"A Praying Life" (chapters 32-34)

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

“Prayer Journaling: Becoming Aware of the Interior Journey” - Chapter 32

• Journaling is a historic Christian practice.
• Life is a journey, a spiritual adventure. Writing down the adventure as it happens gives us a feel for our place in the story God is weaving in our lives.
• Many of us rush around without much conscious knowledge of the pilgrimage God is leading us on. Writing in a prayer journal helps us take stock of our location on the journey.

Aware of Self

• As we walk with the Shepherd, we become aware of our true selves.
• The spiritual pilgrimage is the discovery of self in relationship to God, which leads to a lifestyle of repentance.
• You can’t walk with the Shepherd and not begin to change. His presence allows us to take an honest, interior look.

Journal for a Year

• Journaling allows us to discover the story that God is writing in our lives. Instead of rushing through life, it allows us to pause and reflect.
• Write down areas of your life that the Word and the Spirit reveal to you that need sanctification.
• Journal the spiritual journey (ups and downs) of your progress in that area and see how God is working.

Morning Prayer Journal

• Starting the day with prayer and journaling can help us slow down and reflect on our own hearts and where we need to pay particular attention throughout that day.
• The key is being honest about what we are feeling and then letting Scripture speak to our hearts. By being honest, the real me will be talking. We don’t have to try or pretend to be good.
• When we look at our life through the lens of Scripture, we seldom lose our way. We can be real, but we don’t get lost in our feelings.
• You don’t have to write well to keep a prayer journal, nor do you have to be consistent.
• It is just a written version of childlike praying, except more organized. Begin with what’s on your heart, what’s bugging you, what you are thankful for. If you are real before God, then everything else flows.
• The act of writing out your worries, joys, and prayers helps you focus and keeps your mind from wandering. But the best part is that over time you will begin to see patterns of what God is doing, to pick up the threads of a story.
• If we see our lives as a pilgrimage, then it becomes an integrated whole. It makes sense.

“Real-Life Praying” - Chapter 33

• Prayer is where we do our best work—as a husband/wife, father/mother, worker, and friend.
• We can manage our whole lives—everything that we are—through our daily prayer time. It will shape our loving, parenting, working, etc.
• We don’t need a praying life because that is our duty. That would wear thin quickly. We need time to be with our Father every day because every day our hearts and the hearts of those around us are overgrown with weeds.
• We need to reflect on our lives and engage God with the condition of our souls and the souls he has entrusted to our care or put in our paths. In a fallen world, these things do not come automatically.

“Unfinished Stories” - Chapter 34

• The stories that God is weaving in our lives do not always have an ending that we can see. They appear to us as unfinished stories.
• As we abide in God, he usually shows us what he is doing. But sometimes he doesn’t.
  Job never new why he suffered.
• We will all have unfinished stories from time to time. We must remember that, ultimately, it is God’s story, not ours.

Israel’s Agony

• The people of Judah who returned from captivity returned to just a small remnant of what the kingdom of David and Solomon had been before.
• The prophets prophesied a future time of glory coming, but the people of Judah of that day died without ever seeing it. God’s story was moving forward but at his pace.

The Weaving of God

• The way God answered the hopes and prayers of the weeping Judahites in Psalm 137 is mind-boggling.
  
  • He created a new Israel that included Gentiles as well as Jews.
  • He destroyed the temple and gave them Jesus, “God with Us.”
  • The captivity saw the rise of synagogues, the pattern of the local church.
  • The Old Testament Scriptures were completed and collected during this time in captivity and shortly thereafter.
  • With the kingdom and temple destroyed, the Word of God became more precious.
  • God cleansed Israel of its mixture with other religions.
  • The dispersion of the Jewish people served to advance the church in its early years.
  • Israel was purified of outward idolatry.
  • God was weaving a spectacular tapestry through the suffering of Israel. Without the Babylonian captivity there would be no Israel, no cross, no Christianity, and no Western civilization.

Not Your Story

• The more distant we are from a story, the less we know what God is doing.
• It’s not our business to know or have all the answers to someone else’s story.
• Just as it was not Peter’s business what God decided to do with John’s life (John 21:22).
• Peter only needed to keep his eyes on Jesus and follow him. His story would be different than John’s.

“God Know What He Be Doing”

• “Well, izz hard, but, you know, God know what he be doing.”
• God is not a ‘cosmic Santa’ who will always give us what we ask for.
• Through trials, God bids us to choose: Do we believe, or do we not? Will we be bold enough to love, daring enough to serve, humble enough to submit, and strong enough to acknowledge our limitations?
• Can we surrender our concern in things that don’t matter so that we might devote our remaining days to things that do?”

Come Quickly, Lord Jesus

• Some stories aren’t tied up until heaven.
• Living in unfinished stories draws us into God’s final act, the return of Jesus.
• As the people of faith in Hebrews 11, many will die before the promises are fully fulfilled. But we, like they, are looking forward to a better city, a heavenly one, when God’s story will be complete.