During the week, my morning quiet time is a treasured daily ritual. It’s in this time that I jump start my day with a good cup of coffee, and try to jump start my spiritual walk by reading a devotional, meditating, and praying. All the while enjoying the company of a 55-pound Goldendoodle on my lap. Along with my daily Bible reading, it’s my attempt to maintain some spiritual discipline in my life and to set my feet on the path to following the Lord wherever He may choose to take me in that particular day.
That’s not to say that it always flows smoothly and according to plan. Despite a good sleep score on my Apple Watch, meditation with heavy eyelids easily gives way to power napping. My favorite lap dog tends to believe that belly rubs should take priority over reading a devo on my phone, pinning my arm to the armrest of my chair until she deems puppy cuddle time to be over, or falls asleep. And prayer…that often presents the biggest challenge.
I think many of us struggle to pray. Much like youngsters eagerly writing to Santa as Christmas approaches, we come before God with laundry lists of intentions. Some are more personal either for ourselves or loved ones, while some are more focused on the world at large. Young Rob would leave nothing to chance, getting every wish down on his Christmas list. Adult Rob tends to bring that same approach to prayer, but let’s face it, that’s really tough because there’s always more that we can pray for. It’s a daunting undertaking and it can make it really hard to focus on what God truly intended prayer to be, which is intimate time alone with Him.
Even though the Lord’s Prayer is always there, ready and waiting when I’m struggling to find words to pray, I hesitate because somehow it seems like such a copout. If you’re like me, having grown up in church, you’ve probably had it memorized since kindergarten. And if you’re like my daughter forced in her teen years to begrudgingly pray before bedtime, you can probably buzz through it in about 10 seconds and barely even register any of the words. It’s no wonder that in a quest to feel more spiritual, rattling off that kind of quick, rote offering to God hardly seems like the bold approach to the Throne of Grace that we’re looking for.
But when Jesus’ disciples came to Him and asked Him to teach them how to pray, what followed was a blueprint of how they, and by extension we can and should communicate with our heavenly Father. He took something that had been made complex by tradition and overly self-righteous religious leaders, and boiled it down to a simple, easily-remembered prayer that’s stood as a church staple for centuries. In a more loosely packaged and thought-provoking version of the Our Father than most of us learned, he gave us everything we need.
So, far from seeing it as a copout or a fallback option when our own words fail us, perhaps it’s time to dig deeper into the words Jesus gave us. Time to take a more mindful approach to the blueprint and see what we truly are asking of God in each line, as well as what He’s trying to tell us about how to live in true communion and intimacy with Him. That’s what we’ll try to do over the next several posts. I pray that together, we’ll learn some deeper truths about the Our Father, and about our Father, as we invite Jesus to teach us to pray all over again.