Prayer doesn't give you a less busy life, it gives you a less busy heart

January 13th, 2022

I used to travel a lot for work. I loved the work, but I don’t travel particularly well. On the road I was prone to chronic headaches. My kids didn’t like to see me leave and I would often be gone 2-3 weeks at a time without a definite return date. Some trips were good but others I would struggle with anger, loneliness, lust, and a sense of lost identity.

When my family moved to Las Vegas and we started coming to Summit, Tiffany and I wanted to connect as quickly as possible and to build a community here. John and Angela invited us to their small groups and we both eagerly joined, looking to re-center on Jesus and to get to know people after the pain of leaving our California community. If you get the chance to join one of those groups, please remember me here in this newsletter urging you to commit to it!

One thing that being in that small group brought was that PJ and I would talk when I was traveling. He checked in on me as I was on a challenging work trip and asked if I’d ever read A Praying Life by Paul Miller.
The question barely made sense to me, because of course it’s a book about prayer, not loneliness or anger or fear.
I answered that I thought I had a copy at home and sort of remembered maybe reading it a few years back. Clearly, it did not make a big impression! You can see in the picture of my daughter, who is now 11, that we have had a paper copy for some time!
He sent me a “fresh” copy on Kindle a minute later, and I started reading.
The next days and weeks were transformative.

I think the first thing I noticed was I could tell that Paul Miller knew God. He was someone I wanted to be more like. As I read his stories and saw how God had worked in his life, I wanted what he had. As much as I’d focused on prayer in sermons and reading for years, I was missing some things.
As I walked laps around my office building parking lot with my Kindle threatening to overheat in the 112 degree Vegas summer, I would meet God in the desert. Have you ever read a book where you wanted to underline every sentence and relish each chapter but also wanted to keep devouring? I’m not at all a crying guy but day after day I would get misty as He was showing me more and more of who He was and how He wanted me to come to Him in prayer.

I learned to lament. To really feel sad about grievous evils in His presence. To bring those things before Him without just complaining – to really reckon with evil and sadness, but to trust in a strong Friend that can redeem anything. I learned to pray like the psalmists. It’s liberating to not have to run from bad feelings, but to process through them in prayer.

I learned to be distracted in my prayer time! And I mean that in a good way. For years I had focused on discipline in praying from a list -- not rabbit-trailing or letting my mind wander (which it invariably did, leaving me feeling guilty). I learned that if something kept coming to my mind while I was praying about something else, that I should take that distracting thing and bring it to God in prayer.

And I learned this to be true: Prayer doesn’t give you a less busy life – it gives you a less busy heart. Another Paul Miller mic drop. There are mic drop moments on almost every page.

In praying through those distractions and seeing the poetry that God had weaved in Paul Miller’s life, it slowly dawned on me that God really does let us – no, invites us to – bring Him in on all the small stuff. Where a technical work issue would have had me grinding my teeth and anxiously spinning my wheels trying to solve the problem I didn’t have time to deal with, I would now found myself instead able to ask Him to help me find the problem. Solutions came faster. Leaning on Him so hard brought a humility that made it possible to laugh at my own limitations. I could handle my software work and customer and coworker interactions with a sense of humor that had evaded me. Busyness no longer felt so disorienting. I felt a renewed sense of God’s continual presence and love and availability.

He became a God I wanted to go to with everything. And I saw Him step into all my moments. What an amazing thing to see His fingerprints on all of life.

I know there are times in the Christian life where He feels far away, silent. Where the command is to wait, and He does not feel intimate or close.

But He does promise to draw near to His people as they draw near to Him (Jeremiah 29:13). He is willing to be found. He wants to be known (John 10:14, Col 1:10). He wants you to know His tender fatherly heart, as you submit every sin and struggle and joy and desire in your life to Him.

I pray for us as a church that the Praying Life seminar next week will be a time of rich blessing. I pray that He will use a book and a man and a seminar to reveal more of Himself to His people.

You may not have my experience. But remember – that wasn’t my first time through the book!

In Him,
Jeremy