Former Blackout Artist

Teach me your way, LORD, that I may rely on your faithfulness; give me an undivided heart, that I may fear your name. – Psalm 86:11

“As a pastor, I was charged with, among other things, teaching people to pray—helping them to give voice to the entire experience of being human, and to do it both honestly and thoroughly. I found that it was not as easy as I expected. Getting started is easy enough. The impulse to pray is deep within us, at the very center of our created being, and so practically anything will do to get us started—“Help!” and “Thanks!” are our basic prayers. But honesty and thoroughness don’t come quite as spontaneously.

Faced with the prospect of conversation with a holy God who speaks worlds into being, it is not surprising that we have trouble. We feel awkward and out of place: “I’m not good enough for this. I’ll wait until I clean up my act and prove that I am a decent person.” Or we excuse ourselves on the grounds that our vocabulary is inadequate: “Give me a few months—or years!—to practice prayers that are polished enough for such a sacred meeting. Then I won’t feel so stuttery and ill at ease.

My usual response when presented with these difficulties is to put the Psalms in a person’s hand and say, “Go home and pray these.” A common response of those who do what I ask is surprise—they don’t expect this kind of thing in the Bible.

We tend to think that prayer is what good people do when they are doing their best. It is not. We suppose that there must be an “insider” language that must be acquired before God takes us seriously in our prayer. There is not. Prayer is elemental. It is the means by which we get everything in our lives out in the open before God.” ~ Eugene Peterson

“Prayers are not a tool for doing or getting, but for being and becoming.”
– Eugene Peterson