Piss Poor

I am getting tired of just squeaking by. The average weekly giving at our church seems to be in a slow, painful downward spiral that no amount of "dig a little deeper" exhortations from the pulpit will ever be able to change.

Our church has no money.

In my personal life my wife and I have to come to grips with a cut in benefits for next year, not to mention the horrendous debt we have racked up over the last few years (some of it my fault, much of it not). Yes I am a pastor, yes I am in debt.

I have no money.

My wife wants to buy a house. That is probably not going to happen.

But anyway, God bless!

On Prayer

I met with a friend from church today for lunch. He called the meeting, bought lunch, and asked most of the questions. He was curious about my spiritual journey. We had talked about it briefly last month when several of us got together for dinner. I reveled to the dinner group that I was struggling with the concept of prayer.

He asked me today to talk about that. I did, and it was a refreshingly honest dialog about how disappointment fits into our concept of who God is.

I told him about an experience I had a year or so ago, when a small group of us were praying and asking God to deliver a friend of ours from a pretty severe circumstance. I have never been involved in such a passionate, all consuming and fervent time of prayer. We prayed weekly, frequently spending an hour or more in focused prayer asking, begging God to act in this one circumstance. People all through our church were praying, we organized a daily prayer time, meeting every day the week of Thanksgiving, even Thanksgiving day (how pious).

God never delivered.

That was a crushing experience for me. I had just finished reading "Fresh Wind, Fresh Fire" a book by Jim Cymbala that champions the idea of fervent prayer. Many of my church family had read the book and were motivated to seek God through passionate prayer. I had walked away from the book believing that healthy, dynamic churches prayed hard (whatever that means) and witnessed amazing interventions of God in their midst.

That didn't happen to me. It didn't happen in our church, I am not sure if it ever has. I felt like a second-rate citizen of the kingdom. Like I wasn’t measuring up to someone else's standard of what spiritual health looks like.

Since then I have wrestled with the idea that God will respond to my requests if I pray hard enough. At times it seems that he will bless me and intervene simply on his own initiative, without me praying at all. Other times, I pray for God to do something and he doesn’t, no matter how much I pray.

The whole experience has caused me to react against the typical “gimme prayers” that I have heard in prayer meetings throughout my life. You know the ones.

You walk into a room with horrible lighting, mediocre décor and something less than spiritual ambiance (yes, rooms can have a spiritual ambiance). You sit around a table, or in a circle, making small talk for a while. After an appropriate amount of time the leader of the meeting will ask for prayer requests.

For the next half hour you hear people rattle off all the things they would like God to do for them. Sometimes the more spiritually mature will talk about what God has already done for them. Then you spend time taking turns asking God to deliver on this litany of requests.

Often we will pray out loud, and I am not sure why. Is it because God can’t hear us? Or are we praying for the benefit of those listening? Whatever happened to silence?

Recently my prayer has been almost devoid of requests. I pray to spend time in the presence of God, to acknowledge who he is and how much I rely on his sovereign provision. When I do ask for something, it is usually a request for wisdom and protection from sin. All of which line up nicely with the Lord’s Prayer.