Blue Christmas: The Cure for Christmas Melancholy

I imagine everyone has something that epitomizes their Christmas experience. It’s often a song or a movie. For me, it’s that moment in A Charlie Brown Christmas when Linus and Charlie Brown are discussing the meaning of Christmas. “Christmas is coming, but I’m not happy,” Charlie Brown complains. “I don’t feel the way I’m supposed to feel. I just don’t understand Christmas, I guess.” A little later, after Charlie Brown selects a scrawny little Christmas tree that drops its needles for the pageant, he laments, “Everything I do turns into a disaster. I guess I don’t really know what Christmas is all about.”

I first saw A Charlie Brown Christmas on television in 1965, when it aired on CBS. I was twelve years old at the time, and it captivated me. I loved everything about it: the music, the animation, the storyline. But most of all, I loved its honesty, because even at that young age, I had already noticed a connection between Christmas and melancholia.

A famous song, performed by just about every musical artist who has ever released a holiday album, describes Christmas as “the most wonderful time of the year” and the “hap-happiest season of all.” But many people have a different experience. Theirs is more like Charlie Brown’s. Like him, they wonder why they don’t feel the way they are supposed to feel. Their Christmas experience is tinged with longing and sadness, and they blame themselves. Or the universe. Or maybe God.

I notice it in myself, and I’ve concluded that Charlie Brown is asking the wrong question. Instead of wondering why we don’t feel the way we are supposed to feel, we ought to ask what it is about Christmas that causes us to expect to feel something remarkable to begin with. The answer to this question is more complex than you might expect. It’s not just one thing—this feeling of seasonal melancholia springs from multiple sources.

The Ghost of Christmas Past

One reason our feelings tend to fall short is that we expect Christmas to match our memory. This expectation is infused with nostalgia. I don’t think that it is an accident that the first spirit that visits Scrooge in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol comes to remind him of his past:

“Who and what are you?” Scrooge demanded. “I am the Ghost of Christmas Past.” “Long Past?” inquired Scrooge observant of its dwarfish stature. “No. Your past.”[1]

This is Dickens at his best, functioning as the master psychologist. He understands that what we are is the sum of what we have been. This does not mean that we cannot change. The possibility of change is the promise that lies at the heart of his story. But the fact that the first Spirit to appear to Scrooge is the ghost of his past is a signal that change is unlikely to occur before we have understood the forces that have shaped us.

Take a careful look at your Christmas tree, and you will find that it probably says as much about your past as it does Christmas. If your tree is like mine, it is as layered as an archeological dig. Most of us aren’t just celebrating the arrival of a new holiday; we are celebrating the past. What is more, it isn’t some biblical past that moves us but our own. As Christmas draws near, the collective weight of every Christmas we have ever known bears down upon us like a demanding parent with impossible expectations. We aren’t merely trying to celebrate something; our aim is to recreate.

This is a vain hope for two reasons. First, because the conditions that made Christmas Past have dissipated. Time has moved on. The children have grown. People have moved. Some have died. Even the same ingredients, after we have measured them with meticulous accuracy, take on a slightly different flavor. Try as you might, you will only be able to reproduce an echo of what you think you remember.

All these things point to the second reason for our failure. The Christmas you recall is probably not the one you experienced. What you are feeling is nostalgia, not memory. The term comes from a compound word formed by joining the Greek noun meaning “return” with the noun meaning “pain”. In other words, to the ancient mind, nostalgia is the pain of longing to return. It is an acute case of homesickness.

Unfortunately, the vision of the past that nostalgia provides is one that has been enhanced by distance. It is a picture of our experience with the sharp edges worn down by time and forgetfulness. I am not exactly saying that it is a lie. But it is not exactly the truth either. It is a softer version. As if this version of our reality had been reproduced by that artist who called himself the “painter of light.” I don’t mean Rembrandt or Turner.

Days of Future Past

What we experience as a longing for our past actually has to do with the future. It is what C. S. Lewis has called, in The Weight of Glory, a “desire for our own far off country” and “a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience.”[2] As James K. A. Smith similarly puts it, “We are always on the way; the Christian life is a ‘refugee spirituality,’ because we are longing for a home we’ve never been to.”[3]

As Lewis and Smith describe nostalgia, the feeling is not quite a distortion. It is more of an anticipation of the life to come. We experience the ache of nostalgia as a kind of pleasant grief, the sorrow for a bygone age that will never return. But what if it is the opposite? Is it possible that this longing springs from a desire for what is yet to come? If this is the case, then our orientation is all wrong. Instead of looking backward and trying to recreate the past, the purpose of this ache is to help us face forward. It was the disposition of the patriarchs, who the writer of Hebrews says were “still living by faith when they died.” According to Hebrews 11:13: “They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance, admitting that they were foreigners and strangers on earth.”

During the holiday season, we feel obliged to be happy. I am not talking about the kind of happiness one sometimes feels in the ordinary course of events. What I am describing is more extreme. It is a sense that it is our Christian duty to have a transcendent experience at Christmas. When I became a serious follower of Jesus shortly after I turned 19, I can recall wondering how that would change my experience of Christmas. The honest answer was that it diminished it to some degree. Learning the truth about the Nativity of Christ stripped Christmas of its gaudier aspects. The things I loved most about the holiday season had nothing at all to do with the event it is supposed to celebrate.

The Myth of Christmas Magic

Christmas cards, carols, and just about every holiday movie we have ever seen have told us that the Christmas season is supposed to be magical and transforming. Scripture does, in fact, portray the Nativity and the incarnation of Christ as something miraculous and transformative. The birth of Christ was a singular event with cosmic significance, not only for “all the people,” but for creation itself. Yet describing it as magical is something quite different.

But the effects of Christ’s Nativity are not linked to a particular season, if by “season” we mean a specific month of the year. The idea of sacred time does not originate with the church. It was an essential part of the religious landscape of the Old Testament from which the gospel sprang. Yet the arrival of Christ so altered that landscape that the apostle Paul would later call those things: “a shadow of the things that were to come” and tell the Colossians their reality is found in Christ (Col. 2:17). The Nativity was a sacred event. Christmas, as we know and celebrate it–not so much.

Christmas as a season does not have the power to suspend the regular order (or disorder) of the fallen world. It does not possess magical powers to make all things whole. We see the evidence of this in the Scriptural accounts of Christ’s birth. Miraculous events do take place. There are signs and wonders. But, simultaneously with these remarkable events, we see that all the ordinary functions of the world, along with its failings, are also in full view in the Nativity story. Taxes must be paid. Governments rule inequitably. Joseph works away at his carpentry. The inn is so full that there is no room. The religious leaders who ought to know what has happened are puzzled. The world is indeed invested, but not with magic. It is visited by God, who has come in the form of a child. Creation itself will eventually be remade as a result, but that has not yet happened. Then, as now, “everything goes on as it has since the beginning of creation” (2 Pet. 3:4).

The Great Reversal

It may sound as if my message is the gospel of “lower your expectations.” But what I have to say is really the opposite. The great hope of Christmas is that at the incarnation, God entered the broken world in human form. As a result of this act, a series of events was put into motion that have fundamentally changed us and which will remake the world. The miracle of this event was not only that God became flesh but that he also subjected himself to the brokenness of the world he entered. Jesus “humbled himself by becoming obedient to death” (Phil. 2:8). This is what C. S. Lewis calls “the deeper magic” in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

It is a kind of unraveling and drawing in. The curse of sin is reversed and for the believer, its consequences are drawn into the sphere of grace. To quote from The Great Divorce, another work by C. S. Lewis, it is what he calls the “retrospective” power of redemption. Lewis writes: “The good man’s past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven; the bad man’s past already conforms to his badness and is filled only with dreariness. And that is why, at the end of all things, when the sun rises here and the twilight turns to blackness down there, the Blessed will say ‘We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven,” and the Lost, ‘We were always in Hell.’ And both will speak truly.”[4]

Of course, when Lewis speaks of “the good man,” he is not talking about goodness as an achievement. This is a goodness that comes to us as a gift. The theological words for this are grace and redemption. They are words that describe the great reversal that the preacher Phillips Brooks writes about in the carol O Little Town of Bethlehem:

O holy Child of Bethlehem,
descend to us, we pray;
cast out our sin, and enter in,
be born in us today.

I think we sometimes misunderstand the preacher’s intent with these words. It is not Christ who is born in us. It is we who are born in Christ. To use the language of Jesus himself, we are “born again” (John 3:3, 7; See 1 Pet. 1:27). The Nativity of Christ was a singular and unrepeatable event. It may be reenacted in the Christmas pageant each season, but it can never be repeated. The new life that comes to us as a result of that act of God is something else. It is our repeated experience, but it has no season. The life we celebrate at Christmas is something that we draw upon every day and which is reproduced in others through the preaching of the gospel.

The cure for Christmas melancholia is not, as another song tells us, that we “need a little Christmas right now.” Nor is it necessarily Puritan austerity or renunciation of all observance of Christmas. The cure, strange as it may seem, is good theology. We should not expect from Christmas what Christ alone can supply. It is not a sin to look back, but we can become trapped there.

We need not fear Christmas melancholy. I think we ought to view it as a kind of signpost that points away from that which is not God and toward a life yet to come. It says, “This, not that,” and “Then, not now.” It ought to prompt us to say, “Even so, Come, Lord Jesus.”

[1] Charles Dickens, The Christmas Books, Vol. 1 (New York: Penguin, 1982), 69.

[2] C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory (New York: HarperCollins, 1976), 29-30.

[3] James K. A. Smith, Jennifer Abe, John Swinton, Brandon Rickabaugh, and Michael Vincient Di Fuccia, “How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now” Journal of Spiritual Formation & Soul Care 16, no. 1 (2023): 90.

[4] C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (New York: HarperOne, 1980), 69.

Insatiable Desire & World Weariness: Signs We Were Made for Eternity

Featured ~ John Koessler ~ 3 Comments

Back in the day, we used to sing, “Heaven is a wonderful place, filled with glory and grace.” But eternity is a long time. For some, the few pictures of heavenly activity that we have in the Bible are insufficient to convince us that this is truly the case. I have heard more than one Christian express reservations about what we can look forward to in the age to come.

It is tempting to blame this anxiety on the nature of the descriptions themselves. It is certainly true that the Bible is remarkably spare in its details about such matters. We know a little about Heaven, but not as much as we would like. What is more, the few depictions that we do have are either so strange that we cannot relate to them or so familiar that they fail to capture our imagination.

The Bible’s visions of crowns, thrones, and four-faced cherubim may be of some interest. Yet, for most people, this is not the kind of landscape that would inspire us to pack our bags and move. As a result, many believers are puzzled about what their heavenly experience will be like, and some are anxious.

Signs and Wondering

Theologian Josef Pieper’s observation about Scriptural imagery offers a helpful starting point for considering such matters. Pieper warns that “one must clearly distinguish the images that are meant to make the essence of the matter visible to the imagination from the essence of the matter itself.”¹ Pieper is actually talking about Hell, but his point is equally applicable to Heaven.

We should not think so narrowly about the imagery that the Bible uses that we miss the essence of what it is intended to signify. There is more to heaven than white robes, fantastic creatures, and glass seas. The reality to which these signs point is more expansive than the pictures the Bible uses to convey it. The whole truth of what is coming to the believer cannot be contained in the images alone.

However, we also need to guard against a view of heaven that is so abstract that its reality becomes completely obscured from our sight. The symbols that Scripture uses to speak of Heaven are concrete enough to suggest the old Sunday school song was right. Heaven is a wonderful place. It is more than a philosophy, moral rule, or spiritual principle. Heaven is a true location.

Heaven is where Jesus “came down from” and was “taken up into” (John 3:13; Luke 24:51). Whatever is intended by this directional language, we can at least say that heaven must be a place that is substantial enough to receive the human body of the resurrected Christ (Luke 24:39). Furthermore, our heavenly experience is personal, conscious and human. In the life to come, our humanity does not dissolve. We are not absorbed into the Godhead. We do not turn into ghosts or lose all memory of our earthly life. As the patriarch Job declared, after our skin has been destroyed, we will see our redeemer with our own eyes (Job 19:26-27).

These earthly descriptions are signposts more than they are windows. They are intended to spark recognition and enable us to make correlations. They are not meant to show us the features of heaven in photographic detail. Nevertheless, it is a mistake to dismiss the literalistic language that the Bible employs to speak of Heaven as a kind of baby talk that says less than the words themselves convey. These familiar images are used precisely because they imply more than the images themselves.

Hungering for Heaven

The song the children used to sing is correct on two points. Heaven is indeed a place, and it is wonderful. Such an assertion begs an obvious question. Is there anything so wonderful that we can enjoy it for eternity? On the one hand, human beings possess a capacious desire that the earth does not seem to have the ability to satisfy. “All things are full of weariness; a man cannot utter it, the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing,” Solomon complains in Ecclesiastes 1:8.

Is our problem that we want too much? It may seem so when we read Hebrews 13:5, which urges us to “be content with what you have because God has said, ‘Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.’” Yet the point of this verse is just the opposite. Our difficulty is that we want too little. As theologian Josef Pieper observes, the real difficulty is “that every fulfillment this side of Heaven instantly reveals its inadequacy.”²

Nevertheless, there is a corollary truth in Solomon’s complaint. The weakness he speaks of is not only in the objects themselves; there is also weakness in us. The dissatisfaction that Solomon laments is the result of a weariness which suggests that, as much as we might desire eternity, we are not yet suited for it. “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun,” Solomon complains (Eccl. 1:9).

Mark Twain seems to intuit this in one of his last tales when a fictional resident of Heaven observes that eternal rest may sound comforting from the pulpit, but “you try it once, and see how heavy time will hang on your hands.”³ Eternal existence without a corresponding change in our nature would not be a blessing but an intolerable burden.

We Shall Be Changed

This intuitive sense that no pleasure we now know would be expansive enough to occupy our attention for all eternity is a sign that we must be changed before we can enjoy heavenly experience. All Christian traditions acknowledge this, but focus primarily on the moral side of this dilemma. Without the perfection of holiness, “no one will see the Lord” (Heb. 12:14).

C. S. Lewis takes it a step further by speculating that believers must also be strengthened before they can truly enjoy and even endure the beauties and pleasures of the heavenly realm. Perfection in holiness is certainly part of this transformation. But there must also be a corresponding strengthening of our humanity as well. Lewis pictures Heaven as a place that is so substantial, we are mere ghosts by comparison. This is the solid country, a reality whose flowers are diamond hard, its grass rock solid, and the drops of rain that fall upon those petals as sharp as a bullet.⁴ He is not trying to be literal, but neither is he speaking allegorically.⁵

The world as we know it is not enough to make a heaven. No earthly pleasure can be sustained for an eternity. The distracted search for fulfillment that Solomon laments is a clue that we were designed for something more, something higher. Correspondingly, we are not yet substantial enough to endure the eternal joy that we crave. Just as the world must be remade before its pleasures can truly satisfy, so also must we.

Infinite Possibility

Scripture is deliberately ambiguous when it compares this life to that which is to come. This indefiniteness is born of infinite possibility. “‘What no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, and what no human mind has conceived’ the things God has prepared for those who love him—these are the things God has revealed to us by his Spirit,” the apostle declares in 1 Corinthians 2:9-10.

The things we look for in the world to come are both promised and beyond words. Heaven is real, not only because it is literal, but because the life it brings is even more substantial than the one we are living now. Like our spiritual forefather Abraham, we are “looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God” (Heb. 11:10). The world to come is one with an. entirely different kind of gravity than the world we now inhabit. Its name is glory.

In the Greek text of 2 Corinthians 4:17, the apostle speaks of an eternal “weight” (baros) of glory. The word is missing from the NIV, possibly because translators considered it redundant. Its absence is unfortunate because it causes us to miss Paul’s startling juxtaposition of light and weight.

Lewis seems to have got it right after all, with the more substantial light, grass, and flowers of his heaven in the Great Divorce, as well as the “solid people” who inhabit it. This is the lesson behind all our unfulfilled desires. This is the sacred reminder embedded not only in our delight but also in our hunger and our disappointment. We were meant for more. We were made for eternity.

Josef Pieper, The Concept of Sin, (South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2001), 90. ↩︎
Josef Pieper, Happiness & Contemplation, (South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 1979), 16-17. ↩︎
Mark Twain, Excerpt From Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven, (Amherst: Prometheus, 2002), 41. ↩︎
C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, (New York: Macmillan, 1946), 28,47, 57. ↩︎
Ibid., 8. ↩︎

Slow Faith: Lessons About Belief from the Disciples

Featured ~ John Koessler ~ 4 Comments

There are times when it’s easy for me to be impatient with the slow faith of Christ’s first disciples. Sometimes, it’s hard to understand why faith was such a struggle for them. From where I sit, they appear to have had all the advantages that I lack. They knew Jesus face to face. They spent night and day with him for the three years of his earthly ministry. They saw him die and were among the first to speak with him after he had risen from the dead.

In other words, they experienced what I have often wished for myself. As John later wrote, the proof offered to them consisted of evidence that they saw, heard, and touched (1 John 1:1). Acts 1:3 says that after his resurrection, Jesus “appeared to them over forty days and spoke about the kingdom of God.” Luke also says that during this period, Jesus not only taught them, “he presented himself to them and gave many convincing proofs that he was alive.”

A Slow and Uncertain Faith

So it comes as something of a shock to find in Matthew 28:17 that when Jesus appeared to the disciples once more at the end of all this, “some doubted.” Matthew doesn’t say who these doubters are. I wish that he had. I’d like to know if they were the traditional heroes of faith that come to mind, like Peter, James, and John. Or a small handful of marginal disciples who lurked on the fringes. A part of me hopes it is the former rather than the latter because I think I recognize their slow faith.

Doubt, even at this late stage, is consistent with the picture we have of the disciples throughout the gospels. They come to complete faith but not easily. Their belief develops in stages and seems to falter at several points, sometimes in the most surprising circumstances (Matt. 14:31; 16:14; Mark 4:4). Even during the final hours of Jesus’ earthly ministry, they are still struggling to grasp the details of the storyline.

The epigram that I think best describes Christ’s disciples’ struggle to believe, at least until the Holy Spirit descends at Pentecost, is the phrase that Jesus uses to describe the two disciples to whom he appears on the Emmaus road. He calls them “slow to believe” (Matt. 24:25). There are several reasons for this slowness.

In an encounter that feels almost parabolic, Luke tells us that Jesus drew near to two unnamed disciples who were traveling from Jerusalem to the village of Emmaus, listening as they puzzled over the events that had taken place earlier that Sunday morning. He reveals that although Jesus himself walked with them, they were “kept” from recognizing him” (Luke 24:16). This was a supernatural veiling intended to drive home the reality of Christ’s resurrection to them.

I think there is an underlying grace note of humor, indeed even playfulness, in Jesus’ interaction with them. Imagine the risen savior listening to these two disciples as they give their account of the things that he has just experienced. They speak of Jesus’ words and deeds, his crucifixion, and the reports of his resurrection on the third day. They also express sorrow over the failure of their own expectations, saying, “We had hoped that he was the one who was going to redeem Israel” (v. 21). I can’t help imagining Jesus suppressing a smile as he listens to them.

I Want to Believe

Their questions seem understandable. Jesus had only just risen that morning. He had appeared to a few of his followers but not yet to everyone. These two disciples were trying to piece together the information that they currently had. Their doubts don’t seem to reflect an outright refusal to believe but are more of a lag in faith caused by a combination of incomplete information and their attempt to reconcile what had happened with what they had expected to take place.

Like the slogan on the old X-Files poster, these disciples wanted to believe. ButThey had expected the story to unfold quite differently. They were indeed looking for someone to “redeem” Israel. But the nature of that redemption and the mode in which Jesus accomplished it came as a surprise. They couldn’t see it because they were looking for something else.

This goes a long way in explaining the disciples’ struggle to believe all through the Gospels. It also helps us to understand our own doubts. I think there is a difference between being slow to believe and a stubborn refusal to believe. Like the first disciples, we may be confident that God is doing something but with preconceived ideas about how God’s plan should unfold. We have a kind of faith, but it is faith with an agenda. When God ignores the agenda we have set for him, as he almost always does, we become disillusioned. Instead of questioning our initial assumptions, like our first parents in the Garden of Eden, we begin to question God’s wisdom, goodness, and perhaps even his existence.

Also, like the disciples on the road to Emmaus, our questioning usually springs from incomplete information. We don’t understand why God allows the circumstances that provoke our questions because we are unable to see how they fit into his larger plan. The concerns that challenge our faith are personal and are often narrowly focused on the limited sphere of our own lives and circumstances. What God is doing is much larger. Because we are on this side of eternity, it’s not yet clear how the little threads of our personal experience fit into the larger tapestry of God’s kingdom interests. If our faith suffers as a result, it’s usually because of the assumptions we have made about what God should be doing as much as it is about what he has done.

Irrefutable Evidence

The language that Luke uses in Acts 1:3 to describe Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances emphasizes their persuasive nature. He calls those proofs “convincing,” using a Greek term other writers employed to speak of irrefutable evidence. In the medical realm (Luke’s own field), the term was used to refer to symptoms. Given the context, which is the bodily resurrection of Christ, perhaps this is intended to underscore the physical nature of this proof. Luke’s main point is that the evidence Jesus offered to his disciples was not only concrete, it was indisputable. However, I think that Luke’s description implies another equally important fact about the disciples themselves that is less obvious. It means that they needed persuading, even at this late point in the redemption story.

That they came to believe is clear both from their subsequent testimony and the tenor of their lives. As Peter would later put it, “. . . we did not follow cleverly devised stories when we told you about the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ in power, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty” (2 Pet. 1:16). The apostles eventually came to full conviction, a belief that was strong enough to withstand the threat of certain death. But they were not quick about it. Or, at least, not as quick as we might think they should have been, given the advantages that were theirs as eyewitnesses of Christ’s majesty both before and after the resurrection.

This slowness is a blunt reminder that the faith Christ demands of us relies on something besides physical proof. When Jesus criticized the doubters on the Emmaus road for being slow to believe, he might have urged them to pay attention to the evidence that was in front of their own eyes. He might have told them to heed what their own senses now told them was true. Instead, the risen Lord rebuked them for ignoring old promises. According to Luke 24:25–27: “He said to them, ‘How foolish you are, and how slow to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Did not the Messiah have to suffer these things and then enter his glory?’ And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself.”

Believing is Seeing

An old cliché says that seeing is believing. However, the slow faith of the disciples who beheld the risen Christ tells us that it is the other way around. It is faith that opens our eyes to see Jesus as he truly is. What is more, the faith that Jesus demands is faith in a word. This faith is a matter of believing the word of promise uttered long ago through the Scriptures. It is also faith in the word of the apostles, a testimony that is rooted in history and confirmed by the fact of the resurrection.

When Jairus, the synagogue leader, was told that his daughter had died and there was no longer any reason to trouble the master, Jesus replied, “Don’t be afraid; just believe.” (Mark 5:36). The adjective “just” or “only” in Jesus’ answer captivates me. It’s a word with limiting force, as if Jesus has simplified everything by saying this. All Jairus has to do is believe. Yet “only” faith is not necessarily “easy” faith. Slow faith is not synonymous with unbelief. The repeated testimony of Scripture regarding the disciples’ experience confirms this. Faith came to them, but it did not come easily. When it did come, it did not come merely as a result of external proof.

With this command, Jesus isn’t focusing on the ease of what he tells Jairus to do but on its singular nature. In this moment of need, there was only one path forward for Jairus, and it led through Christ. The only way forward was to believe and, more particularly, to concentrate that belief on the person of Christ. The one option that was open to Jairus was to lean into Christ. This is the essence of faith. Faith does not look inward in the hope of finding some hidden reserve of confidence. It focuses its attention on Christ, who is not only our help but our only hope.

Philosophers and theologians have puzzled over the question of faith and its origin for millennia. Their conclusions seem to diverge into two primary streams of thought. One leans into human reason and emphasizes evidence. The other leans in the opposite direction by viewing faith as a supernatural result of the work of God. Each of these views seems to cancel out the other.

The position that Jesus takes, on the other hand, seems to be a more mysterious middle ground between the two. The faith that Jesus demands from his disciples is not without evidence. Most of Jesus’ dealings with his disciples, especially when it comes to the miraculous, seem to presume that they struggle with slow faith. He builds an irrefutable case for his claims about himself. He doesn’t expect them to believe without substantial proof. Yet their story shows that strong evidence is not sufficient to elicit faith. They saw Jesus perform miracles and even raise the dead. They had healed the sick and even cast out demons in Jesus’ name. Jesus told them point-blank that he would be crucified and rise again. Yet after Jesus appeared to them in the flesh, allowed them to touch him, and spoke at length about what was to come, “some doubted.”

Although our slowness to believe is nothing to boast about, we can at least take some measure of comfort from the fact that we are not the only ones to wrestle with this problem of slow faith. The Bible is full of similar examples. All of this suggests that slow faith is often normal faith.

But neither should we trust our doubt. We are those that Jesus described to Thomas, those who are blessed because they believe without seeing. We also stand with Jairus, whose only viable option was the path of faith. And if we find ourselves faltering, then we stand with Peter, who, in his sinking faith, knew enough at least to grasp the hand that Christ held out to him.

Job and the Divine Game: Faith Amidst Suffering

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In a letter discussing the infant theory of quantum mechanics, Albert Einstein famously observed that God “does not play dice.” Perhaps, but sometimes, it feels as if God does play games with us. At least, Martin Luther seems to have thought so. After studying the Old Testament patriarchs, Luther concluded that God is a Ludus Deus, a God who plays and often engages with us in a ludus divinus, or divine game. In modern vernacular, we might be tempted to paraphrase this by saying that God is “messing with us.”

This divine game is a kind of adversarial love, often reflected in circumstances that cause us to echo Jacob’s complaint recorded in Genesis 42:36: “Everything is against me!” What we really mean when we think this is that God is against us. In the divine game that Luther describes, God relates to us as if he were our enemy in order to make himself our friend. He judges in order to bless. He rejects so that he may eventually accept.

The nature of this adverse love is captured in the line from William Cowper’s hymn God Moves in a Mysterious Way which urges:

“Judge not the Lord by feeble sense, but trust Him for His grace;

behind a frowning providence, He hides a smiling face.”

Luther’s thinking about this is part of a larger theological framework called Theologia Crucis, or the theology of the cross. This is, in part, a theology of suffering. Vincent Kam summarizes Luther’s theology of the cross this way: “God’s grace is hidden under his wrath, and his salvation is hidden under the cross.”[1]

What Luther describes is a sort of masquerade. This is not a pretense so much as a one-sided display that paves the way for grace. We find several instances of this in the Old Testament. One prominent example was the Lord’s expressed intent to destroy Israel after they sinned with the golden calf. “I have seen these people,” the Lord told Moses, “and they are a stiff-necked people. Now leave me alone so that my anger may burn against them and that I may destroy them. Then I will make you into a great nation” (Exod. 32:9–10). Despite this offer, Moses argued with God, appealing to his nature and citing the promises made to the patriarchs (Exod. 32:11–14).

Moses did not really talk God out of doing anything. Rather, it was the opposite. By implying that Moses stood in his way, the Lord invited him to intercede. Moses stood between God and judgment once again when the people were on the threshold of Canaan and refused to go into the Land of Promise. As before, Moses reminded the Lord of what he had already revealed about himself, quoting God’s own words back to him and basing his appeal on the mercy that had been shown to Israel in the past (Num. 14:17–19).

Although he describes God’s anger as a kind of mask, Luther does not seem to have meant that it is merely feigned. Divine wrath is both real and dangerous to its objects. The thought of God’s anger is genuinely terrifying, even to those who are safe from it. Luther compared this divine game to “a cat’s game which means death to the mouse.”[2] In 2 Corinthians 5:11, the apostle Paul similarly observes: “Since, then, we know what it is to fear the Lord, we try to persuade others.” Yet, this fear was not the only driving force behind Paul’s ministry. Indeed, it quickly becomes apparent that it is not even the main driver. In verse 14, the apostle goes on to add, “For Christ’s love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died.”

Paul’s language in these verses echoes his conversion experience on the Damascus road, where a blazing encounter with the glory of Christ left the future apostle face down in the dirt (cf. Acts 9:4–19; 22:6–21). Although Paul’s fear was both real and warranted, it was not the reason Christ appeared to him in this way. The endgame was not to terrify but to commission. From this moment on, Paul’s relationship with Christ fundamentally changed along with his mission. The persecutor of Christ became an apostle, Christ’s ambassador, and a messenger of God’s reconciling love (2 Cor. 5:18–21).

Fear and love, like wrath and reconciliation, do not seem like they should be compatible with one another. Scripture seems to say as much. “There is no fear in love,” 1 John 4:18 asserts. “But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.” Yet John’s statement about the two mirrors not only Paul’s experience but reflects a kind of order of priority. The experience of fear serves the agenda of divine love.

There is probably no one in Scripture whose experience exemplifies Luther’s concept of ludus divinus more than the Old Testament patriarch Job. According to the first chapter of the book that bears his name, Job’s great trial is set in motion when God draws Satan’s attention to him. “Have you considered my servant Job?” the Lord asks. “There is no one on earth like him; he is blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil” (Job 1:8). Job is offered for consideration in a way that seems to portray him as God’s champion, without a peer among the Lord’s servants. The assertion itself appears as if it’s designed to invite a challenge. The God who already knows the answer to every question that he asks is playing a game.

Satan takes the bait and outlines the general terms of the contest in Job 1:10–11. “Have you not put a hedge around him and his household and everything he has? You have blessed the work of his hands, so that his flocks and herds are spread throughout the land,” Satan declares. “But now stretch out your hand and strike everything he has, and he will surely curse you to your face” (Job 1:10–11). God grants Satan’s terms. But the fact that he sets limits is an indication of who is really in control. “Very well, then, everything he has is in your power,” the Lord told him, “but on the man himself do not lay a finger” (Job 1:12).

If this is a game, or at least a contest, what is Job’s role in it? Is he a player? Or is he being played with? All of this takes place out of Job’s hearing. He has no say in how the contest should take place. Neither does he have any idea that his life is the board upon which it is about to be played or that his children, his possessions, and even his health are its pieces. One is given the impression that the real contest that is about to unfold is between God and Satan. The fact that the Lord surrenders so easily to Satan’s conditions makes it clear that God is not only playing with Satan, he is playing him. The game is rigged in God’s favor, but Satan doesn’t realize it.

Job, on the other hand, does. It’s remarkable that despite the assortment of things that trigger his great suffering (the Sabeans, fire that falls from the sky, the Chaldeans, hurricane-force winds, festering sores on his skin, and even Satan himself), the only agent that Job really concerns himself with is God (Job 9:33–35). Job doesn’t exactly call God a bully, but the emotional tone of all his complaints can be roughly summarized as: “Pick on someone your own size” (cf. Job 9:1-12; 23:13–17). Yet, as unhappy as he is with his situation or with God, Job clings to faith. He expresses remarkable confidence in how God would dispose of his case if he were to be granted an audience with him. “Would He prosecute me forcefully?” Job speculates. “No, He will certainly pay attention to me. Then an upright man could reason with Him, and I would escape from my Judge forever” (Job 23:6–7).

Job had an intuitive sense that there was more behind these things than he was able to see. If this was some game, Job’s faith convinced him that he would prove the winner in the end. Yet Job also knew that this victory would not be due to his own strength or even his righteousness, which Scripture assures us was real (Job 1:1, 8). Job may be the hero of this story, but he is not the champion. The unexpected resilience of Job’s faith is ultimately traceable to his hope in another. Job was convinced that he was not to blame for the things that happened to him. But his trust was in a redeemer (Job 19:25).

What Job saw, though only through a cloud, we now understand with the kind of clarity that the incarnation of Jesus Christ alone can provide. Long after Job’s tortured bones had turned to dust, another player stepped onto the board. As Christopher Boyd Brown has observed, “When God plays his game with his saints, he does not simply set up a game for them to play (and lose) against terrible opponents—sin, death, and hell. Rather, God himself is in the game, in the incarnation. To play God’s game is to play with God, the incarnate God.”[3] Job might also add, to play God’s game is to be played by God and win.

[1] Vincent Kam, “Luther on God’s Play with His Saints,” Lutheran Quarterly, 34 no. 2 (2020), 139.

[2] Christopher Boyd Brown, “Deus Ludens: God at Play in Luther’s Theology,” Concordia Theological Quarterly, 81 no. 1–2 (January–April 2017), 163.

[3] Christopher Boyd Brown, Ibid., 166.

Playing God: The Unexpected Attribute

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My wife, Jane, spent her career as an elementary school teacher. On one occasion, the principal brought a new student to her class who had a reputation for being a behavior problem. “This teacher doesn’t play,” he said. It was both a compliment and a warning. I think most of us might be inclined to say something similar about God. Playfulness is not typically attributed to the divine. We think of God as holy, sovereign, just, and merciful. But playful? Not so much.

The handful of statements that explicitly speak of divine laughter reinforce this impression. When the nations conspire against the Lord’s anointed, the one enthroned in heaven laughs at them in contempt (Ps. 2:4). If we restrict ourselves to those instances where the Bible explicitly mentions God’s laughter, we might conclude that God’s capacity for humor is limited. He laughs, but he does not play. He is all business.

John Chrysostom, the fourth-century bishop of Constantinople and the most influential preacher of his day, did not believe that laughter was necessarily sinful, but he did feel that it was dangerous. The sixth-century Rule of St. Benedict, a guide that shaped monastic life for centuries, condemned idle speech that caused mirth, boisterous laughter, and the telling of jokes. C. S. Lewis has the demon Screwtape advise his apprentice Wormwood that some forms of humor are useful to his cause, but he warns that the laughter of joy is comparable to what happens in heaven.

God does not declare, “I am playful” in the same way that he says, “I am holy.” But his work does reveal a penchant for something that we would probably describe as humor in a human context. We might even call it a joke if God were not involved. Often, this humor is played out in connection with humanity’s failure. Balaam’s donkey has a better moral character and sees spiritual reality more clearly than the prophet (Num. 22:21–34). Haman ponders, “Who is there that the king would rather honor than me?” Not realizing that he is the least likely candidate (Est. 6:5–13).

In the New Testament, Jesus calls mercurial Simon “the rock,” knowing that he will deny that he knows Christ three times. His favorite nickname for the band of believers is “you of little faith” (Matt. 16:18; 6:30; 8:26; 16:8; Luke 12:28). He refuses at first to cast the demon out of a gentile woman’s daughter but eventually grants the request because of her playful banter with him (Mark 7:24–30).

Playfulness is a nuanced form of humor that may have the lightness of flippancy but lacks its dismissive scorn. The thing that separates playfulness from bare ridicule is the presence of affection. Christ’s playfulness demonstrates his superiority and control but is also evidence of his love. Playfulness poses the danger that all humor possesses. It may dull our sense of the real situation by treating the serious as if it were silly. But the converse may be just as true. The seriousness of a situation can obscure the underlying humor that is found there. In such cases, what makes the circumstance humorous is not that we find it laughable but rather its absurdity. Something is present which does not belong. By this definition, there is something deeply comic about sin.

Perhaps this is why, when God laughs in the Old Testament, it is in derision of the wicked. He sees the absurdity of their thinking (Ps. 2:4; 37:13). Sin, by its nature, is always tragic, but it is also an absurdity. Theologian Josef Peiper explains, “Sin is an act against reason, which thus means: a violation against one’s own conscience, against our ‘better’ knowledge, against the best knowledge of which we are capable.”^[4] Based on this, Pieper calls sin “a kind of ‘craziness.’”^[5] Sin is no joke, but it is always ridiculous.

It cannot be denied that the Jesus of Scripture never laughs. The human face that Jesus puts on God in the Gospels is, for the most part, not a smiling face. As Isaiah predicted, He shows Himself to be “a man of sorrows” (Isaiah 53:3). Jesus groaned at the grave of Lazarus. He denounced the Pharisees for their hypocrisy and the Scribes because they were spiritually dull. “He flung furniture down the front steps of the Temple, and asked men how they expected to escape the damnation of Hell,” G. K. Chesterton notes. Yet Chesterton suggests that there was a hidden attribute: “There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was His mirth.”^[6]

The God revealed in Scripture is not only a God who speaks but one who laughs. He is not the jolly God of pagan religion but a being of infinite joy. Divine humor is a reflection of this joy. Although we have not yet experienced the joy of God in its full force, we have been granted a foretaste and are “filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy” through the Holy Spirit (1 Pet. 1:8–9). Just as we need to be transformed through the grace of Christ to stand in God’s glorious presence, surely we will need to be similarly changed to grasp the humor that springs from His infinite joy. Indeed, I think we will need to be changed to even endure it.

Without such a change, God’s humor must come crashing down upon us with the full force of His holiness and glory. The book of Revelation tells us that when Jesus Christ comes again to take His stand on the Mount of Olives, He will be dressed in a robe dipped in blood. The armies of heaven will follow Him, and “out of His mouth will come a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations” that oppose Him (Rev. 19:15). Likewise, the apostle Paul writes that at that time, Jesus will overthrow His enemies with the breath of His mouth and the splendor of His coming (2 Thess. 2:8). I have always thought that the phrase “the breath of His mouth” was a reference to speech. In the end, Jesus will defeat Satan and the Anti-Christ with a word. But it could just as easily be a laugh.

[1] J. C. Gregory, The Nature of Laughter, (London: Routledge, 1924), 3.

[2] C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, (New York: Harper Collins, 1991), 54.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Josef Pieper, The Concept of Sin, (South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2001), 45.

[5] Ibid., 42.

[6] G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, (Mineola: Dover, 2004), 154.

Spitting Away From the Angels: Faith, Imagination, & the Reality of the Church

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The church is a caravan. It travels in company. In one of his sermons on the nature of Christ, Saint Augustine pictures the church as being in motion. The church“which is now traveling on its journey,” he observes, “is joined to that heavenly Church where we have the angels as our fellow citizens.” Augustine is saying this not only of the saints in heaven but also of those on earth. His view was one that saw the whole church, not only across the globe but across time. Or as he put it, “from Abel the just to the end of the world.” [1]

This is not what I usually see when the congregation assembles. When I look around the church, I see the faces of strangers mixed with a handful of friends. I do not see angels. Neither do I see the “great cloud of witnesses” that both Scripture and Augustine say accompanies the church on its journey (cf. Heb. 12:1).

This vision of the church that Augustine describes is one that Robert Markus, a scholar of early Christian studies, says was typical of ancient Christianity. “So close were the angels at the community’s prayer,” Markus writes, “that monks were told to turn aside if they needed to spit, lest they spit upon the angels gathered in front of them.” Markus explains that their sense was one of living “in perpetual proximity, even intimacy” with the entire community of faith. “The saints were God’s friends, but they also remained men’s kin,” Markus explains. “Together with them, the whole community was in God’s presence.”[2] To quote Paul Simon, these ancient Christians seem to have seen “angels in the architecture.’

There is nothing especially strange about such a view. It is a reflection of the Bible’s teaching by another Paul, who taught that those who are in Christ are fellow citizens with God’s people and members of his household. They are already seated in the heavenly realms (Eph. 2:6, 19). And yet, at the same time, they are waiting for “the blessed hope—the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ” (Titus 2:13). Likewise, the writer of the book of Hebrews describes the church as a band of pilgrims that does not now have “an enduring city” but is “looking for the city that is to come” (Heb. 13:14).

When I read these words in Scripture, I can’t help but notice how drab my view of the same spiritual landscape is by comparison. I wonder why my church seems to be so different from theirs. But I think I know the answer. It’s because I lack of imagination. “The trick of reason is to get the imagination to seize the actual world–if only from time to time,” Annie Dillard writes.[3] This is also the trick of faith. Both require the use of imagination.

You might think that imagination would be antithetical both to reason and to faith. We view reason as a realm of facts, while we think of the imagined as something “made-up.” Imagination, for most us, is a matter of fantasy instead of reality. Faith also seems to us to be inconsistent with imagination. Faith, for the Christian, is a realm of truth. It is a conviction about what God has said is true.

Yet faith, imagination, and reality are intimately connected. Those who look at the world through the eyes of faith must train their vision to perceive reality as the Scriptures define it. “A Christian does not simply ‘believe’ certain propositions about God; he learns to attend to reality through them,” theologian Stanley Hauerwas explains. “This learning requires training our attention by constantly juxtaposing our experience with our vision.”[4]

The seeing that Hauerwas writes about sounds difficult. Indeed, it is, especially if this particular kind of vision is called faith. Faith, we are told in Scripture, is a gift (Eph. 2:8). When Peter made his great confession that Jesus was both Messiah and the Son of the Living God, Christ did not compliment him for his insight. Instead, he declared that Peter was “blessed” because this conviction was not an insight from common sense or even a result of careful, rational analysis. “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah,” Jesus said, “for this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood, but by my Father in heaven” (Matt. 16:17). Faith is indeed a kind of vision, but it is not ordinary sight. We walk by faith, not by sight (2 Cor. 5:7).

Using the imagination often involves the temporary suspension of disbelief. Those who exercise their imagination train their attention on a possibility that they had not previously considered. It may even be one that they initially thought was impossible. Pausing to ask“what if” opens their eyes to a different way of seeing. Faith, however, calls us to take another step, moving from the consideration of what might be to a conviction about what is.

As Hauerwas puts it, faith is a mode of attention that has been trained by the truth to view things as God sees them. It is not, however, an exercise in magical thinking. The Bible portrays it as the opposite. It is God’s Spirit working through the truth to open our eyes to reality, just as God opened the eyes of the prophet’s servant to see the hills filled with the horses and chariots of fire that surrounded Elisha (2 Kings 6:17). Reality as the Bible defines it is more expansive that what can be seen or even experienced. Perhaps this is why the creeds require the faithful to say that they believe “in” the church rather than asking them to confess that they believe the church. It is a call to maintain a kind of double vision where the church is concerned.

I was reminded of this the other day, when I read a report by the Hartford Center for Religion Research, which said that an increasing number of pastors are considering leaving church ministry. After comparing data gathered from a survey of 1,700 religious leaders in the Fall of 2023 with earlier surveys, they concluded: “The further we are from the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the more we observe larger percentages of clergy pondering alternatives to their present congregation, vocation, or both.”[5] According to the survey, over half of those surveyed reported seriously considering leaving pastoral ministry at least once since 2020. Nearly 20% more clergy reported having such thoughts than in 2021.

I confess that when I first read about this data in a report from Lifeway Research,[6] I wasn’t especially shocked. Ministerial discouragement isn’t new. It’s at least as old as Moses and Elijah (Exod. 5:22; Num. 11:11; 1 Kings 18:22). During the years I served as a pastor, I probably thought about quitting once a week, usually on a Monday.

“The trick of reason is to get the imagination to seize
the actual world–if only from time to time,”
Annie Dillard

Not every pastor leaves a church because they are disappointed. Many depart for the same reasons that the members of their congregation leave. Their life circumstances change. They feel called to a different kind of work or find it necessary to move to a different location. Nor can it be denied that some have good reason to be disappointed. If Jesus wondered how long He had to put up with those he characterized as an “unbelieving and perverse generation,” I guess there is room for us to feel a little frustration now and then too.

At the same time, I wonder if this data indicates something more than the ordinary Monday blues. Idealism is one thing. So is ordinary frustration. But unhealthy perfectionism is something else. It is a strain I recognize in myself. It is the church’s destiny to be perfect, but it is not yet the church’s practice. How can it be otherwise? The fact that the church must be equipped before it can fulfill its ministry means that those who serve it must work with a church that is not yet all it should be. This will be the case as long as pastors exist because when the church is finally perfected pastors will no longer be necessary.

Idealism can take noble forms, but it often wears the mask of perfectionism in pastoral ministry. When idealism disintegrates into perfectionism, the very weaknesses that mandate our ministry blind us to its beauty. Those who have been called to love and serve the church in its weakness begin to resent and despise it. “Anyone who glamorizes congregations does a grave disservice to pastors,” the late Eugene Peterson warned. “We hear tales of glitzy, enthusiastic churches and wonder what in the world we are doing wrong that our people don’t turn out that way under our preaching.”[7]

The only way to recover a true vision of the church is through the imagination. We must train our attention to see the church with the double vision that Scripture provides. One dimension of this view is to look unflinchingly and honestly at its weaknesses and shortcomings. The other is to look beyond these imperfections to the unseen spiritual realities that shape the church. As Augustine observed, it is part of a community of faith that travels in company in a procession that has lasted from the beginning of time to the end of days. This is “the church of the firstborn, whose names are written in heaven” and keeps company with “God, the Judge of all,” and with “the spirits of the righteous made perfect” (Heb. 12:23).

The ancient church looked at the world differently than we do. They were indeed idealists. Yet they were at least realistic enough to know that a monk might have to spit, even in the presence of angels.

[1] Augustine, Sermo 341.9.11 quoted by Robert Markus in The End of Ancient Christianity, (New York: Cambridge, 1990), 22.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Annie Dillard, An American Childhood, (New York: Harper, 1987), 20.

[4] Stanley Hauerwas, Vision and Virtue, (Notre Dame: University of Nortre Dame, 191981), 46.

[5] Hartford Institute for Relgion Research, “I’m Exhausted All the Time”: Exploring the Factors Contributing to Growing Clergy Discontentment,” January, 2024, https://www.covidreligionresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Clergy_Discontentment_Patterns_Report-compressed_2.pdf.

[6] Aaron Earls, “Why Are More Pastors Thinking About Quitting?,” Lifeway Research, April 10, 2024, https://www.covidreligionresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Clergy_Discontentment_Patterns_Report-compressed_2.pdf

[7] Eugene Peterson, Under the Unpredictable Plant, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992), 17.

When God is Silent-Faith, Hope, & Prayer

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It is impossible to talk about prayer without also talking about faith and doubt. The two are bound up with prayer in Scripture. Faith and doubt also represent the polar dimensions of our experience when it comes to prayer. One side is reflected in Jesus’ promise when the disciples marveled that He had caused a fig tree to wither with only a few words. Jesus told them to have faith in God. “Truly I tell you, if anyone says to this mountain, ‘Go, throw yourself into the sea,’ and does not doubt in their heart but believes that what they say will happen, it will be done for them,” Jesus said. “Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours” (Mark 11:22–23).

The other side is reflected in the warning of James 1:6–7 about the undermining effect of doubt. “If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you,” he assures. “But when you ask, you must believe and not doubt, because the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind. That person should not expect to receive anything from the Lord.”

I feel caught between these two Scriptures. On the one hand, as encouraging as the promise of Jesus is to me, it creates an expectation for the results of prayer that doesn’t seem to match my experience. This does not shake my trust in God so much as it erodes the confidence I have in my own faith. Jesus’ promise seems to place pressure on the outcome of my praying. I review the answers to my prayers, trying to determine whether they rise to the standard of Christ’s “whatever you ask for.” Does the fact that they do not mean that my faith was deficient? It is a little like investors who read the quarterly statement and second-guess their choices. Would the answers have been better if I had prayed differently?

If Jesus’s promise causes me to question my prayers after the fact, the warning of James 1:6–7 makes me worry about them at the outset. James seems absolute. If you doubt, don’t expect to receive anything from God. But if, by doubt, he means someone who sometimes wonders whether God is going to grant their request, then I am afraid that I am often guilty. Jesus’s promise may lead me to have unrealistic expectations of God, and James makes it sound like God has unreasonable expectations of me. Either way, it is hard for me to come to prayer without a certain amount of doubt.

Our problem on both sides of this equation is that we have put the wrong figure at the center. In either instance, we have come to believe that our prayer’s answer depends more on us than on God. This is certainly not where Jesus begins. His primary assertion is not “trust in your faith” but “have faith in God.” Prayer’s vast potential springs from a faith that is placed in God. The “whatever” potential of prayer is not because the one who prays has the ability to accomplish whatever he or she might want but because God can do whatever he pleases (Job 23:13; Psalm 115:3).

Faith is the foundation of all that we do in the Christian life. We, however, tend to emphasize the importance of faith at the beginning of our Christian experience and then leave it there. The result is that we tend to preach faith to the unbeliever and effort to the believer. This affects the way we look at faith in connection with prayer. We think of faith as a spiritual energy that we must stir up within ourselves to get the answers we want. The greater the request, the more energy we need. Or we come to view the faith associated with prayer as an ineffable quality of emotion. To get the right answer, we need to muster up a certain kind of feeling that the Bible defines as faith. Faith is not an emotional state but a conviction about what God is both able and willing to do if we ask him.

Yet it is only fair to note that it is Jesus himself who seems to suggest that uncertainty is a deal breaker when it comes to prayer. He qualifies his promise with an exception: “Truly I tell you, if anyone says to this mountain, ‘Go, throw yourself into the sea,’ and does not doubt in their heart but believes that what they say will happen, it will be done for them” (Mark 11:23). The clause “and does not doubt” sounds as if absolute certainty is a prerequisite for answers to prayer.

Confidence that God will hear my request and respond as he deems best is one thing. The certainty that I will get what I ask is something else. If this is what the Bible means by faith, then I may as well not bother. The perception that we need to be sure in advance that we will get precisely what we ask for has caused many people anxiety. There is a difference between confidence that God will answer my prayer and certainty about the way it will be answered. Jesus urges us to pray with confidence. This does not mean we can always know how God will answer our prayers or that we will always get what we desire.

We need go no further than Jesus’ own prayer to prove that faith in prayer is not synonymous with the certainty of its outcome. In Gethsemane, Jesus framed his request in language that affirmed his faith without expressing certainty about the result: “‘Abba, Father,’ he said, ‘everything is possible for you. Take this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will’ ” (Mark 14:36).

I admire the heroes of faith in church history and Scripture, but it is the prayer of the father described in Mark 9 that resonates most with my own. Ever since childhood, his son had been possessed by a spirit that robbed him of speech and sent him into convulsions. When Jesus asked the man how long his son had been like this, he told him it had been since childhood. “‘It has often thrown him into fire or water to kill him. But if you can do anything, take pity on us and help us.’ ‘“If you can”?’ said Jesus. ‘Everything is possible for one who believes’ ” (Mark 9:21–23).

Jesus rebuked the father for his lack of faith, but what was the nature of the faith that Jesus expected? The man’s weakness was his view of Jesus. “If you can,” the man had said. He questioned Jesus’s ability to do what was asked. In turn, Jesus demanded faith at the focal point of his doubt. He called upon the man to believe, not so much in the possibility of healing, but in him.

The father responded with honesty. The fact that he had come to Jesus with his son in the first place indicates that he possessed a measure of faith, but like the doubter of James 1:8, he was of two minds in the matter. Jesus’s tone may seem unnecessarily harsh, but the father’s response shows that it had the intended effect. Instead of turning inward to try and find more faith, the father looks to Jesus for help. “Immediately the boy’s father exclaimed, ‘I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!’” (Mark 9:24).

Faith is a gift as well as a command. Because it is a gift, not everyone has faith in the same proportion. We read the biographies of those who exercised great faith and wish we could be like them. But “you of little faith,” was Jesus’s favorite designation for his followers, and seems to imply that the opposite is more likely the case (Matthew 6:30; 8:26; 14:31; 16:8; see also Luke 12:28). When Jesus’s disciples recognized their limits in this area, they asked Jesus to increase their faith. But instead of offering a regimen of faith-building exercises, he told them, “If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it will obey you” (Luke 17:6).

Great faith is admirable, but according to Jesus, even a little faith is enough to see remarkable results. Instead of telling his disciples to increase their faith before going to God in prayer, he urges them to begin with the small measure of faith they already have. Jesus is not lowering the bar on faith. He only says that more is possible than we can now imagine. Jesus is more confident of the potential of our prayers than we are. He knows that their outcome is correlated more with the greatness of God than with the magnitude of our faith.

Prayer is an act of faith, and its expectation is shaped by hope. Hope in the common vernacular is more like a wish. We say things like, “I hope it doesn’t rain,” or “I hope I don’t get sick.” The hope that springs from faith shares the same spirit of desire but with a much stronger expectation. This hope is closer to certainty. Faith is a kind of motion that leans in God’s direction. Hope is the experience that the leaning of faith produces. Between the two, it is faith that is primary because it is the confidence that energizes hope.

How, then, do we pray in faith? First, we should not let our questions, fears, or even our doubts keep us from approaching God in prayer. Like the father who brought his son to Jesus, we should be honest about our struggles. If we do not know how to express our doubts, the father’s prayer is enough: “Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief.”

Second, we should remind ourselves that a little faith is all that is required to pray. We do not have to wait until we become giants in faith. We do not even need great faith to make large requests. Jesus promised that if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, nothing will be impossible for you (Matthew 17:20).

Third, do not let the size of your request intimidate you. As the old hymn by John Newton says, “Thou art coming to a King, large petitions with thee bring, for His grace and power are such, none can ever ask too much.” The answer to your prayer depends upon God, and he is always greater than your request.

Fourth, trust God’s timing and plan as you wait for an answer. Even when our requests are the same as those of others, he does not always answer in the same way. His answers are personal, specifically suited to our need and his plan. Jesus urged his disciples to “always pray and not give up” (Luke 18:1). We should persist in prayer until God’s answer is clear to us.

The key to faith and prayer is to begin with the faith that you have, even if it is only the size of a mustard seed. Anchor your hope to Christ’s promise that even the smallest grain of faith is enough to change the shape of the world around you.

When God is Silent-Prayers Without Words

Featured ~ John Koessler ~ 5 Comments

Some years ago, a friend admitted to me that she couldn’t pray. “I don’t know why,” she said. “But it’s like choking.” She wrote to me recently and said that she still struggles. “I have read so much on prayer, and it still sticks in my throat and comes out halting and inadequate.” She is not alone. Some of the godliest people have found themselves at a loss for words in the presence of God.

Sometimes, their silence is the silence of awe. When Daniel the prophet was an old man in his eighties, he had a vision that puzzled him. After fasting for three weeks, he encountered a figure on the banks of the river Tigris dressed in white linen with a belt of gold. His appearance shown like lightning, and his eyes were like flaming torches. Daniel’s companions, who could not see the vision but felt his presence, fled in terror. Daniel was so overcome by the sight that he fainted. The heavenly being reached out to touch Daniel and spoke words of encouragement. As Daniel slowly rose, first on his hands and knees and then with trembling on his feet, the man assured him that his prayers had been heard. He had come to explain the vision. “While he was saying this to me,” Daniel later wrote, “I bowed with my face toward the ground and was speechless” (Daniel 10:15). When the being touched Daniel’s lips, he was finally able to speak. “I am overcome with anguish because of the vision, my lord, and I feel very weak,” he said. “How can I, your servant, talk with you, my lord? My strength is gone and I can hardly breathe” (Daniel 10:16–17). It is doubtful that many if any of us, have had an experience like Daniel’s. But we have all had moments of awe that took our breath away.

Silence is a common reaction of those who are perplexed or astonished. In prayer, we may come to God but find ourselves so confounded that we that we are unable to speak. Sometimes this is because we have realized something about God that overwhelms us. Or, as in Job’s case, by interacting with God, we suddenly realize something about ourselves that leaves us dumbfounded. It may be that we finally understand the flaw in our complaint or recognize the gravity of our fallenness. God’s reply to Job’s extensive complaint stunned the patriarch into silence. Job’s initial reaction was to say, “I am unworthy—how can I reply to you? I put my hand over my mouth. I spoke once, but I have no answer—twice, but I will say no more” (Job 40:4–5).

Silence is the primary disposition of the learner. Learning can involve speaking, but it usually begins with listening, and listening demands silence from us. In the Old Testament, sacred ceremonies sometimes concluded with a call for silence on the part of God’s people (Deuteronomy 27:9; Nehemiah 8:11). The prophets called for silence as divine judgment approached (Habakkuk 2:20; Zephaniah 1:7; Zechariah 2:13). According to Revelation 8:1, there is even silence in heaven.

Silence is not the usual state of those who pray. Indeed, it seems to be the very antithesis of prayer. Yet silence in God’s presence does not have to be bad. Ecclesiastes 3:7 tells us that there is a time to be silent and a time to speak. The same writer counsels those who go to the house of God to be measured in their words: “Guard your steps when you go to the house of God. Go near to listen rather than to offer the sacrifice of fools, who do not know that they do wrong. Do not be quick with your mouth, do not be hasty in your heart to utter anything before God. God is in heaven and you are on earth, so let your words be few” (Ecclesiastes 5:1–2).

There is more going on here than a warning about our deportment or the formal way we address God in prayer. He is not merely saying, “Mind your manners.” We are warned that when we approach God, we must have a sense of God’s presence as well as a sense of our place before him. It is easy to be careless in our worship and our praying. We are absent-minded, too quick to offer empty words and cheap promises. This is because we are speaking out of habit. We are saying the things we have always said without considering whether we actually mean them.

When the writer of Ecclesiastes warns about the danger of making rash vows, he is talking about more than the temptation to make promises that we cannot keep. There is good reason to tread carefully when we approach God. It is not because he is irascible and easily angered. We all know hypersensitive people before whom we must weigh our words. We walk on eggshells whenever we talk to them because we are not sure how they will respond. This is not the issue with God; the problem is with us. We are the ones who are flighty and rash. We take God for granted. We babble and chatter because we feel we must say something but have not thought about what we ought to say. We are not self-aware, nor are we much aware of God either.

The warning of Ecclesiastes 5:1-2 does not minimize the importance of words but the opposite. It assumes their gravity. The writer of Ecclesiastes warns us to be sparing in our words because words mean something. If there is a danger in thoughtless prayer, it is that God might take us at our word and deal with us as we have asked. It is no accident that the Hebrew term for “word” can also be translated “deed.” God is not cavalier about the words he chooses. He means what he says. There are no empty words with God. It is reasonable that he should expect the same from us.

We often mistake silence for emptiness, and we are afraid of emptiness. That is why we tend to chatter when there is a prolonged break in a conversation. We feel compelled to fill the void with something. Anything. God views silence differently. God is comfortable with his own silence. He is no chatterbox. There is much that God has said. There is even more that he has not. God is equally comfortable with our silence; sometimes, he prefers it.

There are times when we have no words to offer God, only our strangled cries of anguish. The pain we feel is so great that it drives all thoughts from our minds. Even if we tried, we would not be able to formulate the sentences. Our groans are not metaphorical; they are literal. At other times, it is because we do not know what to say. We are confounded. We only know how we feel. Fortunately, we are not limited to words when it comes to prayer. What we are unable to say in a sentence can be expressed in a sob or a moan. The frequency with which Scripture mentions tears proves that they really are (as the old song declares) “a language that God understands.” The One who wept at the tomb of Lazarus will not look down on our groans, sighs, and tears.

If you cannot find the words, then speak to God in sighs. If sighs are not enough, then offer up your cries and groans instead. Groans are a language that God understands, too. God understands groans because it is a language that he speaks. According to Romans 8:26, “The Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans.” Paul says that the Spirit does this because we do not know what to say. When we find ourselves at a loss for words in God’s presence, we can take comfort in the knowledge that the Spirit is praying for us.

According to Romans 8:27, the Spirit functions not only as our intercessor but as our proxy. When we don’t know how to pray, he takes the deep desires of our hearts and reframes them in a way that corresponds with the Father’s will. In this way, the Spirit’s wordless intercession also becomes our prayer. As the Spirit prays for the believer, the believer also prays through the Spirit. The Spirit is not alone in his work. Paul goes on in this chapter to point out that Jesus Christ is “at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us” (Romans 8:34).

We are tempted to think of our prayers as feeble things. They are only a puff of breath filled with the confused longings of our hearts. We do not know what to say. We are not sure whether God will give us what we want. But Paul paints a very different picture of what is happening. He removes the veil of our struggle to reveal a convergence of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit working together not only in response to our prayers but to help us pray.

Silence seems incompatible with prayer. But lovers know that they do not need to talk all the time to enjoy each other’s company. Silence may signal confusion, but it can also be a mark of contentment. As the hymn writer Isaac Watts observed in his paraphrase of Psalm 23:

The sure provisions of my God

attend me all my days;

oh, may your house be mine abode,

and all my work be praise.

There would I find a settled rest,

while others go and come;

no more a stranger, nor a guest,

but like a child at home.

If you don’t know what to say when you come into God’s presence, then say nothing. You are neither a stranger nor a guest. You are God’s child. And because of that, you are always welcome.

When God is Silent-Jesus on Prayer

Featured ~ John Koessler ~ 2 Comments

Everyone learns to talk by imitation. Most people learn to pray the same way. They hear the prayers of others and copy them. Jesus’s disciples learned how to pray from Jesus. His model prayer, usually referred to as the Lord’s Prayer, is a prayer that we can pray for ourselves, but it is also a kind of template. The Lord’s Prayer provides us with a foundational vocabulary for praying. The church received these words from Christ and for more than two millennia has prayed them back to God. These words of the Lord’s Prayer are proof of God’s care for us and of the new relationship that has come to us through Jesus Christ.

In the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus teaches us to begin by saying, “Our Father in heaven . . .” The first move, then, in all prayer is a move in God’s direction. Prayer begins by recognizing who God really is and what kind of relationship we have with him. Jesus’s prayer teaches us that we are not only approaching God as the creator and sovereign of the universe but as our great caregiver. The designation of God as our “Father in Heaven” unites these two ideas. Jesus grants us permission to address this powerful creator on the most intimate terms. Not only is he “Father,” in the sense that he is the creator, but Jesus’s prayer teaches us to approach God as our Father.

Prayer, as Jesus models it, is personal. We do not approach God as if he were a king who operates at a great distance from us. We are not mere commoners vying with others of greater importance for a small slice of his attention. This is a family matter. Jesus has already told us why this should encourage us. Because he is your Father, God’s eyes are upon you. Your Father sees, hears, and cares for you. Unlike someone who petitions royalty and must convince them that they share the same interests, God is already interested in you.

The first request of the Lord’s Prayer, that God’s name be regarded as holy, invites a question. Regarded as holy by whom? Although it is true that we sometimes take God for granted, this request, like the two that follow, seems to be directed at the world at large. Jesus’s prayer assumes that we already recognize the dignity of God’s name. In other words, the position we should take as we approach God is of someone who knows God and treats him with the reverence that is his due. Coming to God with the familiarity of a child but also with reverence may sound like a contradiction. Some of us are so familiar in our approach to God that we slouch into his presence, mumble a few words without thinking, and then go our way. We have a greater sense of gravity when we meet with our supervisor at work or go out on a first date with someone. But somehow, the fact that we are approaching the creator of the universe does not move us. Is it possible that instead of being comfortable, we have grown callous? We can be confident and reverent at the same time.

Before turning to personal concerns, Jesus’ prayer expands our frame of reference so that we may consider those concerns within the larger context of God’s plan for the world. He teaches us to pray, “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” There is more to this petition than asking God to look after his own interests, although that is partly what is meant.

This petition is a way of aligning our plans with God’s plan. This request also draws a distinction between heaven and earth. God rules over both, but Jesus’ words imply that earth is not yet a place where God’s will is always done. Or, at least, it is not a place where the inhabitants are always inclined toward the will of God. On the one hand, this request reflects a desire to draw the rule of heaven down to earth. The hope of the kingdom is that its arrival will bring heaven and earth into alignment so that God’s will is done on earth just as it is in heaven. But it is also a request that aims to draw earth up into heaven. Before we begin to address our earthly concerns, Christ invites us to view our needs from above. God does not treat our earthly concerns with contempt, but he does expect us to approach these lower concerns with a perspective shaped by the view from above. God is in control, subduing all things for the sake of Christ.

With this in mind, we are ready to turn to the particular needs that affect us. And it should not surprise us that Jesus, who promised that the child who asks for bread would not receive a stone, teaches us to begin with bread (see Matthew 7:9). As the language shifts from “your” to “our,” Jesus teaches us to say: “Give us today our daily bread” (Matthew 6:11). Food is one of the most basic concerns that we have. This request for daily bread includes all the other small concerns that occupy our daily lives. All the things we need to live and the means to provide them are of interest to God because he knows that we need them. We could add many other items to the list as well. We pray for our children, our friends, and our schedules. We ask God for help to accomplish the tasks that we have for the day. Sometimes we even pray for the weather. They are not necessities in the technical sense, but they are a concern for us. Because they are our concerns, God is not ashamed to concern himself with them.

As important as our everyday needs may be, there are other more important concerns. Consequently, the trajectory of personal requests in this prayer moves from material to spiritual. In particular, Jesus singles out the two that are the most critical. One is our need for forgiveness. The other is for spiritual protection. In Matthew 6:12 we are taught to pray: “And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.” The comparison mentioned in this verse is unsettling. Is it a condition? Is Jesus suggesting that we should ask God to make his forgiveness conditional on our forgiving others? The warning of verses 14–15 seems to suggest as much, but to say it this way makes the request sound like bargaining. What is more, we can think of many occasions where we have not forgiven others. From grudges for little slights to outright blame for major transgressions, there is plenty of evidence that shows that forgiveness does not come easily to us. We have no grounds for basing our request that God forgive us on our own track record of forgiveness.

The petition for spiritual protection in Matthew 6:13 addresses our practice of sin at its point of entrance: “And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.” The nature of the request is simple enough. It asks God to keep us out of temptation’s way. This strategy is preemptive. Do not even let us come to the place where we feel the enticement to transgress in the first place. The phrase “lead us not” seems surprising. What does God have to do with temptation? Scripture emphatically denies that God has a role in tempting anyone to evil. It is Satan who is called “the tempter” (Matthew 4:3; 1 Thessalonians 3:5). Furthermore, James 1:13–14 reveals that we are also complicit: “When tempted, no one should say, ‘God is tempting me,’” James observes, “For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone; but each person is tempted when they are dragged away by their own evil desire and enticed.”

When we ask God not to “lead us” into temptation, we are really asking him to protect us from those external and internal influences that work together to produce temptation. With this in mind, the evil spoken of in this petition can easily have a double force. On the one hand, it is a plea that God will protect us from Satan. He is “the evil one” with whom sin ultimately originated. At the same time, it is a request that God would preserve us from all the powers of evil in the larger sense of the word. With this phrase, we confess that our safety is found in God alone.

The doxology included at the end of Matthew 6:13 in some versions does not seem to have been part of Matthew’s original text. It is missing from the oldest manuscripts we currently have available. But there is a parallel in 1 Chronicles 29:11 where David declares: “Yours, Lord, is the greatness and the power and the glory and the majesty and the splendor, for everything in heaven and earth is yours. Yours, Lord, is the kingdom; you are exalted as head over all.”

Whether or not the doxology was part of the original, it is a fitting way to close. In this way, the Lord’s Prayer ends with God just as it begins with him. This is what is at the heart of every prayer. When we pray, we focus our attention on God. We remind ourselves of who he is and what he is like. As we approach him, we place ourselves, our concerns, and even our offenses before him. The confidence we have in doing so comes from the fact that it is Jesus Christ who has taught us to pray this way. He is our mentor in prayer. But more than this, he is our passport into God’s presence. “Until now you have not asked for anything in my name,” he told his disciples in John 16:24. “Ask and you will receive, and your joy will be complete.”

When God is Silent-Staying Focused During Prayer

Featured ~ John Koessler ~ 1 Comment

Many things can get in the way of praying. But one of the most common obstacles is boredom. Prayer can sometimes seem tedious. Our prayers often sound the same. They begin and end the same way. They seem to be composed of the same requests uttered day after day in the same words. We don’t necessarily need to be troubled by the fact that we get bored when we pray. Prayer is an interchange, not a performance. It doesn’t have to be interesting to be effective. What is more, there are many factors that influence the way we feel, none of which necessarily have any bearing on the actual outcome of our prayers. We may be tired or sick. We may be afraid. The fact that we state our requests unimaginatively means nothing to God, who doesn’t analyze their style but searches the heart (Romans 8:27).

Yet the monotony we feel during prayer is sometimes of our own making. We may be bored because we are only praying one kind of prayer. Or it may be because it is the same prayer over and over again. The vocabulary that the Bible uses to speak of prayer is often more expansive than our practice. There is a variety reflected in Paul’s command in Ephesians 6:18 when he urges believers to “pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests.” There are many different situations that prompt us to pray, and we can do so with a variety of types of prayers. One of the things that makes the act of praying interesting, for lack of a better word, is the situation or occasion that prompts it. Just as our lives are filled with great and small traditions, we might also say that there are also great and small prayers. It is unreasonable to expect every prayer to be a transcendent experience.

Sometimes our prayers are urgent. We turn to God in a moment of great need. In those moments, we reach for God the way a drowning swimmer reaches for the outstretched arm of a lifeguard. We have skin in the game. Those are often the times when we feel God’s presence the most. We can say with the conviction of the psalmist, “In my distress I called to the Lord; I cried to my God for help. From his temple he heard my voice; my cry came before him, into his ears” (Psalm 18:6).

At other times, the situation that moves us to pray is mundane. We say grace before a meal or at the beginning of some task. We run through the names on our prayer list and generally ask for God’s blessing on their lives. We are not too specific because we are not aware of any remarkable need.

The more ordinary the context, the less emotionally charged the experience. But it isn’t necessarily the point of prayer to have an emotional experience. Most of our lives are made up of ordinary days. Just as an athlete’s regular training outside the game produces the muscle memory that will enable them to perform in the heat of competition, the habit of ordinary prayer trains us to respond prayerfully in the moment of crisis. Ordinary prayer sanctifies the mundane and makes the benign beautiful. There is nothing wrong with these “bread and butter” prayers. The Bible is full of such prayers. It is our inattention that creates the problem. When our prayers become so common that all we are doing is making religious noise, it ceases to be prayer.

Occasional prayers are a little different. As the label suggests, they are prayers suited to a particular occasion. Invocations and benedictions are an example. Occasional prayers are often a feature of the church’s great traditions. We open and close special services with such prayers. Invocations and benedictions are located at the opposite ends of a task or an endeavor. When a church service begins, sometimes the pastor or worship leader will offer an invocation. This is a kind of invitation offered to God, although we shouldn’t think that He needs permission from us to be part of the service.

God sees past our vague requests
to the real needs that lie beneath them.

Nor should we think that He is somewhere outside the building waiting to be let in. In a way, an invocation is a reminder to ourselves that God is already present as much as it is an invitation to God. A benediction is a blessing. It asks God to bless what we have done or to continue to help us. Although benedictions are viewed as prayers, often they are not addressed to God at all but to the congregation. They are promises addressed to God’s people. One does not need to be ordained to pray an invocation or benediction. Nor are they necessarily reserved for church service. When my children were small, my wife Jane and I would pray the priestly blessing from Numbers 6:24–26 over them when they went to bed at night. Many benedictions are scattered throughout the Scriptures, but writing your own can be especially meaningful. Think about how you want God to bless those for whom you pray and put it into the form of a promise. A good way to formulate your benedictions is to use the language of Scripture’s promises.

The Bible employs several terms to speak of prayer. The most basic is “ask.” It is the general word that Paul uses in Philippians 4:6: “Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.” A prayer is simply a request. But Paul’s inclusion of two additional terms expands the definition. Paul speaks of “prayers” and “petitions.” If there is a difference between the two, it is a difference in perspective. The term prayer looks at it from God’s direction. It was the term commonly used to refer to a request addressed to a deity. This language reminds us of the relational dynamic that provides the context for our request. We are coming to God, who is greater than we are. In a sense, it is a word that puts us in our place.

A petition, on the other hand, looks at prayer from our angle. A petition expresses what we want. The Greek word speaks of beseeching or begging someone. It is more than a request; this is an earnest request. So, the first principle to help us stay interested is to have clarity about what we are doing and what we want. What exactly do we want? What are we asking? It is shockingly easy to pray absentmindedly. Our petitions are not petitions at all. They are not specific enough. We ask God to bless us but in a very general sense. So general, in fact, that God could not answer them if he were limited only to the specifics we share.

Fortunately, God is able to see past our vague requests to the real needs that lie beneath them. But it is hard for us to stay attentive without a concrete sense of what we need. It is not selfish to think about yourself and your situation before you pray. It only makes sense that we should have our problems in mind when we pray. They are the concerns that motivate us to go to God in the first place. But it is possible that in the process, we may magnify those concerns so much that they drive God from our minds. Sometimes when we pray, we are only worrying out loud to God. God hears even these prayers, but they don’t bring us much comfort.

Praying is spiritual, but it is also a cognitive act that requires focused attention. Everyone knows the frustration of having a conversation with someone who is distracted. Perhaps it is because their mind wanders, flitting from one topic to another. Or it may be a result of multi-tasking—the one with whom we are trying to converse is doing something else at the same time. Their attention is divided. Prayer is no different. Conversation with God, just like a conversation with any other person, requires that we concentrate on the topic at hand and on the one to whom we wish to speak.

A meaningful prayer experience, then, requires some forethought. First, what is the subject that we have come to God to talk about? Second, what exactly do we want to say? If we had an appointment with our employer that we knew would cover important topics related to our job, we would spend some time thinking in advance about what we planned to say. The same is true when we have a serious talk with a friend or a family member. We choose our words carefully so that we can express ourselves in just the right way. We do this, in part, so that they will not misunderstand us. But only in part. We choose our words carefully because we have something we want to express. This is what makes the conversation important to us.

Although there is no danger that God will misunderstand us, there is a possibility that we may come to him without having much to say. Perhaps the reason we have trouble focusing during prayer is that the conversation isn’t important. Our thoughts are muddled because we haven’t given much thought to what we are trying to say.

Although words are primary, especially where prayer is concerned, we do not communicate with words alone. Gestures and body motions are also a kind of language. The technical word for this is kinesics. A wink, a nod, a slight gesture of the hand all indicate something. Posture, gestures, and various actions are part of the nonverbal vocabulary some use to talk to God. The difference between these holy kinesics and ordinary body language is that God does not need such signals to understand us. They are for our benefit. Things like posture and gestures can sometimes help us focus our attention when we pray. They may enable us to express ourselves more fully, not because God needs more clarity but because we do. They can also serve as reminders both of our purpose in prayer and the promises that shape it.

Maybe the real problem with my praying is that what I have been calling tedium is actually familiarity. I have come looking for a burning bush only to find a quiet room and a comfortable chair. God does not have to announce his presence with a flourish. Our momentary conversation does not have to be dramatic. Perhaps it is enough just to say my piece and then go my way.