Prayer and Me, It’s Complicated You See

I feel weird writing this.

Prayer... It kind of makes me feel yucky inside, like in the pit of my stomach.

I don’t want to talk about Jesus really, either. Definitely not surrender, or anything like that. It just feels kind of… cringe.

And yet, here I am.

Prayer: I chased it like an addict. Broken, desperate. For years. A box to check.

Then I chose sobriety.

I learned to sit in silence. To become aware rather than to speak. And it felt… powerful.

To be still. And at times, to be spoken to rather than to incessantly speak.

But if any of you know me much at all, there’s one thing I actually really love: talking!

I actually also love to listen, even more than I love to talk, actually. I have to stay self-aware to remember to shut up long enough to hear, sometimes.

So why have I felt such animosity towards “prayer”?

Well, it’s complicated. Maybe because I feel pretty unsure of who or what God is. He or she? Beyond gender? Everything? Outside, within, all around? Maybe just some kind of relationship with ourselves, with each other?

And then furthermore, what the heck would I want to “say” in “prayer”? This Infinite Being… if He exists, He must read my thoughts anyway.

But this concept of prayer has really been coming back to me lately. And fascinatingly, it feels so invitational. Like whoever He or She or It is, is just inviting me. Saying He wants to hear. He’s very strong, and willing to carry whatever I’m carrying. And that it really doesn’t matter in the least what I think about Him, or if I understand Him… “He” just wants me to know that He’s with me.

And mostly, that He loves me.

This morning I was at my best friend’s house and she had a deck of cards sitting on her table. The kind we didn’t have at church, you know.... She invited me to pull a card. And she knows this journey that I’ve been on with prayer. She asked me to pray for her yesterday, actually, and I did… reluctantly.

And it felt good.

I pulled my card.

And of course, the card was “The Power of Prayer.”

Right. Yeah. Of course it would be.

And it talked about how prayer is meant to be a daily practice, combined with silence. To lift our hearts up. Our needs, our brokenness. Even now I feel tears gently touching my eyes as I write.

Words don’t do it justice… but I feel so loved.

So seen, and so held.

No more obligation of prayer. No more box to check.

Just a gentle, beautiful invitation.

An invitation for my heart to be heard.