Faith Works 2-17-18

Faith Works 2-17-18

Jeff Gill

 

Do you really want to?

___

 

Lent has begun, and the journey towards Easter is upon us.

 

April 1 is the morning Christian celebrate the Resurrection of Jesus Christ this year, and there are many making a special effort to prepare their spirits for this commemoration. Some will be baptized, others will recommit their faith in God through Christ, others simply are adopting certain disciplines of the mind and body for a season.

 

Many people want to use this time of lengthening light, earlier dawns, to improve their prayer life. With the apostles on the Mount of Olives, they are saying "Lord, teach us to pray." Books are available and whole classes are taught on the subject, and it is a question many clergy get asked: how can I improve my prayer life?

 

To some degree, this minister has some bad news for you. You probably won't. I'll draw a quick parallel.

 

If you're someone who started the new year with an interest in improving your physical health and all-around endurance, you may have joined a fitness center, a gym with memberships for sale. Most of those like to have a public area that has a whole lot of glass and a wide view to passers-by of people trotting on treadmills or lifting weights on machines.

 

A non-scientific indicator: in January, those devices were of an evening well-filled with users. I imagine the regular patrons of those gyms were a little frustrated as they came in at their usual time for their own pattern of exercise, and found a heap of new folks in the building, tentatively using the equipment.

 

But by mid-February, be of good cheer, fitness buffs. Many of those trial memberships have lapsed, lots of those new customers have fallen away with the first few weather alerts, obstacles to regularity, and just the passage of time. By March, it will be back to the regulars, and perhaps a few hardy souls who have stayed the course.

 

This is what I want to be perfectly clear about as to prayer. It is a form of exercise for the mind and soul. If you really want to be spiritually healthier, and enhance your fitness for godly discernment, it will take disciplined faithfulness. You will need to stick with it, through frustrations and set-backs – and most people who start into a path of prayer do not stay with it after the first bobble or two.

 

Now, the encouraging word: just as fitness trainers get frustrated by unrealistic expectations, spiritual counselors such as myself caution folks that steady is better than spectacular. If you want to get physically fit and have not even been close before, you can't go out and try to run a mile, or even a half mile. If you push too hard out of some unrealistic image of what it means to be healthy, you'll create your own set-backs. Just move, get up, walk briskly. Trot if you like, but not too far. Trot and walk, and maybe you'll be a runner in short stretches, or maybe you'll just be a walker, but that's better than just being a sitter.

 

Ditto people who want to bench press their weight, and are horrified to learn they can barely handle the weight of their head. Maybe lifting is for you, or perhaps you would benefit from stretching and light repetitions, and you just are not going to bench press your weight, which admit it, is just a thing you heard on TV.

 

But to do almost any of that, you need a friendly guide to show you how to start, to point out basic mistakes anyone makes as they get going, and you also need a friend, an accountability partner. They may not go to the gym or work out at the same time and place you do, but you are in ongoing communication about how that's going. And you encourage each other.

 

That's what improving your prayer life needs. Ideally, a faith community where there are people practiced in prayer around who can help guide you in the very basic basics, and in your life an accountability partner, even a spiritual director, but someone with whom you're in contact who keeps up with how your prayer life is going . . . and nudges you when it isn't going at all!

 

This Lent, it would be wonderful if more of us moved a little bit more, and prayed a bit more consistently. Small steps make great journeys.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he's sure without prayer he'd probably not be very fit for much of anything! Tell him about your prayer disciplines at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.