The Primacy of Prayer

It's been 31 days into this year and already it's yielded so much. SO much.

However, I want to spend the next 334 days and the rest of my life with the following words at the forefront of my existence. It's not new. It's not revolutionary. But it's that important and has been presented so wonderfully in only the 2nd chapter of the book I'm required to read for my Master's degree in nursing from APU.

So here goes, from A Psychology of Prayer: Primary Speech by Ann and Barry Ulanov.

Excerpts from the chapter on prayer and desire:

"God does not need to be told anything about what we need and want. We discover this way what in fact we do desire, what we want to reach out to and love. Thus we come to hold in open awareness what before we had lived unknowingly.

Prayer entered into seriously marks an unmistakable break with the way we have been living. It is never simple another happy little part of our lives, an attractive addition to the day or the night like a new car or a new dress or a fetching new way to prepare a souffle.

Prayer is the place we sort out our desires and where we are ourselves sorted out by the desires we choose to follow. Desire leads to more desire. And the greatest surprise of all is that the prayer we thought to be our own activity, our own reaching out, reveals itself instead as God's Spirit moving in us. Our curiosity and desire to know, we see, are the force of the knower seeking the known.

One of the immediate effects of paying attention in prayer to our own desires, whatever they may be, is to experience changes in the desires. We feel them opening, steadying, and deepening. We have moments of uprush of desire, of going out of ourselves in acts of impulsive kindness, of a sudden talking to ourselves in ourselves where we divulge what we really think and feel, what really matters to us. In prayer, desires are disciplined, not in the sense of being restricted or held on a tight rein, but rather in the sense of being given their appropriate space. They no longer gush through us and disappear. Instead, they form a consistent flow of reliable good will toward ourselves and others."

It's SO true. So true. We really don't know what we want. But in prayer, it really is sorted out. In prayer, God begins to unearth His desires for our lives. Everything we think we need we actually already have. Seriously. That's true because Jesus' death was NOT the end of the story.

We no longer need to seek God like greedy children. We no longer need to tell Him what He already knows. But as we pray, let us be open to an intense ordering, which may feel like chaos because that's what treasures in jars of clay look like.

We don't really ever initiate anything. God is the initiator of all things. Desires, dreams, passions, callings. We focus much too much on ourselves.

I'll give you an example. For the last 5 years, I've wanted to start a mobile clinic to deliver health care to urban slums in Africa and South Asia.

Today, I want to start a revolution. I want to build hospitals run by the Holy Spirit. I want to change the face of hospitals in America. I want to publish a paper, perhaps even a book, develop a nursing model based on Christ. I want to go to villages yet to be discovered and tell them about the God I serve. And then I want to come back to the West and shame them with the joy and faith I see in those who have nothing.

Three months ago I wanted to get married. Today, I want to get married, but I want to wait for a man that can teach ME something, lead ME. Someone who brings me to my knees in awe because he is that in love with my God, that committed to loving others and that committed to changing nations.

Yes, desires change. They fizzle out as flames and come back as raging fires.

Primacy of prayer. Prayer is the currency through which we handle KINGDOM affairs. You want to start an orphanage, raise some money, sign some papers and do it. It's not that hard.

You want see those orphans become presidents of nations - pray. Pray, wait and submit to a God much bigger than we know.

Pray, not because you are so in need. Neediness is a given, boring, like defecation. Pray because God so desperately wants to break free and enlarge you, equip you, defeat Goliaths through you. Pray because you were created to be in communication with your Maker, just as a car was created to be driven.

Make it the center. You will be unrecognizable. Guaranteed.