Prayer, perhaps more than any other activity, is the concrete expression of the fact that we are invited into a relationship with God. Prayer is “talking with God about what we are doing together,” as Dallas Willard puts it. In addition to all the other work that gets done through prayer, perhaps the greatest work of all is the knitting of the human heart together with the heart of God. I have sat by the bedside of many people who have reached the end of their lives, and have heard them express regrets about many activities — years wasted in obsessions over work, time thrown away in pursuit of more money. I have never yet heard a person at the end of their life regret time they had spent in prayer. For where there is much prayer there is much love.
Richard Foster writes of a friend walking through a shopping mall with his two-year-old son. The boy was cranky and out of sorts, and nothing the father did would settle him down.
When nothing else works the father finally picks his son up, holds him in his arms, and begins to sing to him a song that he makes up as he goes along: “I love you. I love the way you laugh. I’m glad I get to be your dad.”
Suddenly this song does what nothing else could. His son’s eyes get wide, his mouth closes and grins, he nestles into his father’s chest and listens all the way out to the car.
When his father puts him into the car seat and buckles him in, his son throws out his arms and says, “Sing it to me again, Daddy. Sing it again.”
Prayer is like that. With simplicity of heart we allow ourselves to be gathered up into the arms of the Father and let him sing his love song over us.
Sing it again.
John Ortberg, The Life You’ve Always Wanted: Spiritual Disciplines for Ordinary People (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2009), 106.
Check out the new Bible Study, The Life You’ve Always Wanted. It is available on Amazon, as well as part of the Good Questions Have Groups Talking subscription service. (Like Netflix for Bible lessons.)
