Wonderstruck (10 page)

I resisted the impulse.
Why would God ask me to give up prayer? What scripture instructs us to pray less?
The Bible implores us to pray in every situation, to never stop praying. I batted down the ridiculous thought dozens of times, but the notion returned with ever increasing velocity. With Ash Wednesday a few days away, I began asking the Lord what he meant by the idea of giving up prayer for Lent. My sense was that God didn’t want me to give up
all
prayer, but lengthy prayers.

Giving in to the peculiar sacred echo, I committed to offer God only three-word prayers until Easter. The spiritual practice proved more difficult than I imagined. I could no longer thank God for this morning, because that took five words. The concept
needed to be summed up in three.
Thanks, God, for this morning
became
Thanks for today
. The elementary shift in verbiage translated to a trim here, a rephrasing there, a switcheroo of words over there. Every word, every syllable, demanded mindfulness.

Most mornings I stumbled into lengthier prayers by mistake. I paused and rephrased. Then stumbled again. The painstaking process left me frustrated and edgy. Prayer times expanded, not because I felt close to God, but because crafting even a few comments took so much time.

I also recognized I’d slipped into something one of my favorite writers calls “magical religion”—those moments I convince myself I can control or conjure God through my words or actions. Though I never outwardly admitted to such practices, my new time with God exposed a deep-seated belief that if I just prayed long enough or was more articulate or heartfelt then God would answer.

While I felt free to express every need, ache, desire, and whim to God—which is essential to a true relationship—my petitions often sounded like a child’s sugar-infused run-on sentences:
Dear God, thanks for this day and my husband and his parents and my parents and our one last living grandparent and our aunts and our uncles and our cousins and our second cousins and our friends and our long-distant friends and our superpup and
 . . . I’d rattle on until I ran out of breath. I’d wandered across the invisible border between prayer and rambling and needed to find my way back.

I’d lost sight of God as a loving Father—whose favor I didn’t need to earn, whose attention I didn’t need to procure; God’s eyes were already on me, his hands already extended to help.
¹

The difficulty of relearning to pray lessened with each passing week. Fumbling for words dwindled whenever I used a basic breathing rhythm. When I paused for a single breath between prayers, the words rolled silky smooth rather than crunchy and coarse. The arduousness of my morning prayers eased, but I struggled to carry this newfound practice into other areas of life. Whenever Leif and I shared a meal, I would start to offer a standard blessing for our food, and Leif would gently squeeze my hand and whisper, “Three-word prayers.” Even at the dinner table, I couldn’t escape the tension of being intentional.

With each passing day, the process of creating three-word prayers forced me to become more engaged and creative with God. I began offering handcrafted prayers. No longer generic and mass-produced, my prayers felt artisanal.

The word
artisan
technically refers to a craftsperson or skilled worker, but in recent years, artisans and their products have been heralded as representing a departure from the mass manufactured and a return to making things by hand in small batches using time-tested methods. Artisans value personal involvement in conceiving, designing, experimenting, and creating along the way. Artisanal goods are stained with good, old-fashioned hard work and sweat.

Artisans don’t just focus on the end product but the process.
Such dedication makes the difference between spongy cheap sandwich bread and a thickset, gnawy, flavorful Italian loaf made with hand-ground flour. Instead of machine-fabricated waxy chocolate, an artisan chocolatier might hike through a remote plantation in the global south to find cocoa beans to ship home, roast, and grind into the chocolate needed for dark truffles.
²

Even the simplest items take on artisanal flair when someone cares enough about the process of creating the product. The image of the artisan illustrates much of what was taking place in my prayer life: namely, moving away from rambling, mass-produced prayers that cost me next to nothing to a richer, handcrafted prayer life. Like the artisans, I knew prayer was more than just the end product—receiving an answer from God. But I needed to be more intentional about the process. Three-word prayers required me to reengage spiritual muscles that had long ago grown flabby. These unsophisticated prayers helped me clarify my dreams and disappointments before God. With only a few words, I became more aware of what Abraham Heschel calls “the pangs we ignore, the longings we forget.”
³

These prayers ushered me into a renewed sense of openness before God. Honesty infused both my relationship with God and God’s relationship with me. As our relationship became more genuine, my dependence on God increased. Throughout Lent, three-word prayers felt like I was praying with one hand and foot tied behind my back. I hobbled forward, but every movement reminded me that I wasn’t getting far on my
own. I needed God. Each syllable reminded me of this truth. Stripped of presumption and arrogance, of mindlessness and meaninglessness, I found myself crossing the threshold of God’s domain—choosing divine will over my will and handing back what I mistook as my own. My time with God became imbued with desire and delight.

When the laborious prayers became habitual, they began to shift again. One morning, while praying for some friends whose marriage was unraveling, my request simplified.

Heal. Grace. Compassion. Reconcile. Restore
.

With each word, I paused to allow the fullness of the petition to fill my being as I made the request to God. As the word
heal
rolled off my tongue, God knew I was asking for more than an end to the conflict in the couple’s relationship. I petitioned for the wounds to be cleansed, bandaged, and healed. Broken bones reset. Cells regenerated. A full recovery in a single word.

With my prayer life reduced to a few syllables, every expression felt more potent than ever. Then something even more unexpected began to happen: I found myself entering a rich silence with God—the kind experienced by the closest of friends who sit side by side on a well-worn couch, feet propped up, melting into the cushions. Time slowed. The longer I sat, the less I wanted to move. Eyes grew heavy, not because of tiredness, but because I felt rested, fully myself, without any need to do anything—except be myself—in the presence of one who I love and the one I knew loved me.

Throughout my Lenten experience, I rediscovered the inward stillness of God. For years the psalmist invited me to “be still, and know that I am God,” but I struggled with the continuous inner dialogue that noised up my life.
⁴
In this place with words nonexistent, I realized I’d been dwelling on the edge of mystery. Now I was with God in a whole new way. My soul was both nurturing and nurtured by the silence. In quelling myself, I sensed a resonance, a divine reverberation that I suspect is a facet of what the psalmist meant when he alluded to deep calling to deep.
⁵

To my dismay, just as my communication with God opened again, Easter weekend approached. Watching Lent pack up felt bittersweet. The unexpected gift he brought to my prayer life made me feel melancholy about his departure, but I knew his farewell ushered in the celebration of the risen Christ.

I couldn’t help but reflect on the way I had approached the forty days before Easter. I’d approached the season by asking, “What will I give up for Lent?” as if Lent’s whole focus is asceticism. But Lent’s concern isn’t in removing something as much as receiving Someone. The passion of Lent is Christ. The annual sojourn calls for a more focused relationship with God.

Maybe instead of asking,
What are we giving up for Lent?
we need to ask,
Who and what are we trying to receive through Lent?

As we accept this sacred solicitation with sincerity, God meets us open-armed with his goodness and grace. The transformative power of Christ awakens in our lives. The Lenten season invites us to set apart time during the beginning of each year to slough off the excess in our lives that we may live lighter and holier lives. For forty days, Lent gives us the opportunity to live in gentle receptivity of God.

After Easter, I prayed without the three-word discipline for the first time since Lent began. I waited until the house was empty and peered around the living room as if about to break a rule. I offered up a greeting. “Dear God,” I whispered, “I know it’s been awhile since we’ve spoken like this.”

I began slow. The words soon picked up pace—an uncultivated assortment of adoration and expiation, supplication and thanksgiving. Then I burst forth in prayer like a fire hydrant unplugged on a hot summer day. Conversation gushed forth from deep inside me like I was reconnecting with an old childhood friend. I felt like I was praying—
really
praying.

When I said my final amen, I had to catch my breath. I realized why God had asked me to give up prayer for Lent: I’d been spiritually slumbering, my prayer life reduced to nothing more than sleepwalking. The Lenten season exposed all the “nonversations” in my prayer life—those moments with God where, with a litany of words, I said nothing at all. Though I spoke to God, I was half-awake at best.

God used this discipline to awaken me to the wonder of
prayer. Deliberate, uninhibited, wholly present—I found my voice with God again. I never suspected I needed to lose my prayer life in order to find it again.

From foundation to rooftop, my prayer life was undergoing major renovations, and I turned to the Scripture for a better understanding of the work God was doing in my life. I focused on the prayers of Jesus and found myself taken aback by their brevity and intentionality. Jesus said so much with so little:

“Father, I thank You that You have heard Me. I knew that You always hear Me; but because of the people standing around I said it, so that they may believe that You sent Me.”
⁶

“Abba! Father! All things are possible for You; remove this cup from Me; yet not what I will, but what You will.”
⁷

“Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.”
⁸

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
⁹

“Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.”
¹⁰

I was awestruck that such simple phrases would move God to act.
¹¹

And I found comfort in knowing that I’m not the only Jesus follower who stumbles forward in prayer. The disciples search for steady footing and approach their Rabbi asking him how best to pray. Jesus encourages them to resist flashy, monotonous prayers whose only purpose is to try to win God’s favor, wear down God’s resolve, or appear spiritual to others. Jesus introduces prayer as the acknowledgment that God, our Abba Father,
already knows everything and waits for us to call on him. God sits enthroned, ready to listen, to help.

Jesus provides a specific prayer as a model. Rabbis of the day customarily gave their disciples prayers they could use habitually. Jesus’ response to his disciples, known as the Lord’s Prayer, is his most famous. The early church offered this prayer three times a day, following the ancient Jewish rhythm of prayer: morning, afternoon, and evening.

In the Lord’s Prayer, I began to glimpse the wonder of prayer I experienced through Lent. The Son of God is asked how to pray, and he gives us fewer than five dozen words—an even shorter version appearing in the Gospel of Luke. Grocery lists run longer. The prayer can be spoken in a single breath, easily recited by children, jotted down in a few moments. Every. Word. Matters.

This brief prayer encompasses both the nearness of God in the present and the great hope of communion with God in the future. The Lord’s Prayer is for today and also understood through the lens of eschatology, or end times. God’s name is hallowed through the final destruction of his enemies and the salvation of his people. The imagery alludes to partaking of the bread at the messianic banquet and receiving forgiveness from God on judgment day. And we seek deliverance from the final judgment. The beauty of the Lord’s Prayer is in its breadth and scope. Even if a googol of volumes are penned, they don’t begin to scratch the surface of all Jesus communicated, the splendor displayed, the mysteries depicted.
¹²

“Our
Abba
Father who is in heaven,

Hallowed be Your name.

Your kingdom come.

Your will be done,

On earth as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread.

And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.

And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”
¹³

Renowned for its symmetry and simplicity, Jesus’ prayer offers two sets of three petitions. The first three petitions focus on God—his divine nature, the coming of his kingdom, the fulfilling of his will. The second set of petitions shifts the attention toward us and includes humble requests for provision, forgiveness, protection. Though the prayer is personal in nature, the use of the word
our
reminds us that we are part of a vast kingdom, a community of believers who all need these things.