A Spare Tire Prayer Often Disappoints
Disappointment is in the eye of the . . .
Nothing like an expensive SUV plastered with bumper stickers condemning God, political leaders, and mocking prayer to get my attention! The most arresting one stated simply,
Nothing Disappoints like Prayer.
Yeah, well, I started to bluster mentally. However, the combative bumper sticker was also like a tight shoe rubbing a blister on my heart. The God who invites prayer doesn’t need my defense. But my prayers . . . well, they can pinch!
Nothing can disappoint like my prayers; because, as Tim Keller confessed, “. . . somehow I assume I deserve a better life than you [Lord]. ” *
Overcoming Inertia in Prayer
Years ago, a priest at Georgetown Law School answered Doug’s question, How can I learn to pray?”
“It’s simple,” he said. “Pray, God have mercy on me, a sinner.”
That’s a prayer that cannot disappoint!
What next?
If it weren’t for the Psalms, the prayers of your saints, and Your Spirit, Lord, who seems to say, I am listening at the strangest times, I might have plastered my car with angry accusations, too.
Desperation, ignorance, and fecklessness still form most of my prayers. Were not the right Person patiently making sense of them, nothing would disappoint like my prayers!
Prayer – even mine — steadies, edifies, and knocks me off my throne, my high horse. What disappoints is seeing how often I keep trying to clamber back up on it!
Mystery, Oxygen and Hindsight
The daily mystery of having Your ear, Lord, is my oxygen, especially when doubt, fear, and disappointment is my litany.
mercy
Hindsight shows me I received better answers than any petition I cobbled together, even when all I could do was cry.
When we’ve run out of pretty prayers and Sunday school answers, pleading is an intimate, ugly cry that dares to cast away its pride. ~Matt Tullos
God bless your day, dear reader – here’s little something I hope will not be a disappointment:
A Poem Set to Music
i thank You God for this amazing day ~ read by e e cummings, followed by a musical composition of the same verses.
i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any—lifted from the no
of all nothing—human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)
*Proverbs: God’s Wisdom for Navigating Life, page 76.