I went to church before I entered the world. That’s what I tell people sometimes. It doesn’t make sense. When I tell people, though, they understand. Church is in my DNA, which can mean a lot of things. For me, most of the things are good. You can do a lot worse in life than grow up in a church.
Of all the things I remember about church as a young lad, what I remember most is a man named Enos. Enos was the logo for an old man. He was short and thin, his hair full around the sides and thin up top. His pants rode above his waist and did not reach his ankles. He wore plaid button-up shirts, sometimes underneath a blazer, sometimes not, and large glasses with a lanyard. The penultimate old man quality: he lived on a small dirt road on the outskirts of my small town named after him. Enos Moore Road was not a road at all, but a driveway connecting the highway to his home a few hundred feet off the road.
What I remember most about Enos, though, has nothing to do with his old man qualities. I remember Enos’s prayers. Enos often led the opening prayer at my church, and, boy, Enos could pray. I’m not actually sure what he said. I was twelve or so, and far more interested in almost anything else. The substance of his prayers weren’t the impressive part. The impressive part was the length. Enos prayed a long time. I know because I brought a timer to church every Sunday. Every Sunday, me and a friend would see if Enos could break his previous record.
“Last week, he went five-and-a-half minutes.” I said. “There’s no way he tops that today.”
“I bet you a Cal Ripken Jr. baseball card he goes over,” my friend responded.
“You’re on.”
And we went on like this every time Enos prayed. His all-time record was something around eight minutes. I think I gasped an audible “Wow” after he said amen, and maybe even clapped a time or two.
I don’t mean to disrespect Enos or prayer. I bring this up because, now, as a man who has followed Jesus for thirty-plus years, I have come to marvel at Enos. I realize that I could never pray like that.
I have never been good at prayer. Look, I know. Prayer is not a competition. I should never put my words to God up against another’s. But I do. You probably do too. I have listened to men and women pray over the years, people who could start a revival with their words. You know someone like this, I’m sure. Someone who, every time he or she prays, the hairs on your arms stand at attention.
All along, I knew I wasn’t good at prayer. I couldn’t move mountains or even ant hills with my words. I run out of things to say after a minute or two, and I begin repeating myself. Any time I pray in front of people, I feel anxious and insecure. I say words, trying to arrange them in such a way as to build momentum and play on the heart strings, and all the while I feel like a fraud. Why am I talking like this? I never pray this way when I am alone.
I concluded at some point that prayer was not my thing, so I stopped doing it. I stopped speaking to God. I left that up to the Enoses of the world.
How Suffering Changed My Understanding of Prayer
Then, I got really sick. And for a long time, I was in the bed, alone, just me and my thoughts. It was a dark time. Suffering, however, has a way of revealing, of peeling away old, worn-out ways of seeing God and the world. In my plight, I began to wonder if prayer was something more than speaking words to God. I wondered this because, in my darkest days, when I pondered giving up on life, I heard something. I heard a voice or maybe it was a strong feeling that came from the depths of my soul. Either way, it told me everything was going to be okay.
That sounds like a trivial thing to hear from God. And for most people, it probably is. For me, however, it wasn’t. It was a miracle. It was exactly what I needed to give peace to the turbulent waters of my heart and mind.
From then on, I saw prayer differently. I have come to realize that the traditional Christian view of prayer is one-sided, at best. Ours is an extroverted culture. Our values are external. Progress. Success. Job title. Things like that. And we find little value in silence and stillness and listening. That’s fine. Except when we allow a culture’s values to seep into how we understand and interact with God.
Prayer Is More Than Talking To God
Prayer, it turns out, is not just about talking to God. I’m not even sure it is about talking to God at all. That sounds blasphemous to an extroverted culture. Our approach to prayer, though, reveals something about how we see ourselves and God’s presence in our lives. It reveals that we are the star of the show, and God’s role is to come alongside us, to listen as we speak words to him and then respond to those words.
We are not the star, though. The story belongs to God. He is the Author of the story, and the Publisher. The story began long before we plunged through our mother’s birth canal, and will continue long after someone buries us in the earth. We would do well to remember this, and apply it to our posture towards God.
God is doing something in your life right now, and in mine. God is revealing himself to us. And it pains me to think how much I have missed over the years because I tried to speak eloquent words to God instead of listen. It pains me to think how much the church has missed by not assuming this posture of listening, of silence. The church should have known better. God’s people allowed our extroverted culture to seep into our theology, and thus prayer became about our words to God and not God’s words to us.
Maybe there is a time when we need to talk to God. But it’s prideful and presumptuous to speak to God without first listening. It is a reflection of our anxious and distracted culture that we assume long, articulate words spoken in a certain context and bookended with “Dear God” and “Amen” are the best kinds of prayer. They’re not.
The Best Kinds of Prayers
The best kinds of prayers are ones that begin by listening, by closing our mouths and humbling ourselves before the Ancient One. What is God trying to say to us? He has a word for us. Do we know what it is? Do we care to listen?
We need to take up a posture of listening and attentiveness. We need to assume God is already doing something in us, around us, and our role is to be still long enough for him to reveal what it is. As we do this, our words to God will decrease. We will see God everywhere. We will see his beauty and power and love in places we did not see it before. We might find that the things that once gave us anxiety or filled us with fear begin to lose their grip on our heart and mind.
We might finally understand what Paul meant when he told us to pray without ceasing. Although it is impossible to speak words to God at all times, it is very possible to become attentive to the movement of God around you at all time. And you might realize that this form of prayer, the one where you listen without speaking words to God, transforms you. I believe it will.
Grace and peace.