Okay, take a deep breath, it’s time for quiet prayer with the Lord.
After the appointment this morning, I still haven’t finished with that project, and I did promise I would…
Wait Self, it’s not time for that now! This is your quiet time with Jesus. FOCUS.
Silence (for about 3 seconds)…
Oh my goodness, I never washed that soup pot last night! That’s going to be a mess… and before I get to that I’d better check and see if ____ ever sent me those files because I really need to get going on…
Hold on, that wasn’t supposed to be the prayer either! Let’s try again…
I’m not sure if this chronicle of prayer sounds relatable, but it is a game of tag I frequently play with myself whenever I want to really pray. It seems that we humans are destined to struggle with prayer, and to fight to keep from letting our prayer devolve into distractions – even if we’re aware and watching for them!
What I have found in prayer is that the more I focus on fighting the distractions, the more distractions crop up, and the more my prayer turns into a battle, with me left feeling like I’ve ‘failed’ by the end. But that is only my poor, limited, human perspective.
What is God seeing? Well, He wants to enjoy communion with us. Period. And distractions do prevent us from being receptive to God and His plan for communion with us. But the question is: should we postpone that intimacy with God until we’ve gotten a handle on our distractions?
A very wise priest once told me that, while distractions can disturb us, they never disturb the Lord. God could clear them up for us in a heartbeat. So why does He permit them to plague us?
God allows distractions to creep into our prayers so that we have a chance to prove our love for Him: in our persistence in prayer, and in our insistence on desiring to be united with the Lord in spite of all. It’s not easy, it’s not pretty, but that’s the long and the short of it: He wants us. Not the polished and focused version of ourselves as we’d like to be: He just wants us, as we really are, right now. And offering a prayer disrupted (even repeatedly) by distractions, during which we use our free will to continually refocus on Christ, is just such a rough but real offering.
It’s hard to pray in silence… but that’s okay. It might feel like a battleground. It is a battleground at times! It’s where we fight, and where we love God, but whatever happens (or doesn’t happen!) in prayer, we press us for the sake of the One Whom we know loves us.
___
Artwork: The Monk at Prayer, Edouard Manet (1865), Paris, France / PD-US
