"A Praying Life" (chapters 26-27)

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

“Hope: The End of the Story” - Chapter 26

• Hope is a new idea in history, a uniquely Christian vision.
• The gospel is Good News. Because God broke the power of evil at the cross, we can, along with Sarah, look at our cynicism and laugh.
• Tragedy doesn’t have the last word. God saves the best for last.
• The infinite God touches us personally. We can dream big because God is big.

Dreaming Big

• I have prayed for humility, and it dawned on me that God was answering my prayer.
• I would have preferred humility to come over me like magic. Instead, God teaches humility in humble places.
• What I thought was a stone was really a loaf of bread.
• Our prayers didn’t float above life. Our family was focused on both the reality line and the hope line.
• Praying was inseparable from working, planning, and good old-fashioned begging.

Willing to Be Enchanted

• As we wait and pray, God weaves his story and creates a wonder.
• Instead of drifting between comedy (denial) and tragedy (reality), we have a relationship with the living God, who is intimately involved with the details of our worlds.
• We are learning to watch for the story to unfold, to wait for the wonder.
• If you wait, your heavenly Father will pick you up, carry you out into the night, and make your life sparkle. He wants to dazzle you with the wonder of his love.
• To see the marvel of the stories that our Father is telling, we need to become like little children.
• C. S. Lewis was characterized by a willingness to be enchanted—his delight in laughter, his willingness to accept a world made by a good and loving God, and his willingness to submit to the charms of a wonderful story.
• God delights in turning our tragedies into comedies.

“Living in Gospel Stories” - Chapter 27

• What we think are mistakes and frustrating situations are opportunities for the kingdom of God to show up in our lives. It is always that way with the kingdom. It is so strange, so low; it is seldom recognized.
• It looks like a mistake, but later we realize that we were in the middle of God’s story.
• The downward journey is a gospel story. Humility comes before exaltation.

Gospel Stories

• My trip with Kim was a gospel story. I gave up a piece of my life for Jill. In the gospel, Jesus took my sin, and I got his righteousness. That is how gospel stories work. Jill gets a restful weekend, and I get a stressful one. Whenever you love, you reenact Jesus’ death.
• Gospel stories always have suffering in them. American Christianity has an allergic reaction to this part of the gospel. We’d love to hear about God’s love for us, but suffering doesn’t mesh with our right to “the pursuit of happiness.” So we pray to escape a gospel story, when that is the best gift the Father can give us. When I was sitting on the plane thinking, Everything has gone wrong, that was the point when everything was going right. That’s how love works.
• The Father wants to draw us into the story of his Son. He doesn’t have a better story to tell, so he keeps retelling it in our lives. As we reenact the gospel, we are drawn into a strange kind of fellowship. The taste of Christ is so good that the apostle Paul told the Philippians that he wanted to know “the fellowship of sharing in [Jesus’] sufferings” (Philippians 3:10, NIV).
• Living in a gospel story exposes our idols, our false sources of love.
• When our idols are exposed, we often give up in despair― overwhelmed by both the other person’s sin and our own.
• But by simply staying in the story, continuing to show up for life, even if it seems pointless, the kingdom comes. Poverty of spirit is no longer a belief. We own it. It describes us.
• Repentance, in a strange way, is refreshing.
• When we remove our false selves, repentance creates integrity. We return to the real source of love―our heavenly Father. We become authentic.

Enjoying God’s Story

• If we stop fighting and embrace the gospel story God is weaving in our lives, we discover joy.
• If we pursue joy directly, it slips from our grasp. But if we begin with Jesus and learn to love, we end up with joy.

Meaning to Suffering

• Gospel stories give meaning to suffering.
• Looking at suffering and tragedy through the lens of the gospel helps us to see the redemptive value of suffering.
• God brings grace and freedom through suffering.
• This view of life requires a firm confidence in the sovereignty of God. God is the weaver of stories.

Unseen Connections

• We should be on the lookout for unseen connections.
• To see a gospel story, we need to reflect on how seemingly disparate pieces are connected.
• The best place to pick up the unseen connections of our designer God is in disappointment and tension.
• Unseen means that there are no visible, causal links. As we bring God’s mind to our stories, we can see his hand crafting connections behind the scenes.
• Nothing in the modern mind encourages us to see the invisible links binding together all of life. We have no sense that we live in the presence of a loving Father and are accountable for all we do.
• We need to remember by faith that this is My Father’s World.
• Everything you do is connected to who you are as a person and, in turn, creates the person you are becoming.
• Everything you do affects those you love.
• All of life is covenant.
• Imbedded in the idea of prayer is a richly textured view of the world where all of life is organized around invisible bonds or covenants that knit us together.
• Instead of a fixed world, we live in our Father’s world, a world built for divine relationships between people where, because of the Good News, tragedies become comedies and hope is born.