Continuing from a previous post, Learning to Talk with Your Father, from Paul E. Miller:
Besides asking and believing like a child, learning to pray involves, surprisingly, learning to play again. How do little children play? If you ask a parent how long a two-year-old stays on task, he or she just smiles. But if you must know, it varies anywhere from three seconds to three minutes. It isn’t long nor is it particularly organized.
How can that teach us to pray? Think for a minute. How do we structure our adult conversations? We don’t. Especially when talking with old friends, the conversation bounces from subject to subject. It has a fun, meandering, play-like quality. Why would our prayer time be any different? After all, God is a person.
Even the apostle Paul’s prayer in Ephesians has a play-like quality. He starts praying by saying, “I do not cease to give thanks for you, remembering in my prayers, that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you the Spirit of wisdom” (Ephesians 1:16-17). He continues to pray for several verses, but you can’t be sure where he stops. He starts praying again at the beginning of chapter 3, “For this reason, I Paul, a prisoner of Jesus Christ on behalf of the Gentiles. . . ” but as soon as he mentions Gentiles, he seemingly gets distracted and stops praying. Finally he picks up again in 3:14, “For this reason I bow my knees before the Father.” Paul’s praying is all over the map. It is a classic ADD praying. He starts praying, interrupts himself, starts praying, gets distracted, and then finally finishes his prayer.
Prayer that lacks this play-like quality is almost autistic. When you are autistic, you have trouble picking up social cues from the other person. For instance, Kim calls me around one-thirty when she gets home from work. She presses the speaker button on our phone, dials my phone and tells me on her speech computer how her day went. She never says “hi”; she just jumps into her day and hangs up. No questions, no “good-bye” or “see you later” Just click.
When your mind starts wandering in prayer, be like a little child. Don’t worry about being organized or staying on task. Paul certainly wasn’t! Remember you are in conversation with a person. Instead of beating yourself up, learn to play again. Pray about what your mind is wandering to. Maybe it is something that is important to you. Maybe the Spirit is nudging you to think about something else.
Learn to Babble Again
For the last nine years, Jill has been doing almost-daily speech therapy with Kim. Kim has made remarkable progress, but now she’s at the stage that she needs to get words out, no matter how bad it sounds. Just this morning, I took Kim to get an X-ray on her right knee, which had been bothering her. She lost her temper three times during the morning, the last time because she had to stand still for the X-ray. When we got home, I sat down with her and asked what she thought about the morning. She sighed, “Sorry.” I said, “Use your voice.” So she prayed haltingly, Please forgive me for getting mad. It was barely intelligible, but it was from her heart.
When it comes to prayer, we, too, just need to get the words out. Feel free to stop and pray now. It’s okay if your mind wanders or your prayers get interrupted. Don’t be embarrassed by how needy your heart is and how much it needs to cry out for grace. Just start praying. Remember, the point of Christianity isn’t to learn a lot of truths so you don’t need God anymore. We don’t learn God in the abstract. We are drawn into his life.
Become like a little child—ask, believe, and, yes, even play. When you stop trying to be an adult and get it right, prayer will just flow because God has done something remarkable. He’s given you a new voice. It is his own. God has replaced your badly damaged prayer antenna with a new one—the Spirit. He is in you. “God has sent the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!” (Galatians 4:6). You’ll discover your heart meshing with God’s.
You’ll discover that prayer is a feast. As you get the clutter off your heart and mind, it’s easy to be still in the God’s presence. You’ll be able to say with David, “I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother” (Psalm 131:2).~~~Paul E. Miller, A Praying Life (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2009, 2017) p. 27-29
