"A Praying Life" (chapters 24-25)

A Praying Life: Connecting with God in a Distracting World
By Paul E. Miller

“How God Places Himself in the Story” - Chapter 24

• When we are in the middle of the desert, we feel like God is absent.
• We long for God to show himself clearly, to make sense of the mess.

The Canaanite Woman

• Jesus’ interaction with a Canaanite woman and her needy daughter are instructive for us in our understanding of how God is present in the midst of our story.
• Jesus is aloof, ambiguous, even demeaning to this Canaanite woman. Why?
• Jesus draws out the full measure of her sincerity, humility, and faith.
• If Jesus were a magic prayer machine, he’d have healed this woman’s daughter instantly, and we would not have discovered her feisty, creative spirit.
• Likewise, Jesus’ ambiguity with us creates the space not only for him to emerge but us as well. If the miracle comes too quickly, there is no room for discovery, for relationship.
• The waiting that is the essence of faith provides the context for relationship.

Another Woman & Her Needy Daughter

• God left Jill in confusion in order to grow her faith, her ability to connect with him. To become like a child, Jill had to become weak again.
• Jesus’ ambiguous interaction with both Jill and the Canaanite woman is a mini-course on prayer. God permitted a difficult situation in both of their lives, and then he lingered at the edge.
• If he were at the center, if they had had regular visions of him, they would not have developed the faith to have a real relationship with him.
• When God seems silent and our prayers go unanswered, the overwhelming temptation is to leave the story—to walk out of the desert and attempt to create a normal life.
• But when we persist in a spiritual vacuum, when we hang in there during ambiguity, we get to know God.

Mary Magdalene in a Mini-Desert

• Jesus stands at the edge of the story, unwilling to overwhelm her so that a richer, fuller Mary could emerge.
• He allows her pain to continue for just a moment so Jesus the person could meet Mary the person.
• Many of us wish God were more visible. We think that if we could see him better or know what is going on, then faith would come more easily.
• But if Jesus dominated the space and overwhelmed our vision, we would not be able to relate to him.
• Everyone who had a clear-eyed vision of God in the Bible fell down as if he were dead. It’s hard to relate to pure light.
• When we suffer, we long for God to speak clearly, to tell us the end of the story and, most of all, to show himself.
• But if he showed himself fully and immediately, if he answered all the questions, we’d never grow.
• Jill was profoundly changed in her twenty-year wait. If God had instantly explained everything to her and healed Kim, that change would not have taken place.
• No one works like him.

“Praying without a Story” - Chapter 25

• What happens when you don’t have a sense of your life as a story being told by your Heavenly Father?
• We don’t like the messiness of unanswered prayer—or answers that are different from what we requested.
• A distraught heart makes us uneasy, but it reveals the mystery of prayer.

Reflecting on the Story

• Prayer doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Prayer interacts with all the other pieces of our life. The praying life is inseparable from obeying, loving, waiting, and suffering.
• If we don’t get passionate with God in the face of disappointment, like the Canaanite woman, then cynicism slips in, and our hearts begin to harden. We begin a living death.

No Story	Story
Bitter	Waiting
Angry	Watching
Aimless	Wondering
Cynical	Praying
Controlling	Submitting
Hopeless	Hoping
Thankless	Thankful
Blaming	Repenting

Another Story of God’s Weaving

• God responds to our prayers in the context of the story he is weaving with our lives.
• If we do not recognize the presence of the story or realize that God is writing one, then our prayers will just be isolated, individual requests. We won’t see how everything is being woven together for the purpose of our growth in faith and holiness.
• There is a significant difference between making an isolated prayer request and praying in context of the story that God is weaving.
• The answer to prayer is inseparable from repenting, serving, managing, and waiting.
• Most of our prayers are answered in the context of the larger story that God is weaving.

Living in our Father’s Story

• Living in our Father’s story means living in tension.
• To live in our Father’s story, remember these three things:
  
  • Don’t demand that the story go your way (surrender completely).
  • Look for the Storyteller. Look for his hand, and then pray in light of what you are seeing.
  • Stay in the story. Don’t shut down when it goes the wrong way.
• This last one, staying in the story, can be particularly difficult. When the story isn’t going your way, ask yourself, What is God doing? Be on the lookout for strange gifts.
• Sometimes when we say “God is silent,” what’s really going on is that he hasn’t told the story the way we wanted it told.
• He will be silent when we want him to fill in the blanks of the story we are creating. But with his own stories, the ones we live in, he is seldom silent.
• To see the Storyteller we need to slow down our interior life and watch.
• We need to be imbedded in the Word to experience the Storyteller’s mind and pick up the cadence of his voice.
• We need to be alert for the story, for the Storyteller’s voice speaking into the details of our lives. The story God weaves always involves bowing before his majesty with the pieces of our lives.

Watching for the Divine Artist

• We can see the Divine artistry of God in the story he wrote for Joseph’s life.
  Joseph’s life was marked by suffering and disappointment, but God was writing a story.
• Joseph has not given in to bitterness and cynicism; instead he discovers the gracious heart of his God, grace he extends to those who have harmed him. Forgiveness flowed.
• When confronted with suffering that won’t go away, we instinctively focus on what is missing, such as betrayal in Joseph’s story, not on the Master’s hand.
• Often when you think everything has gone wrong, it’s just that you’re in the middle of a story.
• If you watch the stories God is weaving in your life, you, like Joseph, will begin to see the patterns. You’ll become a poet, sensitive to your Father’s voice.