I read this expression in a book entitled “Help, Thanks, Wow – The Three Essential Prayers,” by one of my favorite authors, Anne Lamott. It struck me how there are both experiences which and even people who fall into the “barely bearable” category. My experience of late is being without my children in a way I have not yet known. Although my oldest daughter went off to college last year, my only son left for VMI a few weeks ago and time with my younger daughters has simply not been as predictable or constant.
The loneliness has been searing at times. I feel like an empty nester well before I am supposed to be one. These experiences, I suppose, can leave us bitter and resentful or sweet and surrendering. The tipping point may be whether or not we have a seeking heart. Seeking what God would have us learn and how, ultimately, He can transform us through our experiences. If an essential ingredient in learning is curiosity, a catalyst for transformation is gratitude.
By the way I heard something on Monday which gave me significant pause. I started a class at my real estate firm and during the participants’ introductions to each other, one person casually expressed, “I grew up poor but didn’t know it…we were happy.”
This blew me away actually. His contentment in childhood was not overtly connected to prayer, but upon further reflection, it is fascinating to consider what can happen during prayer if we allow ourselves to focus on something or someone larger than the circumstances in which we find ourselves.
Following is one I composed last week after pushing through a morning of considerable sadness over mine:
Heavenly Father, Why is it so hard to pray sometimes? To sit with the tears and the questions and the solitude? To feel stripped away of the earthly roles which have made us who we are or more accurately, who we THINK we are? To wait upon You? To get to know You? To love You?
I confess to being overwhelmed with the truth of Your wanting us to be entirely Yours – completely and utterly overwhelmed – and scared. I confess to personally wanting to belong to others, including my children; to a lesser degree, perhaps, myself; and to an even lesser degree, a cause or company. I confess to being addicted to being seen and validated, to wanting evidence that I have done the “right thing”, to succumbing to self-pity, to preferring immediate results and accomplishing things, to seeking to be noble instead of humble, to desiring to be saved yet not set apart, to resisting mightily the reality that prayer IS the “greatest work” to be done.
Oh how lazy we can be- desiring comfort at any cost and the absence of pain at any price as per M. Scott Peck. Help us willingly embrace the excruciating task of spiritual growth so that we are liberated from the rigid idea of who we are in this world and become who You need us to be, so that we may “morally undress” before You, so that we are tightly gripped for Your purpose, so that our lives become lives of prayer, so that they would bear sweet and life giving fruit, so that we may be transformed into Your likeness, so that You may one day say, “Well done, my good and faithful servant.” – Amen.
In the aforementioned book, there is, curiously, one passage underlined by a previous reader containing words written by the inimitable CS Lewis: “I pray because I can’t help myself. I pray because I am helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time, waking and sleeping. It doesn’t change God. It changes me.”
Prayer does indeed change us as well as the way we view things. What are YOU going through right now? Whatever it is – a desert or oasis, valley or mountaintop – consider prayer as your first line of defense not a last resort.
Even if you don’t know to whom or what you’re praying, “just do it” as the Nike slogan goes. Even if there are no words…just breathe, cry, gasp, question…and through it all, be honest. God already knows the truth. You must speak yours.
And when you’re at your wit’s end? That’s actually the best place to be. I am certainly not well versed on the subject of prayer, but what I have read reinforces that helplessness is our best one. As author Jillian Kennedy Dean writes, it “calls from your heart to the heart of God with greater effect than all your uttered pleas.”
If you feel the need to utter anything, however, “help, thanks, wow” is a great place to start.
– Caroline Watkins