The Prayers we pray – and those we avoid.

As a student a group of us attended Spring Harvest as Student Helpers We all shared a chalet and we catered for our evening meal together. We took it in turn to offer a blessing for the meal, it was Helen’s turn to say grace, “God, help us know when we have eaten enough and stop.” Those words stunned us. We had all been up early to help set up venues. A can of pop and biscuit grabbed running from one task to another through the day. We were starving, why could she be so cruel? There are some prayers which simply should not be prayed! We know to avoid prayers for those things we have no intention of changing.

Hunger, for instance, is one of the subjects about which we’ve learned to be careful. If you pray too seriously for hungry people you’ll end up skipping meals and giving your money away.

That’s why most of us are careful not to pray too seriously for the homeless. It’s awkward to pray for people who have no home when we have empty bedrooms.

We avoid praying about things that we don’t want to change. It’s frightening to pray about our careers. Does the law student with good career prospects in international tax law want to pray about whether God would like for her to be a social worker? Does the successful businessperson want to ask God if a lower paying job might make more of a contribution to the world?

We’re especially careful about praying for people we don’t like. Think of the person whose presence bothers you the most, who gets on your nerves and probably always will. When Jesus said “Pray for your enemies,” he was inviting us to the kind of prayer that will lead us to say something kind that we don’t want to say.

Most of the time we are afraid to pray about what we could be or what we could do because we prefer the life of comfort we have chosen rather than a life of prayer which allows God to choose for us. We are afraid to pray not because our prayers will be unanswered but because the will!

We’ve learned to pray, “God, make me a better person, but not so much better that I have to change the way I live.” Prayer is hard because we don’t want to start doing what God invites us to do or stop doing what we are used to doing.

King David went a long time without really praying. One afternoon a look turned into lust, and David didn’t pray about it. The lust turned into manipulation, and David acted in ways that he never would have considered if he had the courage to pray. David was able to keep from admitting what he had done or what he needed to do for a long time. He didn’t pray, because he didn’t want to face the harsh realities.

After being confronted by Nathan the Prophet David began to pray again. His words are recorded in Psalm 51. This is an honest psalm of a man struggling to pray honestly to God. The amazing thing about this psalm is that for all of its agony, there’s also a sense of relief. What David ignored for so long is finally brought out into the open. It couldn’t have been any easier for David to tell the truth about himself than it is for any of us. There is no painless way to stop protecting our easy lives and be honest to God.

Psalm 51 is the psalm set for Ash Wednesday when we begin our Lenten Pilgrimage. Lent should be time of self examination, of honest prayer not just a few weeks to give up some trifling luxury and pretend we are doing the will of God

People who pray passionately don’t have easy lives, but they have abundant lives. God has dreams for us that we’ve been afraid to imagine.

What would happen if we made a searching, fearless inventory of how much more we could be if we asked God for the courage to change and take chances?

God’s blessings for this Lenten season, Alan.