“Pray as you can, not as you can’t.” Dom Chapman
Foster opens his first chapter by saying, “We today yearn for prayer and hide from prayer. We are attracted to it and repelled by it. We believe prayer is something we should do, even something we want to do, but it seems like a chasm stands between us and actually praying. We experience the agony of prayerlessness.
We are not quite sure what holds us back.”
And so, the Bible study group discussed a bit what kinds of barriers we experience to prayer. The discussion focused on ways to stop the barriers and keep prayer flowing throughout the day. One person shared, for example, that she does not say “amen” when she is praying, until the end of the day, to maintain the idea of continual prayer flowing through the day, always ready to pick up the thread of prayer. Another approach group members use is to pray for a given request in the moment after we read it, so it is not forgotten in the press of the day’s tasks.
Foster argues that using busyness as an excuse for not praying is just a “smoke screen. Our busyness seldom keeps us from eating or sleeping or making love.”
Foster believes a major barrier to prayer is the notion that we “have to have everything ‘just right’ in order to pray.”
To move through this major barrier, we must be willing to surrender…and, to be simple. ‘To pray,’ writes Emilie Griffith, ‘means to be willing to be naïve.’
Foster argues that we do not need to—nor can we—have all our motives all sorted out and “pure” before coming to God in prayer. True, we do not want to be hypocrites, but we also cannot afford to let our soul-searching and honesty paralyze us and keep us from coming to God! “God is big enough to receive us with all our mixture [of our “tangled mass of motives”]. We do not have to be bright, or pure, or filled with faith, or anything. That is what grace means, and not only are we saved by it, we live by it. And we pray by it.”
Do we understand this grace? Are we living this understanding of God’s grace? Think of the beauty of Jesus’ response to the man in Mark 9:23-25.
“Jesus reminds us that prayer is a little like children coming to their parents.” Jesus reminds us that we are coming to a loving Father, one who knows us, loves us, and wants to meet our needs (Matt. 6:8,32; Psalm 103:13-14)!
“…it is in the very act of prayer…that these matters are cared for in due time” We reminded ourselves that God’s Spirit is with us to cleanse us in response to our simple requests and confessions (I John 1:9)—and, to help us pray when we do not know how to pray (Rom. 8:26)! : ) We can therefore pray even for God to help us pray!
Foster describes the most basic, primary form of prayer as “simple prayer,” where we “bring ourselves to God just as we are, warts and all…we simply and unpretentiously share our concerns and make our petitions.” He then shows some examples of simple prayer—shocking, ugly prayers recorded in Scripture, as well as beautiful, altruistic examples of simple prayer in Scripture.
“Simple prayer involves ordinary people bringing ordinary concerns to a loving and compassionate Father. There is no pretense in simple prayer…we do not try to conceal our conflicting and contradictory motives from God—or ourselves…we pour out our hearts to the God who is greater than our hearts and who knows all things (I John 3:20).”
Foster ends this section of the chapter by saying that simple prayer is both beginning prayer, and necessary, essential prayer. “Those who think they can skip over Simple Prayer deceive themselves. Most likely, they themselves have not prayed.”
With simple prayer, the “adventure is just beginning”…
“Dear Jesus, how desperately I need to learn to pray. And yet when I am honest, I know that I often do not even want to pray.
I am distracted!
I am stubborn!
I am self-centered!
In your mercy, Jesus, bring my ‘want-er’ more in line with my ‘need-er’ so that I can come to want what I need.
In your name and for your sake, I pray. –Amen”
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