It is interesting that the timing of my first post on my first real blog (xanga doesn't seem to count) comes at a time when it feels as though I am being born all over again. I have just graduated with my B. S. in Bible and B. Mus in Music Composition and am done with schooling for at least the forseeable future. My wife and I are moving; and life feels as though it is finally getting to a place of moderate stability (which is something we have greatly needed to recover from the last couple of years).
In the midst of all of these new beginnings, I'm beginning to rediscover my relationship with God and it is a beautiful thing. I have begun to read Phillip Yancey's book "Prayer: Does it Make Any Difference?" and it is beginning to deeply impact me. I think I have always held the presupposition that it is up to me to make my relationship with God work. This fed my whole desire to always do the right thing. But it's exhausting trying to constantly make a relationship with God work. Especially when the longing for intimacy is met with cold, empty space.
Yancey presents a different model for prayer which is one of the greatest conduits of a relationship with God. He suggests that prayer is the act of seeing reality from God's point of view. It is taking the time to reorient life and "Be still and know that I am God." He says, "Prayer has become for me much more than a shopping list of requests to present to God. It has become a realignment of everything. I pray to restore the truth of the universe, to gain a glimpse of the world, and of me, through the eyes of God." In regards to confession, he suggests that it is simply admitting to God (and even more so to ourselves), the reality of our lives as God already knows that it is.
This completely turns my ideas about prayer and a relationship with God on its head. Prayer is not the act of reaching out to God in hopes that He will do some of what I ask. It is the act of acknowledging that He is here, present in every moment, that He is reaching out to me with full knowledge of who I really am and ready and waiting for me to begin to see the world more from His point of view through simply living life through His eyes. Yancey points out an interesting fact about the tension between God's vastness and His immanence ... "A God unbound by our rules of time has the ability to invest in every person on earth." How incredible that one of the very things that makes God incomprehensible is the very thing that allows Him to take personal interest in us at every moment of the day.
It might have been a trite little children's song but the simple truth still remains. I am beginning to realize that though reading your Bible and praying are vastly infinite endeavors that are greatly misunderstood (at least by myself), but they are the avenues through which a relationship with God can occur. It may seem basic, but that is where I am. Being born again and again, every day into this new life in Christ and trying to figure out what in the world that means.
Monday, May 12, 2008
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