Prayer: What Does It Mean To You? Part I
January 13, 2012Guest post by Mr. Charlie Levine. Part II will be posted tomorrow.
What we got here is a failure to communicate...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJStzRuSFLY
Who hasn’t felt like this?
Prayer is something I still wrestle with and though I’ve cleared a couple of hurdles, I don’t pretend that I’ve arrived. But I also can’t pretend that I haven’t learned anything either.
Prayer has been a contentious thing for me for most of my time as a Christ follower. Early on, it seemed like I couldn’t miss. I’d ask for something, and it happened. This seemed to confirm my faith, and it was easy to believe in God’s providence, involvement, and overall good will.
Then, radio silence.
I got angry. I felt like my rights were being trampled. He wasn’t making good on the promises he made in the Bible. I accused God of being asleep at the wheel.
The backdrop of all this was a pretty long and chaotic set of seasons in my life. I was a very unhappy person with a lot of unresolved character issues (Character is mentioned a lot, but at the heart of it, for me at least, is a question of who you truly are at your core. Are your actions, beliefs, etc reflective of the person you truly want to be?). There were a lot of unresolved hurts, and a lot that I needed to turn away from. In essence, most of my requests were for things that would paper over these problems.
Plus, I had all kinds of false dichotomies making the idea of following God too scary to fully commit to anyway. Basically it could get boiled down to “if you want it, it’s bad, it’s the world, it’s false, it won’t build character,” etc. To borrow from C.S. Lewis it seemed like without ever reading them, I’d overdosed on Emmanuel Kant and the Stoics.
By the way, read The Weight of Glory by Lewis at least once a year. It kicks ass.
I was influenced by the Christian culture around me and unfortunately it was a culture of timidity and false humility.
Here’s a great illustration shared by one of my colleagues:
Consulted with a beautiful mother of two with an incredible modeling career. She… had been suffering what many encounter on the road to massive success: fear of arrogance. She reminded me of a quote from one of my favorite artists, Frank Lloyd Wright, “Early in my career, I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility. I deliberately chose honest arrogance, and have never found reason to be otherwise.” The bigger you ALLOW yourself to be, the better everyone you touch with your message will become. Your passion is too important to be squandered on timidity.
Most of what I saw as “being a Christ follower” would fall under the category of timidity and playing it small. We (the Christian community) couldn’t hang with the cool kids in real life, so we retreated to our own subculture and relabeled our story using Biblical language. This wasn’t the transformation that I’d seen in my friends when I had become convinced of the Gospel, so I was pretty much always angry and hopeless, because if you can’t go to God with your deepest heart issues and expect to actually move him to action, then you’re pretty much on your own.
This was not what I wanted, so needless to say I wasn’t too thrilled about engaging with this God.
A lot has changed since then and I’m further along in putting those lies behind me. Because those are lies. Satan accuses us to ourselves, accuses God to us, and unless you counter that with some serious truth, it’s easy to get off track and stay there.
A lot of that change came down to pursuing real life and inviting God (often very grudgingly) into that process. As a result, I’ve learned and grown much more in a much shorter amount of time. It also was born out of being around other Christians who are successful in real life and who also live the Gospel and who experience God’s working in their lives. Major paradigm shifts don’t happen in a vacuum.
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