Searching for Simple and Reliable

[I'm working on the Introduction to Live Prayerfully: Three Time-Proven Ways Ordinary Lives Become Prayerful. The general of the aim of the book is to provide guidance on historic practices of prayer in simple ways. Below is an excerpt from the Introduction discussing the need for guidance that is both simple and reliable, though that can often be difficult to find.]

In all of our lives, we inevitably look for guidance from others, whether personally or through books and other media. Sometimes the guidance we get is simple but perhaps not as reliable as we need it to be. For example, it turns out that “an apple a day keeps the doctor away” isn’t as true as people would have us believe. I went through a stretch of my life where I ate apples almost every day, usually dipped in mounds of peanut butter, or perhaps together with oatmeal and cinnamon sugar under a pile of ice cream, or (my favorite) in a dessert my wife makes together with gobs of cool whip and pieces of Snickers bars. I followed the advice to have an apple a day pretty well during those years, but for some reason, while eating those apples in these ways, it was in that same period of time that I went from having recently been a college athlete to hardly being able to even think about running down and back on a basketball court. The doctors visits ensued, despite all the apples I consumed. The advice regarding apples was simple, but not as reliable as goobers like me need it to be.

On the other hand, we’ve all probably also had experience with advice that is reliable, but not simple enough. If I start having car problems, I can walk into my local auto parts store and locate the thick printed repair guide for my car’s make and model. I will have no idea how to do what it says. That does not mean its guidance is unreliable, but it just is not simple enough for me.

Thankfully, though, there is another kind of advice. The best advice we receive in life, the kind that sticks with us for decades and that we make sure to pass on to our kids and grandkids, is that which is both simple and reliable. Dave Ramsey’s Baby Steps have been helpful to me and millions of others for this reason. Or, I’ll never forget sitting with my college pastor as I was preparing to graduate and had the sudden realization that I would no longer be allowed to live in the dorm, eat in the cafeteria and attend classes, but would soon have to find another way to live. As the variety of options seemed rather overwhelming to me, his simple and reliable advice was, “Just make sure you’re in God’s will today and you won’t miss being in it tomorrow.” It was simple and reliable; I’ve never forgotten it and continue to work at shaping my life around it.

From my experience, the need for simple and reliable guidance when we seek to learn to pray is just as needed as in any other part of our lives. Guidance that is described by one end or the other of the simple/reliable spectrum abounds, but guidance that is described by both ends can seem hard to find. So, after having spent quite a bit of time seeking guidance on prayer from sources all across that spectrum, my goal in this book is to pass on the some of the most reliable parts of it in simple ways. So, we will take a look at three time-proven ways that ordinary lives have become prayerful:

• Praying With Other People’s Words
• Praying Without Words
• Praying With Your Own Words

Live Prayerfully Sample Chapter: Praying Without Words

Below is a sample chapter from the book I'm working on [and the latest version of the title is], Live Prayerfully: Three Time-Proven Ways Ordinary Lives Become Prayerful. This is the chapter on praying without words. Please feel free to leave comments, and if you like it, pass it along to others. And here's a revised elevator pitch, with credits to my wife and to Robert Pelfrey:

Live Prayerfully is a book on prayer that shares time-proven guidance in fresh and relatable ways, including how we can pray with other people’s words, pray without words, and pray with our own words, as well as guiding readers into participating in each of those ways of praying.

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An Elevator Pitch for the Book

If you and I were acquaintances running into each other on an elevator and you asked me how work was going, (if it was a slow elevator and I knew we both had to go all the way to the top) I might tell you that I'm trying to write a book. This was never the case in the past, even though I've been working on it for a couple of years now. Almost no one beyond my wife knew about it before I made it public here on the blog a few days ago in an effort to try to get unstuck on the project. Even my Mom was surprised to find out about it, just as I was surprised to realize I'd never mentioned it to her. I don't intend to be this way, but apparently keeping things from people is one of my greatest natural abilities- even when I don't know that I'm doing it. So, if during that elevator conversation when I mentioned to you that I'm trying to write a book, you did the polite thing and said, "Oh really, what's it about?" I would try to respond like this:

I'm calling it Live Prayerfully: Three Ways Ordinary Lives Have Become Prayerful Throughout the Centuries. It's for people who sincerely want to grow in their attempts to pray, but, like most of us, wouldn't normally access the rich guidance passed down through history about how to build prayerful lives. Often this guidance is in old language, or academic terms, or perhaps very abstract, so I am trying to pass some of the core pieces of that guidance along in fresh and relatable ways by writing about how we can pray with other people's words, pray without words, and pray with our own words, as well as guiding readers into participating in each of those ways of praying. My experience has been that putting those kinds of prayer together allows them to build off of one another and helps the times that we have set aside for prayer to spill over into the rest of our lives, making us more prayerful people.

So now, let's say that you're not just an acquaintance on the elevator, but a really good friend whom I've said this to... what's your reaction?

PS: My wife says that this description may put some of acquaintances to sleep by the time we reach the top floor on that elevator ride. If you agree, your comment can be something like "zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz".

A Life that Makes Prayer Come Naturally

Alf Means was a hero of mine. I didn't know him very well personally, but he was a good friend of my grandfather's, and once a year at Bloys Camp Meeting I would have the opportunity to listen to hear him make an off-the-cuff comment about life with God that would stop me in my tracks. Mr. Means was a lifelong cattle rancher in a very small West Texas town (very small- the population in 2000 was 187), and my family became acquainted with his family generations ago at Bloys. One of my favorite things about going there each year is a men's meeting where everyone has a chance to say something if they wish, but special deference is always given to the old-timers to hear some of their old cowboy stories or whatever type of comment they might like to make. At those meetings, I always looked forward to Mr. Means' turn to speak, because he would either say something with his great wit or just make general comments about life that gave the rest of us a window into the soul of a man who had spent a lifetime living in a deep friendship with God.

2011 was his last year at Bloys, as he died a couple of months after Camp Meeting that year at age 91. The last comment I know of from him at that men's meeting was a great one for him to leave on. I wasn't there that night, but a friend who was there retold the story:

Apparently the men who were there that night were talking about ways that they tried to devote their days to God. Some of them were saying things like how after getting up in the morning, it's a good idea to pray that God would help them to live that day devoted to him, that for that day they could steer clear of temptation, love others well, etc. It's good advice, and we'd all certainly do well to develop such a practice.

But when it came around to Mr. Means, he said, "You know, I don't really do that. It just comes natural."

I want to have that kind of prayerful life. If I reach my 90s like he did, I want to have spent enough time in intentional prayer and soaking my mind in the Scriptures, that eventually the distinctions between prayer and the things that "just come natural" in my life no longer exist.

Writing the Book

Here are some confessions: Like anyone who at least fiddles around with writing, I think I have some ideas that I could turn into good books. But, even with the millions of books published each year, that number is greatly exceeded by ideas from people like me that never actually get finished and written. I'm sure I'll always have my share of those, but I also hope that I'll actually do something with some of the ideas.

Yet it isn't easy to keep moving toward finished. I have a stellar track record of starting on things that (I think) are great ideas, but I don't think I'd get picked for anyone's team if I were only judged by the things I've brought to completion. I have a book I've been working on for... according to the calendar, it's two years now. Yikes. (If that weren't bad enough, it's been two years on a really short book.)

But the book is about three ways to pray- a type of introduction to classical methods of prayer that have helped ordinary people live prayerful lives through the centuries. The stuff has been incredibly helpful to me, and I think it will be very helpful to others, so I want to get it out there.

But I'm stuck.

Traditional publishing routes haven't panned out. (Apparently, they almost never do for someone trying to do it this way: never having been published before and having a blog readership of- maybe 30-50 of you?.) Self-publishing isn't a bad option these days, but it requires some of my own money rather than someone else's, and I always seem to find other things more fun to do whenever extra funds that come in rather than getting this idea to completion.

But I really don't want to spend the rest of my life wishing I'd written the book. I don't even want to spend another year wishing I'd written the book.

So here's the public declaration: I'm going to get the thing finished. And I'm going to get it published in some form or another. The size of the audience doesn't matter too much to me. What matters more is that it's done in a way that is helpful to people and that it can move from the wish list to the actually done list.

(You all are now my official accountability group.)

What Does it Take, and is it Worth it?

In 2006, my wife and I moved to Guatemala for a couple of years, largely motivated by the desire to be part of what God was doing in the lives of a bunch of kids at New Life Children's Home. We were at a point in our lives when we were pretty free to make a move like that. We didn’t have kids, we didn’t have any debt, we were finished with school, and when the opportunity came up, we thought, “If we don’t do this now we never will.” Our attention had been grabbed by the good ways that we had seen children's lives impacted at NLCH and we wanted to be a part of it, so we went. Like anyone would, we went into that with such high expectations. And it really was a great experience for us, but it’s almost inevitable that at some point, those high expectations are going to come crashing down with a loud thud, and for us, it didn’t take long. We had been in Guatemala three days when we both got sick, and I mean sick. Intestinal infections, amoebas, the works. Not exactly what we were hoping our first week in Guatemala would be like.

And to add to the situation, we knew that the area around where we were moving to wasn’t the safest place on earth. We felt reasonably confident in our safety on the grounds of the children’s home, but the city it’s in isn’t the kind of place where you want to spend much time out after dark. We were aware of that when we went there, but it’s a very different thing to know it and be okay with it while being in another locale than it is to be there and have trouble falling asleep because of hearing gunfire.

The rubber had met the road for us in that first week in Guatemala. We had paid a high cost to get in on something God was doing in the world. Now- was it really worth it? 

As you can imagine, we were a bit discouraged. I’ll never forget being at our lowest point one morning when one of the missionaries we were working with, who is one of our heroes, came over to check on us. She’s a nurse, so she was keeping us on the road back to health, but she also knew we were just having a hard time. My wife mentioned the gunfire to her, and she made a comment that made me mentally stop in my tracks (even though I certainly wasn’t making any actual tracks because I could barely get out of bed). But here’s what she said: “Yes, I might get gunned down in the streets of Guatemala tomorrow. But following Jesus is worth it.”

Now, let me be clear. She hasn’t been gunned down. No one from the children’s home has ever been gunned down, but she got the point of two of Jesus' shortest parables from Matthew 13:44-46, in which Jesus compares the kingdom of heaven (or what God is up to in the world) to someone who finds a treasure hidden in a field or a merchant who found an incredibly valuable pearl. Both unhesitatingly sell all that they have in order to get the things they'd found.

Our missionary friend was able to say such words because was in on God’s kingdom. She was part of what we pray when we say, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” She was in on something God was doing in the world, and she had found it to be so good that any price that may have come along was worth it.

Being part of what God is doing in the world doesn't necessarily mean that you'll go live in a third-world country. For some, it will mean doing something like that. But what matters more than whether or not you would ever do something like that is how, in our real lives that we're really living right here and now, that you and I can get in on what God is doing, cooperate with it, and help to further it.

What would it take for you to be fully in on what God is doing, and is it worth it?

Book Review: Pursuing God's Will Together by Ruth Haley Barton

This book, with the way of life and the way of leading churches and ministries that it commends, is radically good. I couldn't agree more with the first sentence of Robert Mulholland's endorsement: "This book needs a warning label: 'Content may be disruptive to your understanding of Christian life, leadership and community.'"

The book is designed to be a guide for groups involved together in leading Christian churches or organizations. Although it could easily take years for a committed group to come to the place of experiencing together some of the things Barton describes, any group with the courage to take on the task of going through this book and facing the issues it describes will quickly taste the goodness of the kind of spiritual leadership in community which it commends. Barton writes not only as a theorist who has worked hard to develop a sound approach to discernment, but also as a practitioner who has ingrained these principles and practices in her own organization and as a guide who has helped many others find their way through them.

Two-thirds of the book are dedicated to how individuals who make up a leadership group can become a community that is capable of knowing and doing the will of God together. As Barton emphasizes, it is futile to expect that discernment will genuinely happen in a community of undiscerning individuals, regardless of how sound the process may be. On the other hand, if a group is made up of discerning people, discernment will begin to happen even with very imperfect processes. The final third of the book is dedicated to a process that groups can go through as they face decisions which require discernment and what it would actually be like for them to experience doing God's will together after having discerned it in such intentional ways.

Having been involved in leading Christian ministries over the past sixteen years, and having had the privilege of working alongside many wonderful and godly people along the way, my honest reaction to reading this book is both a grieved realization that I have never experienced anything like what it describes (and neither have the large majority of my colleagues) and a deep longing to one day be part of a community dedicated to living together in the ways Barton discusses which would keep us open and available to God, so that when we come together around the common purpose of our shared ministry, we could seek to know and do God's will in such deep trust toward God and one another.

For anyone involved in leading any kind of Christian group (perhaps even right down to our families!), I cannot express sufficiently how highly I recommend Pursuing God's Will Together.