PRAYING FOR HIS PRESENCE
Excerpted from “Beloved Dust” by Jamin Goggin and Kyle Strobel.
Published by Nelson Books, an imprint of Thomas Nelson. Copyright 2014.
I was doing all the right things. I was reading my Bible
regularly. I was enrolled in several Bible classes. I was living a life of
service. In fact, I was leading a ministry caring for the homeless in the city.
Yet something was amiss. I had lived this way for several years, and all the
feedback I received was positive. This must be what it means to be a faithful
follower of Christ. This is what the Christian life is all about.
Yet something about it didn’t feel right. In truth, I was
flat bored. I didn’t feel inclined to rebel or “fall away” from the faith; I
simply felt a dissonance in my walk with God. I couldn’t quite put my finger on
it. I was tired of the “to-dos,” but I wasn’t sure why. My faith life felt
hollow and tedious. What was going on?
During that season of spiritual malaise, I was invited on
a retreat where I was “forced” to spend extended time in prayer. Not prayer for
others. Not prayer with others. Silent, solitary, unscripted,
deprogrammed prayer. I felt like a kid forced to play a sport he knew
nothing about. I was fumbling in the dark, trying to remember the rules, all
the while forgetting to play and have fun. It felt awkward, shallow and forced.
I felt lost.
After about an hour of silence, alone in the mountains,
God and me, I realized that the dissonance I felt was a surface marker of a
deeper reality. I discovered within my heart a profound disconnect in my
relationship with God. As I prayed, I realized I wasn’t really sure who God
was, and for that matter I wasn’t sure who I was. I tried to lean into all of
the theological truths I knew, but they offered no help in the deafening
silence of lonely prayer. In that moment of naked honesty, God provided a
turning point.
Before that point I had certainly prayed. I prayed for
friends in need. I prayed God would take away my sin and guard me from future
temptation. I prayed God would give me the desires of my heart. All of these
prayers were conducted, unfortunately, with little relational attachment, and
functioned more like a phone transaction with a somewhat friendly but unknown
customer service representative. What I realized on that retreat was that, in a
very real sense, I had rarely truly prayed.
As Eugene Peterson states, “We discover early on that we
can pretend to pray, use the words of payer, practice the forms of prayer,
assume postures of prayer, acquire a reputation for prayer and never pray. Our
‘prayers,’ so called, are a camouflage to cover up a life of non-prayer.” I had
been living a Christian life of “non-prayer,” and now I knew it. Prayer had
become another thing to do. It was another bullet point on the list of “should”
and “oughts” for good Christian behavior. At its
best, it had been dressed up as a spiritual discipline: as one practice on the
list of many that mature believers are supposed to engage in. As a result,
prayer became a place to be good.
Prayer became a place to perform.
Prayer became a place to get things done.
If I was honest, even those “non-prayer prayers” were few
and far between compared to reading my Bible or engaging in other Christian
activities. That was for one simple reason: prayer did not offer an obvious
return on investment. I didn’t feel smarter as a result of prayer. I didn’t
feel better about myself as I prayed. I didn’t feel like I was getting much
done. So I turned to other things like service and church attendance to gain a
sense of accomplishment.
All of this betrayed a deeper and more insidious reality
in my life. My desire for a felt experience of self-fulfillment was the driving
force of my spiritual activity. The Christian life had become more about
looking and feeling like a Christian than abiding in relationship with God. I
was operating in the realm of seeming, not being.
However, if the Christian life is most fundamentally
about being with God, then prayer cannot be merely another activity on the list
of good Christian behavior. Prayer must be a way of life. But this is not what
I had signed up for. I thought I believed Christianity was about having a
relationship with God, but in that moment, alone before Him, I came to realize
that deep down I didn’t truly desire God’s presence.
Claiming that Christianity is about a relationship with
God taps into the provocative truth that God gives Himself. The solution to the
pain, suffering, evil and vice that plagues our world is nothing other than the
presence of the Creator. God’s presence brings healing. This is such a big
idea, and its implications are so far reaching, that we often accept something
less instead. Rather than embracing the wildly provocative truth that God has
given Himself to us, we come to believe He functions primarily to give us other
gifts.