LITMIR.BIZ

      We can trade in times of gentle sweet communion, walking with God in the cool of the evening in the garden of Eden, for our frantic, harried pleas that God do what we say. There is a great line in the movie Shadowlands, a line I’m told may have been written specially for the movie. No matter; it rings true. In the film the actor who plays C. S. Lewis says, “I do not pray because it changes God; I pray because it changes me.” That is, we pray in order to be brought into conformity with the Lord’s design. “Thy will be done,” the smartest line in every prayer we pray. We have only to look back across the years and see the things we prayed for that would have been disastrous had our prayers been granted. Only after the passage of time can we see the answers that at the time seemed wrong but that have turned out to be for our solid, certifiable good. “Thy will be done” (Matthew 6:10 KJV). This prayer does not need to be cut to fit us; we need to be changed, transformed through the slow-drip splendor of God’s grace, in order that we fit this prayer. But we start where we are. We walk before we run.

      Prayer Is Connection in Community

      Despite the fact that our conversation here is focused on private prayer, it is also true that we must always pray with others, and that the people in our lives will pervade our prayer times. Prayer is a way we are related, interconnected, dependent on and involved with others. In the Bible, we read the words of the prophet Samuel: “I would never sin against the Lord by failing to pray for you” (1 Samuel 12:23). No casual calling, this. The Trinity, the Three Persons, is a community, and so is the body of Christ. We are taught that we are members of one another—as deeply connected as that. We are to pray for and with each other always.

      I sometimes wonder what somebody means when they say they’ll pray for me, but with certain saints, I know exactly. When I ask my pastor for her prayers, I know she falls down on her knees and seeks God’s mercy in fervent devotion. I also came to know what the man sometimes called “the evangelical pope” meant by praying for another. That man, John Stott, spoke one night at Amherst College. At the end of the evening, a long line formed to speak with him. I joined the line, and when my turn came, I spoke from a deep experience of the phrase “to covet someone’s prayers.” I said, “I’m here with my friend Annie. She does not know the Lord. Tonight when you are traveling over the Atlantic Ocean flying back home, would you please pray for Annie?”

      John Stott looked at me with kindest eyes, and he said no.

      “I will, however,” he said, “pray for your friend right now,” and as he stood there, surrounded, in a crowded auditorium of people who seemed unwilling to leave, he prayed a prayer that I will always remember. When John Stott prayed that night, I knew that I was praying with a man who walked with God. It was a prayer like few I have experienced in my life.

      For saints, prayer comes first. It just does. It is the bedrock foundation of every action of every day. We are helped in prayer just knowing others pray. There is such beauty in awareness that when we pray the hourly prayers of the church, numberless others all across the world join hearts and minds together in that prayer.

      Prayer connects us with other people when no other contact is possible. My ninety-seven-year-old aunt—the dictionary definition of a prayer warrior—never leaves her nursing home. But oh, the places she will go; oh, the places she has been. She’s on more speed dials than anyone I know. “Will you pray?” Those three words have echoed down the years, and will be said with no less fervor in a call she might well get this afternoon. Her life is actively involved with people and events across the globe.

      Prayer is praying for the people we love. Prayer is a dynamic, powerful, supernatural involvement with other people. Prayer might be asking God to bless a stranger on the street, the mail carrier, the librarian, your doctor, or the crossing guard. Prayer might be choosing one person, a close friend, or maybe someone you don’t know particularly well and praying for him every single day, perhaps for years. You might be the only person who ever prayed for him. I had known and prayed for someone for twenty years who one day said to me, “I don’t know if your beliefs in God are right or wrong, but you may be the only person on earth who cares about my soul.” I repeat these words here because it is a calling every single one of us can take upon ourselves: to care, in prayer, for the soul of another.

      There is another way, however, that we sometimes do damage to one another’s prayer lives. Friends sigh and say to us, “You know, I hardly ever pray.” And we commiserate and say, “I know. You’re so busy now. It’s so hard.” And we sell each other down the river. We diminish these friends; we patronize and sell them short. In an effort to be nice—the scourge of humankind, I sometimes think—we fail to hold each other to account. Bottom line, we have to decide whether prayer is a harmless pastime, a lovely interlude, there to indulge in when we have the time, or, if it is food for body, soul, and mind, air to lungs, fire to life. If we decide prayer matters, we deprive and dishonor one another by placating, patting one another on the head, and saying it’s OK not to pray. I can remember with precision those times in my life when I’ve said to a good friend, “I shouldn’t do that,” and the friend has replied, “No, you shouldn’t.” Replies like this can make us understand what friendship is. The Bible tells us to “consider one another to provoke unto love and to good works” (Hebrews 10:24 KJV).

      May prayer itself be love and a good work.