, or if you have the perfect set of skills to do church/ministry/mission work, you don't have A Calling. Os Guinness reminds us that "[o]ur primary calling as followers of Christ is by him, to him, and for him. First and foremost we are called to Someone (God), not to something (such as motherhood, politics, or teaching) or to somewhere (such as the inner city or Outer Mongolia)." Our Call is to follow Jesus. And I don't mean that one moment when you become a Christian for the first time and call yourself a follower of Jesus. I mean follow in every sense of the word. Follow is not a destination. Follow is not a moment. Follow is a sequence of moments. It is inclusive not just of your future, your Sundays and your Wednesdays, your job, your college choice, what church you belong to (besides, the church is merely a local expression of the Body of Christ; that's a cool post for another time). Following is inclusive of the minutes, of the seconds that you live and breathe now, and our Call is to love Jesus, and to be his hands and his feet, his eyes and his ears, and his pinkies and his elbows now. I might even say that we have to learn how to be his pinkies and his elbows before we learn how to be his eyes and his ears, and we have to learn how to be his eyes and his ears before we can be his hands and his feet (though I'm sure we learn them all in tandem to some degree).
And we will fail. We will fail at following. Not just in those "big" ways, when we confess our unchecked greed, our unbounded sexuality that we have been denying God's say in. We will fail at following. We fail when we don't trust Jesus to be enough for us. To steal a phrase from the lead singer of Tenth Avenue North, we live in a world of cheap thrills. We fail when we replace Jesus' sustaining grace and power and love with the cheap thrills this world offers us. The "big" failures are not the problems. The addictions to pornography, the drive to accumulate wealth at any cost, the consuming need to have a significant other at all times--those are not the problems. The problem is our tendency, as inherently sinful people, to deny in our daily moments that Jesus is enough for all our needs. We fail when we choose our own ways of meeting our needs--for affirmation, for intimacy, for success, for security, instead of trusting Jesus and what he has to offer us and what he calls us to do in our moments.
I remember one Retreat of Silence I had at IVLI after a particularly challenging week. We had gone on our outtrip to Mackinac, and God had shown me more of himself, and more of myself. I was rather a mess. I had a conversation with Jesus that went something like this:
Nothing you could do could ever make me love you less, because you have followed me.
But I can't even follow right!
Don't you think I know that? :)
And so I spent the rest of that ROS learning how to rest with Jesus, in the way you rest with a significant other. When you rest on the couch or in bed together, you don't justify yourselves to each other. You just rest with them. Regardless of how you yelled at each other that day, or neglected each other that week, when you cuddle with each other, you focus on just being with them. And you find the grace in each others' arms.
So before we follow Jesus across the ocean, we have to learn how to stay. We have to learn how to stay when nothing makes sense and the path seems to be going nowhere--or even in the wrong direction. God leads by steps, and we can't tell him what those steps are. This goes against everything our culture tells us: plan for the future now, otherwise you'll never get anywhere. We have to learn how to follow in our moments before we can follow Jesus in our futures. Following is not a goal. Following requires being a disciple. Disciples are not made. Disciples are. Even when Jesus' twelve original disciples were being dense, they were still disciples. The path in the verse I started this blog with is not the goal or the point; the path is not what matters. What matters is that we walk in it. Discipleship is not a goal. Discipleship happens along the way.
For me, personally, I no longer understand why I am in graduate school for chemistry. And that is frustrating to me--even though I now remember that I asked for it when I surrendered my plans to the Living God, time and time again. I'm learning how to live in the reality that God really has removed any sense of right to the control of my life, to be content with that, to surrender each step, to trust God's faithfulness. I'm learning how grad school might just be a grace period. A chance to learn how discipline forms rhythms of work and rest, and a chance for me to not worry about that next step. To realize that I've been blessed with a job that pays me sufficiently, that has flexible hours, and that by definition is exploratory. Most importantly, though, I think, is that it is a chance for me to heal. I very much feel like God is tearing down a lot of things in my life, dredging out hidden idols, and asking me to lean fully upon his grace. At IVLI, God showed me that my greatest strength as a leader is my heart. God also showed me that it is also my greatest weakness, and that it is in need of some major care. Chemistry has nothing to do with my heart; it is a purely intellectual pursuit. So, I do chemistry graduate work while God what he does best: restore. God is teaching me what I have always wanted to teach others: God is more interested in our hearts than what we do.
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