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 Dropping the FormulasBy Jackie Walker Our Father, who art in heaven … hallowed be thy name … Hold up, slow down. Did you say “hallowed”? Was that before or after “thou art”? Or was it “art thou”? Can we start over? For a new Christian, corporate prayer can be rather daunting and cumbersome at best—confusing and a barrier to a relationship with God at worst. With all the impersonal, fancy, old-school words and phrases, someone struggling with talking to God might have trouble just forming a prayer properly. A couple of years ago, my friend Amy began to explore Christianity, to question it and to learn what Christians believe in order to decide whether she too would like to join the faith. Thanks to her husband and a supportive church, Amy was quickly welcomed into a community of believers—but she wasn’t yet sure how to do what they did, particularly when it came to prayer. She bowed her head when the pastor said, “Let’s pause for a moment of prayer.” But she didn’t pray along. She wasn’t sure what praying along might entail—not to mention, how would she ever learn to develop personal prayers of her own? “My only experiences were with corporate prayer, and I just didn’t get it,” she remembers. “Some of the words and phrases were pretty intimidating to someone like me because it made me feel like I needed to be ‘fancy’ when praying.” She began to wonder whether she would ever get it right and whether this fear would hold her back from becoming a Christian. Eventually, she began reading the Left Behind series and found that the characters in those novels prayed in a simple, conversational manner. A few books into the series, Amy began to pray on her own on occasion. Though she still feels as though she hasn’t fully developed her prayer life, she says she finds prayer less intimidating—now that she knows she can just talk to God like she’s talking to a friend. Lately, Amy has found a new stumbling block: feeling overwhelmed by what she is “supposed to” pray for. “I talked about this with a friend of mine, and he encouraged me to let go of that concern for now,” she says. “The way he explained it is that God is more concerned that we have a heart for Jesus and long to follow Him than with whether we’re doing all the spiritual disciplines correctly or as long as other people would have us feel like we should.” Apparently, Amy is not alone in her struggle with personal prayer. How do I know? Because anytime something seems to be difficult for a lot of people, publishers will produce how-to book after how-to book to teach you how to solve your problem. Joyce Meyer, famed television preacher and author of more than 70 books like Look Great, Feel Great and Seven Things That Steal Your Joy, recently composed a book called The Power of Simple Prayer: How To Talk with God About Everything. The book promises to teach you how to transform your life through prayerful conversation. Note: That didn’t read “through repeating whatever your neighbor is repeating with your head bowed, disconnected but following along.” No, it promises to teach you that prayer is more like a conversation: a two-way, connective, open, honest conversation with God. Author Lindsey Crittenden also published a new book called Water Will Hold You: A Skeptic Learns to Pray. In this book, Lindsey tells how she was always skeptical about prayer, feeling disconnected, especially when repeating memorized phrases (“If I die before I wake …”). Eventually, a priest helped her to see that it was just a matter of coming into conversation with God—to be there with Him, to admit that both she and God were present. Through simple, conversational prayer with God all the time, she began to develop a relationship with Him, as one might come to better know a friend or a significant other. She began to question Him, to tell Him things, to ask Him things. She opened up and leapt into an honest relationship with her Creator. Get hands-on. Get real with God. Just start talking. And stop being concerned with whether you’re doing it right or enough or whether you’re following the proper formula. The point is that you are coming to God with your heart open, ready to tell Him your concerns, to listen to what He wants to communicate, and to thank Him for what He’s done. In his book, Searching for God Knows What, Donald Miller suggests one’s relationship with Christ is a lot less about following a formula and a lot more about developing just that: a relationship. It’s about being in Christ’s presence and being aware of one’s relationship with (and responsibility to) God. It’s not about making sure you always say the right thing or do everything correctly or perfectly. Rather, one should admit that they can’t do anything perfectly without Christ, thus forcing them to rely on His grace and His love. “The gospel of Jesus, in other words, is all about our relationship with Jesus rather than about ideas … our lists and formulas and bullet points are nice in the sense that they help us memorize different truths, but harmful in the sense that they blind us to the necessary relationship that must begin between ourselves and God for us to become His followers. And worse, perhaps our formulas and bullet points and steps steal the sincerity with which we might engage God,” Miller writes. “Becoming a Christian might look more like falling in love than baking cookies.” The point is the struggle. So long as we are working at prayer, so long as we are making an effort to connect with Christ, we are on the right track. Drop the formula, drop the fear, and just start talking. And that initiation of contact will help you to start or to continue to develop a true relationship with God. It doesn’t matter how you get there—whether you write your prayers down, whether you base your prayers on those you learned in Sunday School or whether you talk to God like you’re talking to your best friend. All relationships take work, and your relationship with God is no different. The point is that we each continue to work at it—the “doing” is the thing. Only then can we drop the intimidation and the fear and learn to fall in love with our Creator. Jackie Walker is an editor and freelance writer living in Illinois. When she isn’t busy searching for commas and hyphens, she loves painting, playing the piano, learning about world religions and eating more than her fair share of gummy bears. Back to Top |
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