Dear Church,
I want you to slow down and be unbusy before God.
In 1981 God called
me to a deeper praying life. I needed it so badly! I was doing, doing, doing,
and the inner fire was leaving, leaving, leaving. God told me to take Tuesday
afternoons, get unbusy, and pray. I needed to tend the fire within.
This was a new
beginning for me, a time when my doing began to emerge from
my being in God. This was important, since in the spiritual
life being precedes doing.
That first Tuesday
afternoon was spent sitting on a rusty tractor, in a field, in a forest
preserve north of Lansing, Michigan. I remember being there,
trying to pray, while my mind kept asking, "Just what the heck am I doing here,
anyway? What am I accomplishing?"
The answer seemed
to be: "nothing." I wasn't xeroxing. I wasn’t at some planni9ng
meeting. I was producing nothing. No empirical "product" was coming
from sitting on this old tractor. And yet…
…That was one of the most important days of my life. I was getting
reattached to Jesus, the Vine!
Prayer is wasting
time with God. The world says, “If you are not making good use of your time,
you are useless.” Jesus says: “Come spend some useless time with me.”"
Henri Nouwen writes: "If we think about prayer in terms of its
usefulness to us—what prayer will do for us, what spiritual benefits we will
gain, what insights we will gain, what divine presence we may feel—God cannot
easily speak to us. But if we can detach ourselves from the idea of the
usefulness of prayer and the results of prayer, we become free to “waste” a
precious hour with God in prayer. Gradually, we may find, our “useless” time
will transform us, and everything around us will be different."
The world measures us by how much we do, how much we accomplish. We impress
others by how busy we are, by datebooks filled with engagements, deadlines to
be met, and meetings to attend. Jesus, on the other hand, calls us to do
nothing, accomplish nothing, until we first spend much time with him. “Be like
a tree branch,” counsels Jesus, “that stays attached to the trunk of the tree.”
Then, your life will bear much fruit.
I confess to
having led church meetings where we decide on what we are going to do, and then
baptize our decisions with prayers. The opposite, counter-intuitive way of
Jesus is to first, spend much time praying and, in that God-seeking
environment, discern what the Lord would have us do.
In a sense, prayer
is being unbusy with God, instead of being busy with other things. Prayer is
primarily doing nothing useful or productive in the presence of God. If
anything important or fruitful happens through prayer, then we work hard, and
behold how God achieves the result.
Love,
PJ
REFUSE
Refuse
to identify your worth by…
…your
accomplishments, by…
…your
datebook, by…
…your
checkbook, by…
…your
material possessions, by…
…your
appearance, by…
…your
performance, by…
…what
others think of you.
From my book 31 Letters to the Church on Praying.
