The Unrecognized Potency of Prayer

Let’s start here. Think about this thought:

“Too often we have stripped our single greatest asset of its power and hobbled it to the degree that it has come to be viewed only as a pathetic last resort. Yet despite our incessant meddling, this asset nonetheless remains a first resort so potent that it never needs a last one. And that asset is prayer.”

Prayer. You know, through our own lack of understanding and discipline, we’ve granted prayer the characteristics associated with some antiquated religious monk living in some secluded monastery off in the woods. For us, prayer sits on the far fringes of life as some traditional nicety that we toy with when we’re not wrestling with bigger things. It might serve a purpose in life’s special moments, or in the midst of life’s most dire emergencies, but even then we’re not all that confident that it actually brings anything to either. To varying degrees we’ve rendered prayer as culturally outdated, logistically outmoded, a backburner endeavor, and far too simplistic to grapple with the monumental realities that are part of living in the 21st century.

But I would challenge all of that by saying this:

“I am convinced beyond words to convey that prayer is infinitely more than the mindless ranting of some poor, delusional soul talking to some imaginary friend in some imaginary place. Oh, to the contrary. Prayer is the manifest pleading of a soul worn raw that, by the simple act of prayer, unleashes untold forces that we can’t imagine that surge in a descent so massive and so inconceivably powerful that the ground of everything before them shakes. And in this descent lives are changed beyond recognition, nations are transformed beyond comprehension, and history is brought to its knees in the face of a God who says, “be healed.” That, my friend, is nothing of a delusional soul or imaginary friend or any other such nonsense.”

That is what prayer is. But let’s build on that. Consider this:

“How do I tell you what prayer is? It is everything that I need every time I kneel in the practice of it. It shakes the infinite alive and sets its armies afoot in defense of me. It will never run aground or find itself drowning in the waters of the adversity that I bring to it. Nothing it faces is insurmountable, for to think that such an adversary exists is to run a fool’s errand. It will shield me in its advance, it will beckon me to anticipate the miracles that it is about to wield, and in the midst of it all it calms me as it whispers, 'Be still and know that I am God.' And because of these reasons and a million more, I find prayer the single greatest place that I could ever imagine being.”

That’s what prayer is. And if that’s not what prayer is in your life, or if that’s not what your experience of prayer is, then you’ve missed one of the powerful things that we have the privilege of engaging in. We’ve settled for this slumlord existence of spiritual impoverishment when we can be spiritually rich in ways that give light, and energy, and meaning, and purpose to life.

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