Thursday, December 07, 2006

An unexpected prayer...

These days I am having the most unexpected, amazing experience. I have always been a deep sleeper and have never required a nap during the day. Even if I have been out late the night before, I know once my head hits the pillow at night, I will not wake until morning. That hasn't been the case for the past few weeks. Each morning, some time in the early morning hours, I wake up in the middle of a prayer. Sometimes I am in the middle of the prayer, and sometimes I am just beginning my prayer. There will be a person on my mind, and I will pray for that person. I don't know how long this lasts because I don't look at the clock. In the past I have found that if I look at the clock after being woken up, I will focus on the time and worry about not being able to get back to sleep. And usually, I don't get back to sleep. Because of this, I have no idea how long these prayers last.

If I wake and no one is on my mind, I find myself praying the Lord's Prayer with the deepest sincerity and no loss for the words. Of course, I say the Lord's Prayer each Sunday and should have it down by heart, right? Well, yesterday morning in the car on the way to work, I thought I would just recite the Lord's Prayer to see if I could do it off the top of my head. To my surprise, I had to pause and search for the words. I was shocked. How could I not know the words if I have been praying them in church each Sunday and each morning in these unexpected prayers?

Growing up going to church regularly, I have always been around prayer. However, praying, whether out loud or to myself, was difficult for me. While praying to myself, I couldn’t organize my thoughts to pray what was in my heart. And while praying out loud, I was worried about saying the wrong thing or sounding strange, thus diverting my attention away from God. I finally just gave up on the whole idea of prayer. I had also given up on the whole idea of God. You see, I was attending a Christian College, and I just didn’t get into the hype of pop-Christianity. I hadn’t prayed in years, and, to be honest, didn’t really want to have anything to do with God. It wasn’t until I got the opportunity to study abroad that I started praying again. Money was tight, and I was doing all I could do just to pay my rent, buy books, and have enough left over to eat on. I wasn’t happy at the school where I was studying. I grew up and got all of my education in the same town, and I felt as though I was going to explode if I didn’t get out of there. So, I made a pact with God. I prayed a simple prayer explaining that if He allowed this study abroad to happen, I would never lose touch with Him again. He made it happen, and it was my turn to hold up my end of the pact. I found an empty sketch book in my father’s study and asked my father if I could have it to keep a journal while abroad. He consented, and I was on my way to a new life of writing abroad. I had no idea what was in store for me.

I have been keeping a journal for 14 years now. In the early years of my writing, I would simply write where I was and what I was doing at that moment. Although I really didn't like writing at the time, I was studying in London and wanted to keep a journal of my travels and experiences there. The early entries were actually pretty boring; they read like a daily planner of a travel agent. I also ended each entry with a little prayer of thanks in order to keep my pact with God. Seeing as how I didn’t really like praying to myself or writing, I thought it a good idea to combine these two activities I had promised I would do while overseas. Then I got the idea to write about my feelings while traveling to various places and experiencing varying situations. The entries then started to have a bit more color to them. A few years later, I started sprinkling the entries with thoughts and concerns about life. These concerns led me to my ending the entries with longer prayers. These mixed entries of experiences and prayers went on for several years. It wasn’t until I moved to Korea and stayed for an extended period of time that I stopped writing about experiences as frequently and focused more on the prayer.

During my time in Korea, I grew really tired of the same prayer jargon that I had learned to use from my childhood in church. I started just talking to God. I started talking to Him like He was a real person sitting right there with me reading each word on the page. I have to admit some of these entries weren’t the most pleasant passages to read. And, they certainly weren’t prayers I had been taught to pray in Vacation Bible School. At first I was afraid to write them. I felt like the wrath of God would come down hard on me for writing what I felt. Yet, I knew He knew how I felt anyway; I just needed to say it-or pray it. After writing such an enraged entry, I would slowly close my journal and with closed eyes just wait for something horrible to happen to me. It never did. As always, the same calm that had been there before my writing was there after. I just had a better understanding of my feelings. You see, God was speaking to me through my writing. Like some encrypted message shining through my tirade, God’s peaceful voice was there ironing all the wrinkles and filling the void. I could then go about my day not even thinking about what had just happened, but knowing deep down that I was going to be OK.

Today my journal entries are predominantly prayers. On occasion I will sit down and just write my thoughts. However, just writing my thoughts doesn’t seem to be enough. I want to pray. I want to talk to God. There is such a peace that fills me when I know He is listening to my silly concerns. Yet, the peace I feel in my unexpected early morning prayers is so much deeper. It is a stillness-a calm. At times I feel as though I am not even the one praying. I am just there listening. Of course the person I am thinking of at the time is someone I know, but the actual prayer just happens.

Concerns about literal words during prayer

I mentioned before about the prayer jargon I learned growing up in the church. This jargon, along with the rituals we perform in the church, stumps me at times. I will go on and on using the same phrases ingrained in my head from various worship services because I don’t really know how else to say those things. Sometimes in the middle of a prayer, I will pause, give up this silly regurgitation, and plead for God to sift through the mess to find my true intentions for the prayer. After all, the Bible teaches that prayers are not really formed with words but breath. We are to have a prayer on every breath. Is that what my early morning prayers are? Are all those words I have written in the form of prayers just a mask for the true work that is going on? Honestly, I don’t know. I do know that I don’t want to stop. There is a compulsion inside to continue. Who knows, maybe this is my purpose for being here. I will continue to pray for whatever or whomever is on my heart. I will continue to search for the right words to express what is inside. And if those can’t be found, I will plead for God to know my heart and hear my prayer.

The Bible and prayer

It wasn’t until 1999 in Pohong, South Korea sitting in my little apartment doing my daily devotionals that I truly understood what the crucifixion was all about. That didn’t come from any church worship service or Bible study group. It came at a time in my life when I was alone and truly searching for answers from God. I was searching for answers about things that had always puzzled me about God and all the things that I had been taught about Him. I was tired of asking people their thoughts about God; I needed to hear it from Him. That is when I sat down with my Bible, a devotional, and my journal and started asking God very specific questions. The most important question at that time was about the crucifixion. I asked God how watching the only person here on earth who was supposed to be the His son be slaughtered on a cross could possibly encourage us worship Him. Over the course of a few weeks, I slowly began to understand what the crucifixion meant…to me. You see, I believe that what we ask for we will receive. The Bible says ask for wisdom and it shall be given. Where I believe we go wrong in understanding the Bible is we ask to receive answers that will make us right in religious and Bible arguments with others. Understanding the Bible and God is a very personal thing that has to be cultivated over a lifetime. In Pohong, I was alone, and I earnestly wanted to understand what the Bible and stories of God meant to me. God knew that, and He taught me. The things I learned at that time didn’t prepare me for any religious debate or Biblical argument, but they did prepare me to pause and recognize when someone is provoking me to a religious debate. I experienced this later that year in a few discussions with a very strong Southern Baptist teacher who was living in the same city at the time. When we would start discussing religious topics, I could sense that I was being provoked into a debate where the motivation was to prove one person right and the other wrong. Each time, I was given the words to say to end the debate on a level where there was no right or wrong, only understanding. That brought me closer to God and increased my faith in Him.

The Holy Spirit

My answers to my questions about the crucifixion led me to questions about the Trinity-specifically the Holy Spirit. In Pohong I came to understand why the Holy Spirit was given to us, but it wasn’t until six years later in my last year in South Korea while living in Seoul that I came to understand what the gift of the Holy Spirit meant to me. The year 2005 was a year of learning for me. I had no idea what I was in for when 2004 passed, but I got a hint when change started in January and continued at a rapid pace for the next twelve months. I suffered a breakup of a six-year relationship in January, the loss of a business to that partner in May, the pain of a large misunderstanding with my closest friends there in Korea in September, the separation and solitude due to that misunderstanding in October, and the realization that my time in Korea was coming to an end in December. God really knew how to get my attention.

These losses forced me to turn to the only resource I had left-God. And God taught me who the Holy Spirit was to me. You see, I tend to focus on others and their needs a lot. Of course this isn’t a bad thing. One might say I am a generous person, and that is a virtue. However, when that focus hinders my attention on God, it becomes a vice, and God has to get my attention again. In 2005 one by one, the things I held precious in my life where slowly taken away, and I couldn’t understand why. During the latter months of the year, I spent more and more time at home reading and writing. This time I came to understand just how important the Holy Spirit is through some unexpected sources. I felt compelled to read books I had never really been interested in before. I wrote in my journals more and more. Looking back on those entries now, I can see how God was preparing me for major changes. Not just the change of a move back home, but a life change.

I once wrote in a journal that life was like a spiral; like a slinky, those rungs of the spiral sometimes get stuck together causing us to experience the same situation over and over until we learn the lesson embedded within. I was revisiting the lesson from 1999 in 2005. I had to learn what the Holy Spirit was all about and how to allow the Holy Spirit to guide me. To avoid any provocation of a religious debate, I won’t divulge the sources from which I learned the importance of the Holy Spirit. God uses any and all things to get His messages across. Who are we to question that? After all, He chooses those people, things, and situations because He knows where to find and how to get our attention. Once He has our attention-and that is usually when we are left all alone-His teaching begins. I learned that although I was physically alone, I wasn’t alone at all. Of course, we are taught that in every worship service we attend, but do we really feel it. Do we feel that there is this amazing gift from God, Himself, walking with us, listening to us, deciding what we will do next? I didn’t, but I am learning how to. The Holy Spirit is here to care for our every need and guide us in every situation, yet we go along on our own little way not taking pause to know what is really good for us. Then, when we get stuck and all those things we hold so dear have gone, He is there to pick us back up and set us on the course that God made for us. The amazing thing is had we taken pause and allowed the Holy Spirit to guide us, we wouldn’t have had to experience hardships. After all, the Holy Spirit is just following God’s will, and God’s will is our will if we just learn to focus on Him through our work, relationships, and everyday activities.

I take pause and search for God’s will through my writing. Writing that started as a mundane activity has now become the vessel through which God’s peace flows to me. I had no idea where a little old sketch book and a pact with God would take me. But He proved to me that He would take care of me no matter what. He has kept his end of the pact, and, though I get off the path from time to time, I have kept mine. He has proven to me time and again that this relationship is a lifetime commitment full of lessons and new experiences that may not always be easy. Yet, He provides me with the gifts to keep going. He has given me the gift of learning. Through this learning, I find new ways to fulfill what He wants me to do here. These may come in the way of writing, traveling, or meeting new people. Or learning may come in the early morning hours through an unexpected prayer.