are the words we read in Isaiah 1:18 (KJV). Prayer can be exactly this: reasoning together. We do it all day long, with ourselves and with the people in our lives. We may not give it this name, but we are always thinking and deciding, discussing and arguing about ideas. Reasoning is part of prayer. Prayer can be the questions we ask God, and when we allow ourselves to listen, it can be the questions God asks us. “Have you ever stopped to think about it this way?” asks the Holy Spirit. Faith is not a blind venture; it is based on serious thought and understanding. On reasoning. On reason.
For anyone—such as me, to take one random example—whose first experience of prayer was limited to asking God for things, there is much to learn. And that’s the good news. The challenge of learning to pray can get me out of bed some mornings. Imagine how boring and lifeless would be any practice that was not dynamic, multifaceted, and richly textured.
Perhaps a useful starting place might be to think about what it is we do in prayer, to help us move toward an understanding of living in a state of being with our Heavenly Father. Many Christians know the acronym ACTS, which offers one good description of prayer: Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, and Supplication. The order of the letters recommends the sequence we might pray.
First, we adore. Think of the bride and groom standing at the altar on their wedding day. It’s not hard to imagine a bit of adoring as the first order of business, the natural impulse, automatic and exactly right. So it is that we are made to love and adore our Savior. But, the argument arises, marriage is a human relationship, not the connection of God and his child. True, it’s not; but human love can help us know the nature of adoring, caring, and blessing, so long as we do not confuse comparison with definition. We cannot think of relationship with God without referencing our experiences in human love. And so we do compare, always with the understanding that it is the same and it is different, that the two are alike and unalike, one a shadow image and the other the real thing.
In this sequence of prayer, we start out by adoring, knowing adoration as a feeling we have for those we love the most. And is this automatic? It is not. Or, not in my experience. It’s hardly an exaggeration to say that it took me approximately forever to reach the place where I even knew what adoration of God could be. It has truly been a long time coming. And how did I get there? I prayed. I asked God to give me love for him. I prayed the truth; I prayed the very words, “I do not love you. Would you give me love for you?” And he did. There is nothing we can do apart from him. We cannot even love him. But what a blessing to be given access to the experience of adoration.
I have found that hymns of praise foster my adoring best of all. The music primes my heart, allowing words to penetrate my consciousness, enlarge my loving. I hear, “Angels, help us to adore him, / Ye behold him face to face; / Sun and moon bow down before him; / Dwellers all in time and space,” and I glimpse heaven—angels, planets, and images beyond my knowing.
Sometimes, art can be the way in. Every public library in the United States has books of Christian paintings. Steal an hour. Take one off the shelf and sit with holy images, allowing them to touch you. Let God surprise your heart in worship in the middle of the reading room.
Adoration is my favorite part of prayer, the part that now resembles no other aspect of my life, the part that doesn’t leave me second-guessing or dissatisfied. Taking certain pleasure in something outside ourselves feels wonderful, and when that something is definitively perfect, there’s no downside. When we worship and adore anything or anybody who is not God, we are always shushing hushed but niggling, slight misgivings about the object of our worship. It sort of takes the edge off. But when we worship God, we adore perfection.
The second part of the ACTS prayer is confession. Here, even more clearly, we experience ourselves to be entirely dependent upon the grace of God. We pray that the Holy Spirit will convict us of sin, in order that we can confess. I know no more frightening human condition than for a person to think he is just fine when that is not the case, to be unaware of danger, which, if recognized, could easily be avoided. A blindfolded man runs toward the cliff’s edge, laughing, saying he is fine. In our deepest beings, we must pray that God will show us the reality about ourselves, how fecklessly we run to peril.
I have a very simple exercise I do. It is modeled on the Daily Examen of Ignatius Loyola, which is a practice of prayerful reflection on the day in order to see God’s presence and discover his direction. In the evening, I sit in a quiet place with my eyes closed, and I review the events of the day. It is almost like watching a movie as I bring all of the day’s activities and interactions to mind. I watch this movie twice—the first time, on the lookout for all the ways I see God’s hand in what has happened; the second time, praying to see the instances of things I’ve thought, and said, and done that have not been pleasing to the Lord. The Holy Spirit brings to mind those things for which I need to ask forgiveness.
Confession seems to be a focus on the negative, for so sin surely is, but paradoxically, this is the path to peace. There is nothing lovelier in all the world than to feel regret and pain for something I have done and then have God obliterate all memory of that forgiven sin. Sins, fire-engine red, washed freshly-fallen-snow bright white. We misunderstand the Cross if we think Christ died to mute remembrance.
The T in ACTS, thanksgiving, is perhaps a bit more straightforward. The primary glitch in this regard is trying to give thanks in the middle of the muddle of our lives. On a bright sunny day with no work and everybody healthy, our thanks is at the ready. But give us stormy weather, deep-sorrow sadness, or pain in mind or body, and praise is sometimes hard to come by. I have discovered, though, that it is an extraordinary experience in the middle of a migraine to sing out hymns of thankfulness. The blessing in those moments is the miracle that as I sing my heart fills up with what is good, and pure, and peaceful. I might still have the pain, but it is not the only thing contained in that one moment. I often wonder if I would know God as I do if I didn’t have a migraine brain. Chronic, quirky, unpredictable, and disorienting migraines help keep me tethered to the Lord. I thank God for the agency of anything in life that draws me close to him.
If we wait for everything around us to be OK before we open up our hearts to praise, we will wait forever. The secret in life is to make a place for joy and thanksgiving no matter what the circumstance. “But that’s impossible,” you say. Of course it is. God traffics in the impossible all day. And if we are his children, so will we. Imagine a world where only the possible was possible. I wouldn’t want to live there.
Our ACTS prayer ends with supplication, an antique word that is our invitation to ask God’s blessing—for so very long, the first (and sometimes only) part in all my prayers. This aspect requires little explanation, except perhaps to say that there is nothing in the world we cannot ask God for. He is the One who says, “The very hairs of your head are all numbered” (Matthew 10:30 KJV). It is his will and pleasure that we come to him with every longing that there is. There is no part of daily life that we are not meant to bring to God in prayer.
I have a friend who has enlarged my thinking about prayers of supplication. This is a woman who has lived through a campaign of genocide, of ethnic cleansing, and she tells me she doesn’t want to ask God for anything that she can get from any other source—she’s thinking food, water, safety from being harmed—because she says if she gets that thing from some source other than God, then she will be inclined to worship that. She tells me she wants from God what one can get only from God. Me too. Basically. Only I don’t know what that is or how to ask for it. But I love the way her words have made me think about my prayers of petition. There’s the old saw: be careful what you ask for, you may get it. I thank God that he protects us from so many of our prayers, that he spares us by denying our requests. But it seems to me that my friend prays a holy prayer, one that will not be denied.
Gazing on God
ACTS
