"Just Receive"

Dear WRC,

The other day I was on a walk with Finn. I was spending the day fasting so I took my lunch break as an opportunity to walk through the neighborhood and pray. My prayers, though, were jumping all over the place. The prayers were coming out rapid fire and leaping from one thing to the next. Have you ever had that, where you can’t seem to pray in a straight line? As I turned the corner by Washington School I found myself praying in rapid succession for all of this: Cyndie who had just driven past me and stopped for a moment to chat; Edna whose house I was passing; Oden the German Shepherd who also lives on that corner (and his humans); my kids, their teachers, the other students, and some of the issues I know of in the schools these days; and all of that was an aside from whatever it was I had been praying about as I walked up the hill from Dunkin. In that moment I felt my anxiety rising, not receding. As I prayed, I wasn’t handing these concerns over to God but finding more and more to be concerned about. Something seemed off, and the moment I named my praying as anxious and frenetic, I realized that it felt familiar

I had prayed like this before, a couple years ago as I began a silent retreat. I was coming out of a really busy season and was nervous about how it would go, if I’d do it right, and if I’d truly meet God in that space. The lesson I learned on that retreat was to stop and just receive the reality of God’s presence with me. God was always there; it was me who had run away. The peace and rest and joy that I found in that space was remarkable, and I found my praying relax and slow down, too.  I guess I needed to learn that lesson again.

I often think that the way to be faithful to Jesus’ command to not worry about anything is to carefully lay out all of the concerns and worries that I have in prayer and volley them over the God’s side of the court. Now, if there was ever a place to do an anxiety dump like this, it would definitely be in prayer (check out Philippians 4:6-7), but sometimes I find that praying a laundry list like this actually just makes me more anxious. Trying to control all these situations through prayer, I’m actually just reinforcing my anxiety.

I’m reminded of something Pastors Keith and Wes both pointed us to at the Ash Wednesday service this year: it’s really easy to take up our Spiritual practices and a life of faith as means of controlling God and the situations around us, instead of places where we are broken open to God’s presence and path.

I wonder how often in my praying I am still holding onto control over things and just demanding God work it out according to what I think would be best. No wonder my anxiety was rising on that walk! Prayer is enjoying and responding to God’s presence. Whatever I was doing, it wasn’t prayer.

I guess I have some work to do this Lent. There is more to give up; there is so much more to receive. God is right there, with you always. When is the last time you took a few moments to just receive God’s presence? To delight in your creator and redeemer? To feel God smiling upon you and return it with your own?

Writing this letter has been an invitation for me to take a break from just listing things at God that I want him to do something about and instead receive the gift of his loving presence. My hope is that reading it may offer you the same invitation.

In the Sermon on the Mount, shortly before telling us not to worry, Jesus has this to say about prayer: “The world is full of so-called prayer warriors who are prayer-ignorant. They’re full of formulas and programs and advice, peddling techniques for getting what you want from God. Don’t fall for that nonsense. This is your Father you are dealing with, and he knows better than you what you need” (Matthew 6:7-8, The Message).

In Christ,

Pastor Andy