prayer

When Walking is Prayer

April 18, 2018 By Michelle Leave a Comment

Though I’ve never met her in person, I’ve admired Hilary Yancey for a long time. She’s a deep thinker and a beautiful writer, and, lucky for all of us, she’s recently released her first book, Forgiving God: A Story of Faith – a memoir about becoming a mother to a child with disabilities and the impact that experience has had on her faith and on her relationship with God. I haven’t finished the book yet, because it just arrived in the mail today, but let me simply say that I picked it up while I was sitting here at my desk, read the opening few pages, and really, truly did not want to put it down. It’s a privilege to welcome Hilary to the blog today; I know you will be touched by her words.

Post by Hilary Yancey

I remember the first time I prayed with my eyes open. It was on a drive home from high school, late in the winter of my senior year. I had just gotten my driver’s license and was nervously winding my way down the same roads I had been traveling for years. I could feel the car swing into the familiar right turns and how my foot anticipated the next stop sign. But my eyes darted from side to side, my hands sweated at “10 and 2” on the steering wheel and out of my mouth slipped a decidedly complex prayer: “Lord Jesus do not let me die on this road I JUST got my license!”

I’ve always been the kind of person who prays with her eyes closed. I found it easier to concentrate on the ideas of my prayers, to imagine how they were being sent upwards and meeting Jesus in heaven. I prayed in this way to stop being distracted by the things I saw around me, by a book I wanted to read or a pile of laundry I was supposed to do. I thought that by closing my eyes I could close out the world and so through my prayers ascend somewhere else, wherever it was I thought God was.

A few years ago, my prayer life changed. I was pregnant with my first child; we’d received a challenging medical diagnosis at our 20-week ultrasound; I’d never needed to pray more. But when I closed my eyes, it was darkness. There were no feelings of ascent, no sure footing. The world had interrupted my old patterns and it was impossible to close out the world because the world had shrunk to the space of my body expanding for my son and the world was with me everywhere I went.

By the time my son was born, I had given up praying with my eyes closed; I had almost given up the practice of praying. But I walked: to and from his crib in the NICU, to and from the family lounge where doctors met with us to share further diagnoses, treatment options, to and from my bed to the shower to the hallway again, and around the outskirts of the hospital building when I would call my friend to cry. I could not speak to God directly, except to yell, and so I walked.

And my footsteps became words, they became prayers, but open-eyed prayers, prayers of pressing into the world instead of pushing away. My footsteps took me both where I hadn’t wanted to go and where it turns out I needed to, to the place of being surrounded, immersed in the very experiences I had once prayed to avoid.

I walked my son to the doors of the OR, I walked the floorboards of our house listening to the breaths in and out of his new trach, I walked us around the lobbies of his follow up clinics and through the hospital hallways too many times to count, memorizing the turns – up one floor, left then right and around to the desk where they check your ID, down the hallway, slight right to the sink and then left and then Jack, my son, is on the right – all of this walking and I emerged with prayers carved into my feet, with prayers left on those floorboards and hallway tiles, echoes of what my mind couldn’t say but my body could.

I am still at the very beginning of learning to pray. I am still working on finding a new rhythm of conversation with God. But now, when I can’t find a way to say what I mean, when I close my eyes and feel only quiet dark, I start walking. And the footsteps become words, and the words become prayers.

I turn the corner and I am somewhere new.

Hilary Yancey loves good words, good questions, and sunny afternoons sitting on her front porch with a strong cup of tea. She and her husband, Preston, and their two children, Jack and Junia, live in Waco, Texas, where Hilary is completing her PhD in philosophy at Baylor University. Her first book, Forgiving God: A Story of Faith was just published by FaithWords. You can read more of her writing on her website and follow her on Instagram at @hilaryyancey.

A Prayer to Start Your Week

November 22, 2015 By Michelle 6 Comments

Yesterday my church celebrated a special global worship service with amazing prayers and songs from around the world. We opened the service with this prayer, written by Japanese theologian Masao Takenaka. It was so beautiful, so appropriate for our time, and such a perfect way to start the new day and the new week, I thought I’d share it here today.

Peace for your day, peace for your week, friends.

Holmes Lake Tree

Eternal God, we say good morning to you —
Hallowed be your name.

Early this morning,
before we begin our work, we praise your glory.
Renew our bodies as fresh as morning flowers.

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trumpet vine

Open our inner eyes,
as the sun casts new light upon the darkness
which prevailed over the night.
Deliver us from all captivity.

prairietreesunset

nebraska sunset grass

Nebraska plains sun

Give us wings of freedom
like the birds in the sky to begin a new journey.
Restore justice and freedom,
as a mighty stream running continuously as day follows day.

birds on wire

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Temperance at Sunset

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We thank you for the gift of this morning,
and a new day to work with you.

dam walk

Amen.

Prayer is the Attention that Comes First

July 16, 2015 By Michelle 6 Comments

spiderweb

A few weeks ago during the Q & A session after a book reading, my friend Kori asked me what I thought about prayer. I stumbled over the question, admitting that my definition of and approach to prayer is broader and more fluid than it used to be.

These days, I told the audience, my prayers are often wordless. My best prayers, the ones that feel most genuine, are simply those moments I stand in my backyard, glimpsing the early morning slant of light, pausing to catch the melodious call of an unseen oriole. I don’t say anything. I don’t even really think anything. I just simply am.

“In those moments I don’t consciously realize I’m praying,” I said to the audience, “but I think that’s essentially what it is: a wordless prayer, a moment of silent praise and thanksgiving to God, a tuning-in to my surroundings and to him.”

At the time, perched on a stool in the local bookstore, my answer felt like a cop-out and not nearly “religious” enough.

Recently I sat in a weathered deck chair overlooking Lake Superior and watched a spider skate from her gossamer threads to the sun-warmed rail. Just beyond the deck, two Canadian geese flew side-by-side like a single, sleek body, low over the still, blue water. The lake was calm, the sun sizzling off the surface like a Fourth of July sparkler.

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I was reading poetry that morning, a rarity for me – a volume of Mary Oliver poems I’d picked up in a local bookstore. I turned to a poem entitled “The Real Prayers are Not the Words, but the Attention that Comes First,” and I knew, right then, that was the answer I had awkwardly tried to offer the audience at my reading weeks earlier.

Prayer is often wordless acknowledgement, attention, silent awe. Prayer is standing still in order to open myself to God. Prayer, for me, is often the moment that comes before the words. The moment I watch two geese fly as one and a spider dance from web to rail. The moment I pause in my backyard to listen to the oriole singsong from the river birch tree.

I think this is what God conveys when he says, in Psalm 46, “Be still, and know that I am God.”

We miss him in the flurry of day-to day-activity, our eyes fixed on our smartphones, iPod cords dangling from our ears. We miss him as we hurtle across town, dashing into the grocery store to pick up a frozen pizza for dinner, squeezing in a quick call to mom as we scurry toward the automatic doors. And then we wonder why our prayers feel empty and dry when we finally pencil in a few moments for quiet contemplation with our Bible and our journal.

When we offer God only a fraction of ourselves, we experience only a fraction of him.

We deprive ourselves of the fullest, deepest experience of God’s love when don’t allow ourselves ever to be fully present with him and in him.

Mary Oliver and the psalmist are onto something important. They know that the truest, most genuine connections with God often come not in the helter-skelter of daily life, and perhaps not even in the words of prayers whispered, recited or thought, but in the moments we quiet ourselves enough to notice where and who we are.

Moments so pure, so untainted, they precede even language itself.

{the poem that inspired the blog post}:

The Real Prayers are Not the Words, but the Attention that Comes First

The little hawk leaned sideways and, tilted, rode
the wind. Its eye at this distance looked like green
glass; its feet were the color of butter. Speed, obviously,
was joy. But then, so was the sudden, slow circle
it carved into the slightly silvery air, and the squaring
of its shoulders, and the pulling into itself the long,
sharp-edged wings, and the fall into the grass where it
tussled a moment, like a bundle of brown leaves, and
then, again, lifted itself into the air, that butter-color
clenched in order to hold a small, still body, and it flew
off as my mind sang out oh all that loose, blue rink
of sky, where does it go to, and why? — Mary Oliver

{As we prepare to leave for the north woods, I am reposting this reflection that ran last July. I’m hoping to squeeze in a little time and maybe a few poems on that deck again this year}.

Where Do We Start with Prayer?

March 12, 2015 By Michelle 1 Comment

Today I’m delighted to welcome my friend Ed Cyzewski to the blog. Ed is the author of a bunch of books, including A Christian Survival Guide: A Lifeline to Faith and Growth and Coffeehouse Theology: Reflecting on God in Everyday Life, as well as his most recent release, Pray, Write, Grow: Cultivating Prayer and Writing Together. Ed has spoken truth, wisdom and insights into my writing life these last few months, and for that I am profoundly grateful. He is very smart; you would do well to listen to (and read) him.

Post by Ed Cyzewski

One of my most intense moments in prayer started on a whim.

I sat down to pray in our living room one morning, and for some reason my mind kept venturing back to the moments of my deepest shame.

The relationships I’d messed up in college.

The many stupid things I said during our first year of marriage.

The time (times?) I placed unreasonable expectations on a good friend.

As I squirmed and fretted over my shame, I had a “revolutionary” thought: “What if I just prayed as if God knew all about this stuff already?”

Antelope park with text

We Bring Our Vulnerabilities to Prayer

I’m not breaking new ground when I say that we can’t hide anything from God or that we don’t have to be perfect in order to approach God. That’s pretty much covered from most pulpits on Sunday morning.

Actually living as if we have nothing to hide and God still loves us is quite another matter.

As I finally warmed to the idea, I realized that God didn’t just see my shame and weaknesses. God wanted me to bring those very things I feared about myself into the light. God wanted to start with my fears, shame, and “secret” sins.

“Fine!” I said aloud. I then spoke out loud everything that I’d been obsessing over. Every source of shame, every failure, and every uncertainty—I spoke them all out loud right there in our living room.

In a flash, I was overcome with a sense of God’s love and acceptance. It’s not that God sweeps our failures and vulnerabilities away. God embraces us and heals us through our shame and weaknesses once we come clean and admit the truth. The shame we feel becomes the conduit for God’s healing. God transforms shame by redeeming it with forgiveness, love, and acceptance.

By the way, as I reflected on that moment later in the day, it hit me that God works a bit like good art. We create our best art through honestly confronting our pain. Perhaps the thought of that makes my experience in prayer sound a little less crazy (although, writing it all out, it still sounds pretty crazy, right?).

Self-Awareness Guides Us Into Prayer

While our shame and failure provide one place to begin with prayer, we can also practice regular (if not daily) self-reflection and self-awareness in order to identify a starting point rather than waiting for a breakdown like that moment in my living room. For instance, I’ve found that awareness of my body and thoughts provide critical gateways into prayer. Here are a few questions that may help you get started:

What is my body telling me when my teeth are clenched or my shoulders arch up?
What prompts worries when left to my own thoughts?
Would writing help me sort out the thoughts swirling in my mind?
Do I need some silence to sort my fears and worries out?

As you may have guessed, practicing this kind of awareness means turning off the television, putting your smart phone away, or flicking off the radio. You need to face your thoughts and the tension you’re carrying in your body in order to identify the symptoms of your stresses or fears. Only when you see these symptoms with clarity can you begin to identify the root causes and approach them in prayer.

Regularly practicing Examen has helped me pay attention to my sources of encouragement and discouragement each day (I use the “Examine” app). However, the real value of Examen has been the insights I’ve gained after months of this practice.

For starters, during the first year of using the Examen I noted that I was worried about money. It was the thing that kept me awake at night, that prompted me to keep pushing my work hours into our family time, and even stole my enjoyment of leisure time. I reasoned, “How can I enjoy myself when our income for the next year is uncertain?”

I’m a freelance writer. Uncertainty is part of the deal. There are up months and down months. If I was going to keep at my line of work, then I needed to arrive at a place of acceptance and deal with my fears. The Examen prompted me to continue praying and asking for help so that I could end my chronic worrying.

Fixed Hour Prayer Guides Us

I’m one of those “holier than thou” Protestants who thought the only way to legitimately pray was to freestyle my own prayers from scratch. I had grown up praying the assigned Hail Mary’s and Our Father’s after confession, so I didn’t see how praying the Psalms or written prayers in the Divine Hours could help.

Here’s the thing, my mind often engages in a swirl of ideas, worries, and items on my to-do-list that need immediate attention that very second I try to pray. Reciting prayers from the Divine Hours offers a basic starting point or a place to center my thoughts. Even the practice of centering prayer relies on a “sacred” word that gently guides us back to prayer.

I typically end each day with the Examen and the Divine Hours Compline. The first exposes my worries and helps me voice gratitude to God, and the second directs my prayers before falling asleep.

I still struggle with prayer some days—perhaps most days. Perhaps I don’t leave enough time to pray. Perhaps my mind is filled with worries. It’s not that I have a “successful” prayer life. Rather, I have a few simple tools available that make prayer a bit easier and more likely to happen. You could say that I’m learning to create a bit of space each day for prayer, and now I’m learning to trust the results with God.

This post is adapted from Ed’s new book Pray, Write, Grow: Cultivating Prayer and Writing Together.

PrayWriteGrow

Order the eBook version for $1.99 between now and March 16:

Kindle | Nook | Kobo | iBooks | Print

Ed Cyzewski is the author of A Christian Survival Guide and Coffeehouse Theology. He’s a freelance writer who regularly addresses the intersection of faith and writing at www.edcyzewski.com and tweets as @edcyzewski. Get two free eBooks when you subscribe to his newsletter.

Hear It on Sunday, Use It on Monday: Making Prayer a Discipline

December 3, 2012 By Michelle 14 Comments

When I get crazy busy, as is usually the case this time of year, the first activities on the chopping block are exercise and spiritual practices. Not only do I indulge in extra slices of apple pie and then not lace up my running shoes, I also tend to stay up later and sleep in – thus skipping my morning Bible-reading and quiet prayer time.

This, I’ve learned the hard way, is not a good thing. Skipping exercise leads to tight pants. And skipping time with God creates unbalance in my life. Suddenly, I’m more prone to grouchiness, less patient with the kids, more likely to complain and fret, less able to see the positive in my life. It seems that my morning ritual, just a half-hour or so of contemplative time with God, is the glue that holds everything together.

…Will you join me over at Her View from Home for the rest of this post? But before you go…link up your own Hear It, Use It post below! {and thank you…it’s so great to be back with the Hear It, Use It community!}

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Welcome to the “Hear It on Sunday, Use It on Monday” community, a place where we share what we are hearing from God and his Word.

If you’re here for the first time, click here for more information. Please include the Hear It, Use It button (grab the code below) or a link in your post, so your readers know where to find the community if they want to join in — thank you!

Please also try to visit and leave some friendly encouragement in the comment box of at least one other Hear It, Use It participant. And if you want to tweet about the community, please use the #HearItUseIt hashtag.

Thank you — I am so grateful that you are here!