in this life. Each day, we travel an unfamiliar path toward a sure destination.
God is our ever-present companion — guiding and protecting, comforting and
convicting us, but we are often unaware of Him…
Prayer is our means of
acknowledging God’s presence and seeking His help on our daily journey. It is
God’s way of giving us access to Him.
sustenance, His peace. He knows that we need what He has — that we have no where
else to turn!…
In heeding God’s command to pray, we become part of a
humbling and powerful collaboration:
- God hears us and answers us. (Jeremiah 33:3)
- Jesus prays for us. (Romans 8:34)
- The Holy Spirit helps us pray. (Romans 8:26)
When God calls us
to pray, He isn’t calling us to do something for Him. He’s calling us to
receive something from Him — something we need: His light for our daily
journey.
We, sojourners, have Jesus as our light and the Holy Spirit as
our guide…We are not traveling alone. The presence and the power of the Triune
God are ours.
We’ve all had the experience of carefully relying on a map
or GPS to navigate a complicated route to a new place. Then, gradually, with
repeated trips on the same road, we don’t need to rely on navigational tools. We
have internalized the map. It has become part of us. We know the way.
The
same thing happens with prayer.
Prayer should not be a formula but a
pattern – not a chain but a path—to help you as you make your way. God uses
well-established spiritual disciplines to guide us when our emotions run
thin and our motivations are weak. Every Christian is prayerless in some,
perhaps many, seasons of life. Like any frequently traveled path, a path of
prayer allows our faltering steps to progress, even if our hearts are not fully
engaged. Often, the heart is sparked by the comforting routine of prayer,
courage is restored, joy eventually returns.
We are all, gradually,
moving toward hard times in life, if we haven’t gone through them already.
You won’t learn to pray in the emergency room — that’s where you’ll speechlessly
lean into Jesus. You won’t learn to pray in your overturned car — that’s where
you’ll just cry out His name. You won’t learn to pray in your living room while
reeling from a loved one’s bad decisions—that’s when you’ll just weep to God.
Learning the way when life is somewhat stable makes us familiar with the path so
that we can run straight to Him in the dark, like a nightmare-scared child
instinctively making his way to his parents’ bed.
We are with God all the
way; He is the route, and He is the destination.
[written by Kathi
Lambrides Westlund]
