Richard Foster writes in his book, “Prayer”
“We are not quite sure what holds us back [from praying]. Of course, we are busy with work and family obligations, but that is only a smoke screen. Our busyness seldom keeps us from eating or sleeping or making love.” (p. 7)
You know what they say, “actions speak louder than words.” (And when “they” say it, you know it’s true!). Following up on the last post on this subject where I wrote about the fact that we talk about prayer, but we are not quite as good at living it out, this brings us to another great question:
What makes prayer so hard? Or, perhaps a better question is why is it less important to us than eating and sleeping or even things like working out and making love? Of course there are a lot of reasons we could put forth here but for me the main one is this: Prayer does not feel productive.
You see, recently I have realized how addicted I have become to being productive. This is an example where I have let the cultures values overtake my values as a Christ follower. It’s pretty bad, I feel like I always have to be doing something. Sitting around and not working on a task is not something that I do very often. There is always another thing to do for church, another e-mail to answer or another website to update.
Stopping all I do to pray feels so unproductive. It seems to me that if we are measuring the productivity of prayer by the worlds standards, we’ll find that it is not very productive at all. In fact, this quote does not really apply completely as I often will now go without eating lunch during the day and will often go to bed late at night when I have to be up early in the morning (I am currently writing this post at 1:00 am and have an alarm set at 6:00 to head off to work).
So, for me, the struggle I have with prayer is often (but not limited to) the fact that it does not feel productive. I guess it’s kind of like reverse laziness or something.
What about you? What is your biggest reason for not praying? What is your biggest struggle for making prayer part of your daily routine?
Lord, for some reason, prayer is not easy. It is totally counter-cultural to our world with says you are valuable when you are producing. Please teach us how to slow down and sit with you in moments of quiet prayer. Lord, teach us to pray…
Next post – Prayer as Spiritual Formation
Wes said...
1I just came across your blog last week and appreciate your tackling this prayer thing headon. Euegene Peterson (in The Contemplative Pastor??) says the pastors most important job is to teach the church how to pray. The hard thing about this, is that I don’t do this very well in my own life. As I have been thinking about prayer, this unproductive issue has came to mind. Thanks for sharing your struggles and thoughts.
Wes
07/13/06 2:39 PM | Comment Link
David said...
2I agree entirely that our need to be productive is perhaps the main reason why we do not pray as much as we should — to be more honest, why I do not pray as much as I should. How we do break out of that trap? I wonder if the analogy to “making love” might not be apropos here. Why make love? Because we want to, because the other person is important, because we love. I sure hope we don’t simply because we want to “produce a child.” There is a relation between two partners that in a way reflects the relation between the human and God, at least in the sense that we are in a dialogical relationship to God and prayer is how we consummate that relationship.
07/13/06 4:09 PM | Comment Link
Todd said...
3Wes, thanks for stopping by. I love that book by Peterson. he’s such a challange to read because it makes me realize how far i fall short on this stuff. but we’re all learning and growing…
dave, i get your point, but i don’t think i meant to imply that prayer was about being productive (is that what i did). i think the point of making love actually works great beacuse it implies ultimate intimacy between two people. without taking the illustration too far for obvious reasons, i think prayer with God is a great example of that. i pray, not because i want to be productive or produce something but because i desire to be in communion with God. So, perhaps from that perspective the analogy of making love is helpful.
make sense?
07/13/06 5:32 PM | Comment Link