Why Prayer is Like Poptarts

No pictures of poptarts. Maybe my baby will draw them in...

"Oh, what peace we often forfeit,
oh, what needless pain we bear,
all because we do not carry
everything to God in prayer."

-Joseph M. Scriven,
"What A Friend We Have in Jesus"


It has been a while since I posted (read: new-mommy-slash-grad-student-slash-teaching-assistant), so I decided to put fingers to keyboard tonight, but didn't know what to say. So I prayed, and this is what came to mind right away:

"In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express."
-Romans 8:26

A friend told me once that he worked for a mission organization in which they prayed about everything, and I mean everything. It was the foundation of their organization. If they needed money, he said, they prayed, and the money was provided. They prayed before every decision that they made. I remember thinking that that was both radical and beautiful, and that I wished my life looked more like that. I wasn't quite sure I believed in prayer quite as much as they did in that organization, but I wanted to. I wanted to trust prayer like I do a chair when I sit in it. (Thank you, youth group, for that handy illustration.)

Praying to Jesus is not the coolest thing to talk about these days, out in the world. In fact, as I am writing this blog post, I am wondering how I can make it sound more chic, you know, instead of bringing up images of dusty Sunday School rooms you sat in when you were five. But I am, in general, too concerned about being cool. And I can lose sight of the truth because of it. So I am just going to say it:

Prayer rocks.

For example: One of my pet peeves is misplacing something and having to look for it. I am getting better but I naturally feel like I'm wasting my time and want to give up early. At the risk of treating God like a magic trick, I don't know how many times I have been looking for something that I've misplaced, and, after a frustrating quest for said object, have stopped and prayed to God to help me find whatever it is, and within five minutes it is found.

A better example: I used to think that I had to make relationships happen, and I would work really hard at my friendships. And it's not like I don't have to work at them anymore, but it is like what I am learning in my grad degree about singing properly.

When you sing the wrong way, it feels like a lot of work and lacks power, like trying to bulldoze through dirt. When you sing correctly, your voice rides on your breath, and the air does the work, and you have power but there is ease to it. It feels a bit like the way your hand does when you stand in a swimming pool, put your hand on the water, and spin. Your hand rides on top of the water, even bounces a bit. You don't have to hold your hand up anymore, because it is carried along on the surface tension of the water. Prayer is like that. It is both simple and powerful.

I can honestly say that I have experienced friendships of the kind you read about in books, the kind that feel like brothers in the trenches together, that were built around praying together. There is a mysterious power to it, one I cannot recreate by trying hard.

Prayer takes the pressure off of you when a friend is in distress. I remember seeing an episode of 30 Rock in which Character A had a problem, and went to Character B for a listening ear. Because of this, character B felt sad and had to go to Character C to listen, and so on. It was as if the problem was a huge cartoon anvil that just got handed off with each sad retelling.

I used to listen repeatedly to a cd by the band Smalltown Poets. I liked the song "If You'll Let Me Love You". It starts out with these lyrics: "I don't know what to do to ease your mind. I don't have the perfect words to make it fine. I'm not so qualified for sympathy, but I am not without love."

Have you ever felt like that? Like you wanted to be there for a friend, but you didn't know what to say, and there was this pressure to make things better, and when the conversation was over, you felt weighed down? I have.

But then I started realizing that if I was Character B and Character A was crying over their coffee cup on the other side of the table, I could invite Jesus in to be Character C. I could hand A's problems off to Him and actually feel like I was helping. And you know what? Jesus, it turns out, is big enough to hold emotional anvils.

At summer camp, we used to sing a song based on 1 Peter 5:7 that went like this:

"Cast your burdens [clap clap clap]
Unto Jesus [clap clap clap]
For He cares [clap clap clap]
For you [clap clap clap]!"

It went on like that with some super fun hand motions, especially when it got to the part where you get to sing, "Higher-higher-higher, higher-higher-higher, higher-higher-higher, lift Jesus higher!" At that part, you'd jump up and down and raise your arms in the air like you just didn't care, and watch the dusty hay barn dirt at Camp Lone Star make a cloud of joy and sweat around you.

Too bad you can't do hand motions on a blog.

But you can talk about prayer. You can talk about how it might just be the solution to gossip, because there's this perfect listener who won't tell a soul. You can talk about how prayer is probably the best foundation for a friendship.  And you can talk about how prayer might just be way cooler than it gets credit for, about how prayer should never go out of style...

...just like Poptarts.

Amen.