Spiritual Formation: Prayer
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Following God's Lead in Our Prayers
Bowing my head in frustration I cried out to God, "Lord, I have no words to intercede on behalf of Mantombi. Your Holy Spirit gives me suggestions of what to pray for, but today, as I listen to you, I feel barren. I have no words."
I admired the small, delicately crafted cross serving as a bookmark in my Bible. Mantombi, a beautiful, lyrical name was written on a card attached to the cross by a gauzy ...
Related Topics: Calling, God at Work, God's Timing, Intercession, Missions
The Twelve Prayers of Christmas
Although most people enjoy the excitement and delight Christmas brings, some experience heartache and pain. My friend Anna (not her real name) was one of those people. Having spent most of her childhood Christmases at the hospital with her mentally ill father, the season left a sense of dread that didn't fade as she grew older.
Anna and I had known each other for almost a year when Christmas rolled ...
Related Topics: Christmas, Encouragement, Friends, Supporting, Friendship, Prayer
Me Time
It had been a hurricane week. Personal struggles had stormed my heart and left a trail of emotional debris. Even sleep didn't relieve the fatigue. Was it the week's events, or just my body's edging into midlife that had made me so weary?
Grateful for the weekend, I knelt in the living room Saturday morning for prayer time, which always included a long list of requests for others, but my mouth couldn't ...
Related Topics: Acceptance, Divine Instruction, Peace, Prayer, Presence of God
Pestering Prayers
The great people of prayer—Moses, Jeremiah, Paul, and a nameless Gentile mother from the region of Tyre and Sidon—insist that prayer is a dialogue with a personal God, even at times a struggle and a wrestling. In fact, it was this anonymous mom whom Jesus singled out as an exemplar of prayer after she had wrestled with him over her request.
This had to chagrin his disciples. They'd tried ...
Related Topics: Faith, Persistence, Prayer
Taking It to the Streets
It took two minutes to sink in. The pops my son Christopher and I had just heard weren't the back-firings of a balcony BBQ from the grimy apartments we always passed on our way to the park. They were bullets being fired.
Someone in or near those apartments was shooting, not very well mind you, at four strapping youths who were running across Winona Avenue and up Vaughan Road past Vaughan Road Academy, ...
Related Topics: Crime, Current Events, Intercessory Prayer, Outreach, Service
Confessions of a Christian Insomniac
Sleep and I had always been close friends.
In college, when a fire alarm emptied my dormitory during the wee hours, my roommate dragged me unresponsively out of bed and hauled me downstairs. We waited outside until firefighters granted an all clear. At breakfast, when the dining hall buzzed with excited indignation about the false alarm, I thought my friends were kidding. I remembered nothing.
As a ...
Related Topics: Attributes of God, Praise, Sleep, Worship
Paint Your Prayers
Two years ago after an unexpected career loss that happened to coincide with the devastating death of one of my friends, I picked up some sketchbooks and a vibrant assortment of colored markers. For 12 months I sat beneath shady trees or by a fire where I scribbled, sketched, and scrawled images, words, and Scriptures that careened into my imagination. I painted my prayers.
Images of seeds and vines, ...
Related Topics: Art, Arts, Communication, creative ideas, Creativity
The Big Red Truck
Not knowing.
Of all the nightmares that haunt a parent's private moments, this one is particularly terrifying.
Losing contact with an adult, or young adult, child, for whatever reason. Then living every day with a host of silent questions.
Is he sick? In jail? Is she married? Are there children? Is she suffering? Is he somewhere in the next town, or the next country? Is he alive? When a child and parent ...
Prayer Envy
Ever since becoming a Christian, I've worried about praying. Should I pray to God the Father or to Jesus or, although I'd never heard anyone do so, to the Holy Spirit, whom Jesus promised would advocate for and comfort us in his absence? Should I favor obviously holy topics—gratitude, praise, others' salvation—over my daily worries and complaints? Most importantly, how, precisely, does ...
Praying for Terrorists
'I was having a Jonah moment. Several years ago I realized I didn't want to forgive the people who planned and executed the September 11, 2001, attacks on America. I didn't want God to forgive them, either.
This surprised me. In the past, I've been able to forgive most people relatively easily. And it didn't make much sense to me: Like most Americans, the events of 9/11 shook me, but I wasn't personally ...
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