I’m incredibly ashamed of my writing output this month – only three blogs in the past twenty days.  Life is forcing me, no matter how hard I fight it, to face the fact that I can’t do everything.  Each passing days brings me closer to my wedding (December 15th, if you’re keeping score at home) while simultaneously dropping a heap of matrimony-related tasks into my lap.  At the same time, my workload at church has been on the rise.  All while I’m trying to complete the final pre-publication proofreading of my book.  Unfortunately, blogging’s been lost in the shuffle.  And, as much as I hate to admit it, a prayer time or two have slipped through the cracks as well (but in my defense, I almost always try to make up for them). 

No matter how busy life may be, though, I’ve still been privileged to see God at work around me.  This past Saturday, a dear friend and coworker, the high school minister at my church, got married to his beautiful fiancé.  It sounds cliché, but there’s no other way around this:  it was awesome!  Everything you'd want at a September wedding – dancing, BBQ, and bride and groom bobbleheads.  What more could you ask for? 

While he’s gone on his honeymoon, I’ve been lucky enough to be his fill-in, leading our weekly youth service on Sunday nights.  Last Sunday, I began a new series entitled “Re:Focus,” a four-week examination of the Lord’s Prayer.  Over the past month, God has literally been blowing my mind with those five verses from Matthew chapter six, the ones I’m (hypothetically) praying three times each day.  I may have learned this prayer as a kid in Sunday School, but believe me, this stuff is not for the faint-of-heart.  This prayer is dangerous; powerful; radical – it has the power to totally turn our lives upside down.  Are we really brave (or stupid) enough to ask God to forgive us the way we forgive others?  Can we honestly devote ourselves to seeing God’s will be done over our own?  Will we approach the Creator of the entire universe, his truth filling unseen galaxies, and call Him our father?  This prayer is wild and beautiful.

In youth service this past Sunday, we spent the entire night discussing the ramifications of four words, “Our Father, in Heaven.”  These must be one of the most powerful phrases in the entire Bible.  The God of creation – of the Egyptian plagues, Ezekiel’s dry bones, Christ’s resurrection and Pentecost – allows us to approach Him as our father.  He is powerful, holy and righteous; we are weak, depraved and broken; and yet, as Galatians 4 reminds us, He chooses to adopt us as His own.  All who follow God’s commands, Christ teaches in Matthew 12, are children of the most high.  Paul, in his letter to the church at Ephesus, writes that we’re not only adopted into God’s family, but He considers us his “masterpiece, created anew in Christ Jesus.”  The Hubble space telescope has taken some of the most awe-inspiring photographs of our universe, but the God who created it all calls us His masterpiece.  Wow!

At twenty-seven years old, I still struggle with my identity – in fact, it seems to be almost constantly under assault.  On one side, society preaches that I’ll never be accepted or loved until I make more money; buy a nicer car; write a successful book; starting moving up the social ladder.  From the opposite flank comes the evil one, whispering that I’m a disappointment to God, unlovable and irredeemable.  But in the midst of it all, the Savior’s voice rises above the din, teaching me to pray – “Our Father” – reminding me that no matter what claims the world or the evil one may try to make upon my identity, the Creator is the only one capable of telling who I am.  I love how John, in his first letter, emphatically hits this point.  “The Father… loves us so much that we are actually God’s children,” he writes, “And that’s what we are.” 

My prayer for you today is that you get a little taste of the Father’s love, to allow Him to tell you who you truly are – His beloved son or daughter. 

Honestly, I don’t think my life has ever been as busy as it is now.  In three months, I’m getting married.  And while this is sure to be a joyous occasion, the planning of said event hasn’t always been so – nearly all of my free time (and to be fair, Janie’s as well) from now till December 15th has a designated wedding task assigned to it:  making centerpieces, renting tablecloths, corresponding with caterers.  It’s enough to make your head spin.  This is why people elope.

At the same time, I’m also trying to put the finishing touches on my first book, a project nearly three years in the making.  A few weeks ago, I was excited to receive a galley from my publishing company – an electronic version of my book used for final editing.  My task is simple:  reread the entire thing, catching and correcting any last minute mistakes or formatting errors before its sent to the publisher.  It’s frustratingly slow going; I can see the finish line, but it still seems miles ahead.  I’m trying to enjoy the process, but at this point, I’d much rather just be done.   

And to top it all off, September’s prayer challenge keeps grabbing my attention, three times every day.  I’ve missed a few of my designated prayer times – usually the 6:09 AM one – but I’ve hit the mark much more than I’ve missed it.  And in the process, I’ve been pleasantly surprised to find that these times of prayer are much more refreshment than duty, a cool drink of water amid a desert of to-do lists.  It’s a mystery, one that I can’t fully explain, but it serves to reason that spending time with the Prince of Peace would make ones life more tranquil – after all, He is the one who calms the storm.  And Lord knows, I need all the calming I can get right now.     

Challenge:  To intentionally pause my life, three times every day, to engage in prayer. 

Why:  To encourage an ongoing conversation with God that results in a deepening and
           ever-growing faith. 

-----

                                  “The great beast rolled over on his side so that Lucy feel, half sitting 
                              and half lying between his front paws.  He bent forward and just touched her 
                                         nose with his tongue.  She gazed up into his wise face.

                                                             ‘Welcome child,’ he said.

                                                       'Aslan,’ said Lucy, ‘you’re bigger.’

                                       ‘That is because you are older, little one,’ answered he.

                                                             ‘Not because you are?’

                                    ‘I am not.  But every year you grow, you will find me bigger.’”

                                                                       _C.S. Lewis
                                                                    Prince Caspian


The Christian faith is ripe with disciplines, practices that help usher us into the presence of God.  For thousands of years, followers of Christ have fasted, meditated on scripture, tithed and practiced a weekly Sabbath day of rest as a way of drawing nearer to their Creator.  If this yearlong blog has revealed anything about me, it’s that I love a good challenge – and these Christian disciplines offer just that.  For most of my life I’ve engaged them, with varying degrees of success, and even now continue to daily practice many of them.  Except Sabbath rest – I suck at that.  And prayer.

I know many Christians to whom prayer is a lifeline, a practice that offers peace amid chaos, reason in a world seemingly devoid of it.  Their first inclination is to take their joys and their successes, their heartache and their failures to the feet of their heavenly Father.  Their prayers are full of passion, angst, and blood – they’re real and powerful.  Mine, by comparison, feel hollow; contrived; weak.  I’ve experienced the spiritual enlightenment of fasting, the wisdom of scripture and the gift of tithing – and yet prayer has perpetually remained a profound mystery, a power source I just couldn’t seem to tap into.  Somewhere along the way, I began to accept the fact that I’m not “good” at prayer, treating it like a talent I just wasn’t born with instead of a discipline to be learned.  And that attitude, perhaps more than any other, has stunted by spiritual growth.

I could try to affix the blame of my lackadaisical prayer life on any number of factors, but the truth of the matter is I just don’t like talking.  In high school, my father (unofficially, since he’s a pastor and not a psychologist) diagnosed me as an extroverted introvert – I can carry a conversation and engage with others when necessary, but my soul tends to value thoughts more highly than speech, listening over talking, and silence above the buzz of a crowded room.  As often happens, God brought a woman into my life that, at least in regards to conversation, is my polar opposite.  Get her in a room with the right people and the conversation flies back and forth like a Chinese Ping-Pong match.  It’s dizzying.  And while on more than one occasion her penchant toward talking has driven me crazy, I’ve always admired the way she prays.  Her conversations with God are genuine, honest, like He’s in the very room with us (which, I guess technically, He is).  Her prayers have the natural ebb-and-flow of conversation, never rushed or forced.  Mine, on the other hand, resemble a break-in:  I rush in, grab what I need, and hurry out before the owner of the home realizes I’m there.

In the past year, I’ve gotten into the habit of listening to audiobooks as I run.  This morning, while listening to a section of Prince Caspian, the fourth book in C.S. Lewis’ classic series The Chronicles of Narnia, I had an epiphany.  In this scene, the Pevensie children – Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy, the heroes of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe – have been called back to the land of Narnia by the power of a magic horn.  While it’s been only one Earth-year since their last visit, many thousands of years have passed in the history of Narnia.  The children go days without seeing the great lion, Aslan, when Lucy is awakened from her sleep by a strange noise.  She wanders away from camp and, amid a band of trees, finds Aslan.  After embracing, she notices that the lion’s larger than she remembered.  She assumes, out loud, that this is because Aslan has grown older.  The great lion, however, patiently corrects her.  “I am not (older),” he answers, turning to face Lucy.  “Every year you grow,” he explains, “you will find me bigger.” 

As so it is with mature followers of Christ – as they grow, the great God they serve appears even more loving, powerful, and involved in their lives than He was even the year before.  If we’re progressing in our faith, this necessarily must be true.  But notice that Aslan makes a distinction between “growing” and “aging” – getting older doesn’t necessarily mean you are growing.  In fact, in the Chronicles of Narnia mythology, the oldest Pevensie sister, Susan, grows farther away from Aslan as she ages, until, as a grown woman, she no longer believes in Narnia.  Lucy sees Aslan as larger, more powerful, more righteous, because she is growing; her faith is expanding by leaps and bounds (and what Aslan asks her to do after this brief encounter pushes her faith even further).  As the writer of the book of Hebrews insinuates, there is a time for spiritual milk, to be infantile in the faith, but there also comes a time when we must make the switch to solid food, to take personal interest and responsibility for the state of our spiritual lives. My prayer life is milk, and a grown-man can’t survive on it – it’s slowing my growth and causing my God to remain small.  That is no longer acceptable.  It’s high time I grow up.    

Naturally, September’s challenge will address this deficiency head-on, prompting me to intentionally practice (and thereby strengthen) my weakest discipline – prayer.  In the process, I expect it to allow not only my faith to grow, but my God as well.  As with all my other challenges, I have a specific plan lined out.  First, since I find myself struggling to know what to pray for, I’ll be using the model passed on from Jesus in Matthew chapter six.  After being asked by His disciples to teach them to pray, Christ uttered the famous words now known as The Lord’s Prayer.  I’ll use the five verses, from “Our Father” all the way to “deliver us from evil” as a guide, adding in more personal requests along the way.  And, because I often forget to pray throughout the day, I’m setting three alarms.  When they sound –  at 6:09AM, 12:09PM, and 6:09PM – I’ll drop what I’m currently doing, retreat to a quiet place, and converse with my Creator.  These times also roughly correlate to the three meals of the day, a subtle reminder that, as Christ says in the book John, He is our “real food and drink.”  (I know what you’re thinking – “yeah, yeah, that’s good and all, but why nine minutes after the hour?”  There’s a perfectly good explanation.  Christ’s model prayer starts in Matthew 6:9 – so that explains 6:09 AM and PM – and, well, 12:09 just happens to follow the pattern.) 

One of my favorite songwriters, Bill Mallonee, remarks in his song Starry Eyed that “some prayers are made without a sound.”  I totally agree, but, at least for this month, I plan on making mine heard, loud and clear, at least three times a day. 

A little preview for September's new challenge. 
Look for the first blog in the coming days.