Sure Catch Trout Pond

Today marks the 3rd time this week that somebody informed me that they don't know what to pray for. Do I pray for healing? Do I pray for peace? Do I pray for God's will to be done? Do I not pray at all? The inability to connect what it is you want with how you ask for it is maddening and no place is this more a reality then in prayer. Unlike the child who wants a Puppy and asks God for a Puppy, we often fail to ask God for what we really want/need in prayer in a move to hedge our bets if it does not pan out. Fearful to pray to a God whose will seemingly has other plans than our own we relegate our prayer life to the Sure Catch Trout Pond rather than contend with the Marlin. Let me explain.

Back home in California there is a sorry excuse of a lake that sits along the Southbound lanes of Hwy 101. Never having been there but reading the signs as I get stuck in the inevitable jam that comes with reducing 4 lanes of speeding California traffic into 2 I know this "lake" to be well stocked. Yet despite the abundance of fish found in this body of water, far more than would have been found in the "wild", you run a risk of not catching anything. Fishing is a game and like most Fishermen and women will tell you, you often lose. So the owners got to thinking...what would happen if we took out the variable, the chance of failure and made a way for every line to bring up a catch. Enter the Sure Catch Trout Pond, a very large and deep above ground pool of sorts stocked to the brim with hungry, underfed Trout just looking for a bite. Story goes that even the youngest angler can bring up their limit and pay for the privilege of doing so. With desperate, hungry fish everybody is a winner.

The point is this: it is impossible to fail when your bar is so low. It is impossible to feel as though your prayers have not been answered (what do we mean by that? topic for another blog post) when we pray on the fringes of our hearts desires rather than tackling head on the thing that we most want. Take for example the Lord's Prayer, the model prayer Jesus gave the church. If you recite it to yourself right now you might encounter some serious Marlins. "Your Kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven." "Forgive us our debts", "Lead us not into temptation", these are not Sure Catch prayers, these are some pretty aggressive topics to bring to God and this is our model.

I want to encourage you to think first about God when you pray and not about what to pray for. Ask yourself this: what kind of God am I praying to? Is it a God who dodges and ducks the difficult, the painful, the complex? It is a God that takes the path of least resistance? Or do you pray to a God who welcomes lament, who has the prerequisite amount of depth to invite bold prayers in difficult times? The God you pray to may have more to say about what you pray about then you might think.

I will close with advice. If prayer is difficult for you right now I would encourage you to continue to reserve that time usually spent in prayer and use it to discover God. Find a parable, a prophet, or something of Paul's and as you read ask yourself what kind of God are they talking about? My hope is that by getting to know God better we can find direction in our prayers.