Sunday, July 28, 2019

As a minister, I’m often asked how prayer works. What does it mean to speak to a God who is unseen, and what should we expect from those conversations? In our Gospel text this week, we hear one way Jesus answered this same kind of request from the disciples: “Lord, teach us to pray.” But beyond offering some ideas about what should be a part of a conversational prayer with God-as-Heavenly Parent, Jesus tells a story – one that teaches us an interesting theory: persistence (or shamelessness) in prayer creates an opportunity for God’s presence. And that Holy Presence means something, whatever we might understand about how God responds to humanity’s requests. Jesus simply says: We can and should pray – we can and should ask. God is listening, and God is waiting for us to reach out. And I believe the more prayerful a life we live, the fewer questions we will worry with concerning God’s mystery – we will be able to sit with our Heavenly Parent, a good friend, and be in the kind of trusting relationship we all long for. We may not have all the answers to how God responds to our requests, and that’s okay, because we will have relationship to God and wisdom in the Presence that fills the space in which we pray.