A Confession

May I make a (perhaps startling) confession to you, dear readers?

I have never in my life sustained the practice of daily prayer, for any one person or thing, nor simply for the experience itself.

As a Christian this is a shameful thing to confess. Admitting to our shortcomings, however, in some way takes the shame away and robs the devil of the power to hold it over our head. I've had several conversations with friends about prayer in the past few weeks. At the heart of the matter, I believe, are two intellectual objections I have never been able to get beyond.

1) I do not know how it works.

This must be due, in large part, to the fact that prayer is a great spiritual mystery to begin with. But I struggle with many aspects of the inner-workings of prayer. How do prayer and providence work together? How does my sin affect my prayer? Is prayer really about asking God to give me what I want (he's probably a bit better as a judge of what I need and what is best in the universal scheme of things)? But is praying "your will be done" the only thing I can do, or does God also hear and move and respond to our requests? Being an all-knowing God, is there great need in me praying every day about the same thing...of which he is already aware and working on? The questions seem endless.

2) The lure of the novel

This is the name I give to a deep-seated desire I find at work within me. When given a choice between the commonplace or ordinary and the new and the fresh, I almost always choose the novel. As a child my father often said, "variety is the spice of life" and now as an adult I have apparently taken its meaning to be "novelty is the spice of life." While this guiding principle is not always true, it certainly makes repeated, daily prayer more of a challenge.

I am saying all this because I was challenged at church this morning that the very act of connecting with God, abiding in him, is transformative. I want prayer to be something transformative in the world at large: lives changed, events altered, the power of God brought to bear for me in my life. And, incidentally, I am often like Veruca Salt: "I want it now." What I was reminded of this morning is that the effect is very often within me, and often any discernible effect will require patience to notice.

Just moments ago I read something about C.S. Lewis in a book, and he told a friend that daily prayer for that friend felt a little like short meetings despite their geographic distance from each other. That's a beautiful picture I can get behind. I then jumped online to look for some information on Lewis's book, "Pilgrim's Regress" and read of an exchange between Lewis and his friend. His friend asked, "When will you write your next book" and Lewis's response was, "When I understand prayer." I guess in a sense it's comforting that others have wrestled with this subject as well, and at the same time have practiced what they could not fully understand.

I've started lifting weights again after the accident, and determined to gain back some weight that I had lost. As I read more about weight training, I was reminded that so much of it has to do with diet. A friend told me once, "You can't out-train a bad diet." I say all this because even though I didn't fully understand the correct way to lift or to gain muscle mass when I was a younger man, I still lifted weights. I drew pictures before I fully understood value and color. Part of living and growing is doing, and progressing as you go.

So I am resolving to make a list (I almost shudder at the thought) and pray daily. It may be the most horrible way to go about counteracting the problem, but it will be something. I simply feel I can no longer neglect something so important and blame it on ignorance.