Conversatio Morum

NEWS?

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All of us have hang-ups when it comes to praying. Sometimes we get tripped up and stumble around for awhile trying to figure out how to pray. Some of us at various times wonder if we should pray. At other times, we know we can, we know we should, and we even know how, but we simply do not have the desire to pray. Some of us have been stuck in dry, empty routine for some time. Others have completely given up on the hope to really connect with their Creator in any meaningful way.

Books have been written on this subject for hundreds of years. And a few that I’ve read are very good! (Wow, what an arrogant statement.) I have neither the calling nor the wisdom to offer more now on the subject, except for a bit of personal experience that I bet most of us can relate to.

Looking back over the last few months, I’ve discovered a certain theme in regard to the ways I’m approaching God through prayer. I rarely begin where I am. Rather, I always feel like I have to crawl to some certain place to where God is before I can set out to really share my heart with the Lord or hear from Him. Like I have to ascend a mountain or climb to some spiritual level to reach Him. It’s not penance. I don’t mean that I feel like I have committed a certain sin that keeps me from His presence. I mean, rather, that I feel as though I have to earn His ear, like I have to clamor for His attention. Do something fantastic, even if it’s reaching some level of humility so that I can come before Him (forgetting that I immediately become proud of my humble attainment anyway).

The feeling, if I were to put it into words, goes something like this: “I am not worthy of God. He’s really busy. He’s not that interested in me or my life. So I’ll just be really cautious in the way I approach Him.” Translation: “I am not worth anything to God. He is limited in power and limited in love. I will be faithless and godless and only pretend to be holy so that I can feel better about myself.”

My devotions have become routine. Communion with God has been replaced with assumptions (“I think this is what God thinks about this or that”). Obedience has become guesswork (“I guess God would want me to do this or that”). And the zeal and zest for life, that expectancy that Paul spoke of when he said he approaches God with an anticipation of “What’s next, Papa?” has been usurped with dull and drab predictability. “I wonder what’s next” is spoken aloud to no one in particular.

It’s all certainly a step away from “fearlessly and confidently and boldly draw near to the throne of grace” found in Hebrews.

I’ve noticed this for a few weeks now. I’ve been paying attention to the way in which I approach God, or don’t. And why. I had conversation with a friend and afterwards wondered why I wasn’t asking Jesus in that moment how to encourage him or what I was to take from our time. I have decisions to make at work. Have I consulted God about them? There are hundreds of men gathered on a mountain right now to meet God, and I have been called in to intercede for their time. Am I asking Jesus how to do so? What of my own heart? Am I coming to Him with the ache and confusion and hope — eyes wet with tears or fists raised to the sky, whatever the moment calls for — or am I biting my lip and putting on a smile and faking my way through?

How I’ve gotten here isn’t so important as the question of what I am to do with this reality. What do you do with that? It can be a bit despairing, actually. Okay, so I’m blowing it in a big way. Great. Whew, that’s a relief. Glad to hear it.

The options are pretty few, actually. As I see it, I can either 1) continue with what I’m doing now, or 2) recognize what I see as less than what I want and move toward change. Given those two choices, I’d think the second is the most appealing. The problem is, though, I’ve tried this. I’ve tried to get up earlier to pray more. I’ve tried to read more Scripture. I’ve opened a couple of those books I mentioned on prayer. Nothing seemed to make any lasting change, though.

The reason none of them worked is because in doing them, I’m still living in the first option. It’s the same thing. I’m not going to God. I’m trying to get myself together, get to a better place of prayer, but I’m not actually praying at all. I’m doing it on my own. Which was the source of the problem to begin with. So this is what I finally decided to do. A few days ago, I asked Jesus something very simple, “Stir in me the desire to seek You.” That’s it. Nothing profound. I can’t even say it was particularly heartfelt. I didn’t wait until it “felt” good at all, or until I “felt” passionate desire for it. I’d wait forever and never approach Him if that were the case.

And then yesterday a friend shared his story of having conversation with God. It was over something really simple, something so small, in fact, that I thought, “You can’t do that. Can you? I mean, God doesn’t care about something like that. Does He?” Turns out, God did care. And He showed my friend that He cared. And He honored my friend by his coming to God about it in prayer. He met him, right where he was. This friend of mine was the first to admit that it wasn’t a particularly nice place he was in. He was irritated and selfish. But he came to God anyway. And God honored him for it with friendship.

Well, this story pierced me. And anytime something pierces me I always assume that it’s God’s doing. Most of the time, anyway. Certainly this time I felt it was, since I just asked God for help. Then there were two more things that happened. First, after I heard that I asked Jesus if there was anything that was keeping me from hearing His voice. (In John 10, Jesus promises that we would hear His voice.) I listened, and I heard His reply. He said, “only you.” In other words, only my refusal to come “boldly” into His presence. That’s it. Not my sinfulness, not my selfishness, not my irritability, not my weariness, not my insolence. It’s not a matter of time or attention or spiritual warfare. It’s a matter of trust. Do I believe Him when He says that I really can have intimacy with Him, that I can commune with Him on matters of the heart?

The second thing that happened is that I read somewhere that all the things that keep us from praying are not important. “Never mind them,” the author said, and I received it as confirmation for what Jesus told me. Nothing can keep us from Him.

And so, there’s this subtle change that is taking place in my heart. It is a shift of orientation. (“Orientation,” by the way, comes from the word “orient,” which means “to face toward the east.”) It’s a small shift, but the effects of it are great. Therapists call this change “generative,” meaning a small change on one level has momentous effects on another. Thinkers and writers of old had a phrase for this kind of change — conversatio morum. Death to the status quo. Richard Foster explains its meaning as “constant change, constant conversion, constant openness to the movings of the Spirit.”

I’m re-opening myself to these “movings of the Spirit.” It’s been a combination of my desire to be done with the status quo and the Lord’s kindness that has led me back into His presence. It’s a cliché to say this, I know, but the truth of it is so profound: God is always present. He is here and available to us now. “The sheep listen to his voice and heed it; and he calls his own sheep by name and leads them.” This is the promise of Scripture.

We must begin here, with simply coming to our Shepherd as sheep in need. Maybe again and again. Everyday, maybe. Or maybe just for the first few seconds of prayer, a kind of recognition that we come into the throne room of grace by grace. Not because we’ve ascended to where it is, but because God has condescended to us in Jesus. Anything else would be unbelief, a refusal to acknowledge Jesus as the Christ. And from that place, from a conversation already happening, then we can grow in intimacy with our Lord. But it must begin with recognizing that He’s come to us. I can’t remember who said it, but I remember hearing once that every other religion is man’s attempt to get to God. Only in Christianity has God come all the way to man. All the way. We start there. The easy fellowship and light burden of walking with God must begin with our response to His invitation to draw near now.