Posted by Justin Mulwee in Confessions & Personal | 2 Comments
Uncensored Prayer #1
I want publish more things that sort of document how people are wrestling with God. For one thing, it lets people who wrestle with God (most of us) know that they aren’t crazy. Or if they are crazy, at least they’re in good company.
To that end, I’m starting a series called uncensored prayer, and it’s exactly what it sounds like. Written prayers that don’t try to sound holy and are more concerned with being honest than with saying the right thing. If you feel so inclined, please send me one. In the mean time, it’s only fair that I start it off with one of my own.
Dear God, sometimes I feel that there is nothing more to say to you. I fail at my goals and commitments, I ask for your help, your presence to resolve the situation, but get none. No sign of you. I feel like we just keep disappointing each other.
I’ve been having trouble praying lately because I don’t have anything to say. Frequently, I pray and the apparent result is… nothing. Emptiness. The feeling that it was a waste of time in the first place. It’s like I regret praying. Sometimes, anyway. There are other times when I do feel your presence. What frustrates me is the unpredictability.
I’m desperate for you, though. Really I am. Sometimes in bed I reach my hand out, literally reach it out, hoping that I will somehow be able to get your help if I stretch out my hand. I remember walking down the street at Spring Arbor late at night, and I closed my eyes and put my hand out. I told you I wanted you to lead me. I waited in silence and all sincerity, waiting to feel a phantom hand slip into mine and lead me, blind, down the road. And I really thought you would do it. But you didn’t. I felt so empty when you didn’t.
Last week I fasted all day, praying in silence, waiting for you to speak to me. To give me some insight, some comfort, or even just the faintest hint of your presence. I felt nothing, and after a day of fasting and prayer, I felt robbed.
Is there some kind of trick to getting what I need from you? Or am I just supposed to do nothing and wait? A relationship with you really isn’t like my other relationships. I know what to expect from my friends, my family. But you’re a mystery. Which is great, in theory, I just wish you wouldn’t go all mysterious mode when I need you the most.
Look, I know you don’t owe me anything. I believe you are a good person and I’m sure you have your reasons. But sometimes you make no sense to me. I want to be angry at you, but I can’t be for long, because I know if there’s anybody doing anything wrong here, it’s me. But I don’t need validation. What I need is you.
Thanks, Justin – both for an insightful series idea, and a genuinely moving prayer.
Hello Justin,
Your experiences are all too real and familiar. I wish I were able to send helpful thoughts of my own to you. However….
I very recently stumbled upon Henri Nouwen and have been reading his book “Reaching Out – The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life” …and after reading your “uncensored prayer” I felt I had to share a couple of his thoughts with you. His writings have become a comfort for me.
Nouwen explains… and please forgive my sad paraphrasing here…
Our problem in failing to feel or hear God in our lives, even with sincere prayers and in our sometimes desperate reaching out, comes from our own human limits, those limits which obviously “God is beyond….”
Nouwen, page 126
“Although at exceptional moments we may be overwhelmed by a deep sense of God’s presence in the center of our solitude and in the midst of the space we create for others, more often than not we are left with the painful sense of emptiness and can only experience God as the absent God.”
Nouwen, page 128
“The spiritual life is, first of all, a patient waiting, that is, a waiting in suffering (patior = to suffer), during which the many experiences of unfulfillment remind us of God’s absence. But it also is a waiting in expectation which allows us to recognize the first signs of the coming God in the center of our pains. The mystery of God’s presence, therefore, can be touched only by a deep awareness of his absence. It is in the center of our longing for the absent God that we discover his footprints, and realize that our desire to love God is born out of the love with which he has touched us. In the patient waiting for the loved one, we discover how much he has filled our lives already.”
Nouwen has a passage so similar to one of yours here, where he says “we can stretch out our arms to our God” at the same time he says “we will never be fully free from loneliness and hostility.” Nouwen, page 130-131
Nouwen, pages 128-129
By touching the center of our solitude, we sense that we have been touched by loving hands. By watching carefully our endless desire to love, we come to the growing awareness that we have been loved first, and that we can offer intimacy only because we are born out of the intimacy of God himself.”
There is so much more that I found real and comforting, even if somewhat “non-intellectual” and based on “unproven assumptions” as friends might say.
Peace
Leanne