“Prayer is not for getting what we want, but rather for
bending our wants toward what God wants.” (Stanley Hauerwas)
Wanting is one of the
strongest drives in our nature. The Lord's Prayer recognises this. Our wants can be as daily as bread, as needful
as forgiveness, as desperate as a cry for deliverance from whatever might hurt
and harm us. We want the material things we need to live; we want to have
satisfying relationships with other people; we want to be kept safe and to live
as well as we can. And at times we live as if achieving all that was entirely
up to us.
But each of these wants is part of basic prayer. We pray to
God for what we need to live our lives – bread to nourish our bodies, the
security of home, enough money to provide what’s needed, a job to give us a
place and a purpose. We pray to God about marriage, friendships, family
relationships, people we work with, neighbours. Time and again these
relationships need to be salvaged, renewed, cleansed, recycled.
That same prayer deals with needs as well as wants: forgive us when
we get it wrong, as we forgive those who get it wrong with us. In life there are alos givens, those circumstances that come to us, or at us. So we pray to God
about those experiences that test our integrity and our faith, that face us
with hard choices, when it’s easier to do wrong than pay the price for doing
right. So we bring our wants to God; often we want, mostly we need, those things we can’t live without,
or at least can't live well without – bread, forgiveness, strength to survive the traps and tests and temptations of life that often feels way too complex, demanding and confusing.
The Lord's Prayer is a remarkably clarifying agenda to start, and end, each day.
The photo looks towards Stirling from Gartmore – the sense of space and distance help put this small person in perspective!
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