Squishy Prayers

Saving our prayer life from meaningless words…

I have been around a lot of prayers. Prayers before meals, before church, before the offering, before the message, before the game, prayers involving hedges, prayers filled with Fathergod, prayers as a letter (Dear Jesus,…), prayers after the game, after the message, after the offering, after church. Lots and lots of prayers.

The prayers that always bothered me were the repetitive “Now I lay me down to sleep” prayers. These always seemed to have as much meaning as singing the chorus of Oceans for the 24th time. My kids went to a Christian school for a number of years and during the weekly praise and worship time, it would always conclude with a sweet little second grade girl praying “to close our time together”. As a parent attending these on a regular basis, I got to hear that cute little second grader pray a hundred times for everyone to “have a good day” and “not get hurt on the playground”, after years and years of these prayers I began to get a tic every time the Headmaster would say, “As we close our time together…”.

The funny thing is that it didn’t bother me because those prayers weren’t legitimate and heart felt, but because I prayed like that too.

“Jesus be with me today.”

“I pray that we will have a nice time together.”

“I pray that we will have a safe trip.”

“Bless our conversation.”

“Bless my family.”

“Spirit lead me where my trust is without boarders…” Oh, sorry…

My oldest son has been doing a lot of writing at school lately. One THING that I have noticed about his writing is that he takes after me with his assumed descriptiveness. This is where you use as few descriptive terms as possible to describe what you are talking about, assuming the other person already knows what you mean. My red pen loves to circle the word THING and STUFF, as in “he picked up the THING full of STUFF”.

My prayers, often times, are replete with the same assumed descriptiveness. Squishy words like “bless”, “nice”, “better”, “safe”, “good”, “fun”. How do I want Jesus to “bless” me? What does a “nice” day look like? Does Jesus really want my life to be “safe” or have “fun”? Isn’t there something more significant that I should be praying? My prayers assume that my definition of “good” is the same as his. However when I read chapter five of Matthew, I should realize that His “good” does not always mean the same as my “good”. And when I pray for him to be “with me”, I am actually an idiot, because he said that he never leaves me.

I look at my kids and hear their prayers and I would love it if they have a better and more meaningful prayer life than I have. The funny thing is that attempting to help them has in fact, helped me. Through the years my wife and I have found ourselves focusing on three distinct themes, thankfulness, variety, and selflessness. These three themes have challenged the squishiness of my time with Jesus.

Thankfulness

When my oldest son was around 3 years old, he started not only listening, but participating in our nightly prayer time. I clearly remember his very first prayer. I was encouraging him that prayer is just as simple as talking to Jesus. To help him get started, I asked him what things he is thankful for and then tell Jesus what those things are. He thought for a moment and scrunched his eyes closed and said, “Thank you Jesus for bacon.”

Before you judge me on giving nitrate rich food products to my three year old, remember… he takes after his father with his assumed descriptiveness and probably meant to say “thank you that my mom serves me nitrate free, turkey bacon”. Actually, had he used the term lardon, I would have been quick to realize that he was prophesying about a future move to Portland, the land of the free range and home of the lardon (aka bacon).

Thankfulness has been a theme that has ebbed and flowed as our boys have gotten older. When we are thankful, it forces us to think. Then it reduces our anxiety by reminding our souls that we aren’t ultimately in charge by re-calibrating our hearts to be more mindful of Jesus’ true role in our life.

Variety

Variety of prayers is our second theme. When we have prayed with our kids on their way to school, we have asked them different questions like: what can I pray for? what are you thankful for? who is someone who needs our prayers? what are you most excited about today? what are you dreading today?

Each person in the car would answer the question and then the answers would be incorporated in our prayers.

We have sung our prayers.
We have rapped and rhymed our prayers (I will warn you, nothing rhymes with orange).

I’ll give you a second…

I told you.

We have prayed using an acronym: ACTS (adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication)

Prayed with our eyes open, then as my guys got older… with our eyes closed.

Prayed once per person, prayed twice per person.

Tried popcorn prayer.

Prayed agreeing with others out loud.

Prayed for ourselves only.

Prayed for others only.

Our desire to increase variety was to demonstrate that there is no “right way” to pray. Singing praises to him in a worship service is just as much prayer as a quiet word mumbled before a conversation.

Limited Self Focus

The main reason we introduced variety and focused on thanksgiving was to keep the spotlight on Jesus and off of ourselves. By praying for others, or praying with thanksgiving, or acknowledging an attribute of God, we are moving the focus off of our need or our lack of something to an awareness of someone else’s need or of how great God is. I would love for my boys to live an adventurous life, recognizing when Jesus works in and through the lives of those around them.

I am super selfish and it is easy for me to get caught up in all of my THINGS and STUFF and fail to identify the needs around me. The less I am concerned with myself, the more I am concerned about others. Helping to teach them how to pray has helped to highlight the squishiness of my prayers and allowed me to fight against it. So “as we close our time together” let’s both teach and incorporate thankfulness, variety, and selflessness into our prayers and we can be guaranteed that our “faith will be made stronger, in the presence of my Savior.”