Reading this makes me desire more to be in God’s awesome presence.
Prayer Is About Love
Praying Like Monks, Living Like Fools
by Tyler Staton
The Bible is not a rule book or a set of directions; it’s a love story — a romantic, courageous love story we’re invited to believe. We see that whole story captured in a single scene when Jesus defends and dignifies a shame-covered woman thrown into the dirt at His feet, but we can see it just as clearly when we zoom all the way out to the metanarrative that God has been authoring since hanging the stars in the night sky.
The biblical story begins with perfect love at the center of the plot, and the conflict introduced by sin is a twisting and warping of that love into something lesser. The hinge point at the story’s center is the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. The wound opened up by infidelity is mended by a love that will never give up. Jesus, on the final night of His life, says this to His followers:
As the Father has loved Me, so have I loved you. Now remain in My love.1
The whole sixty-six-book anthology becomes resolved, not in a catastrophic apocalypse, but at a wedding banquet — Christ united to His bride for all eternity.2 Human infidelity repaired by divine fidelity.
How do we remain in that love? How do we make covenant love the constant backdrop before which the scenes of our lives play out? Prayer. “If you can’t love, you can’t pray, either,” writes Johannes Hartl. “Praying is loving. And learning to pray means learning to love.”3
Love is easy at the first and at the last. It’s effortless in the honeymoon stage when you’re infatuated with each other — touchy, talkative, and smitten. And love is like breathing for the old couple who are decades into a mature love that has been aged to perfection like a fine wine. But all those years in between? Love in the midst of building a career, raising kids, establishing a life, and facing trials — those are the long years when love has to be worked at and fought for. Those are the years when early infatuation is matured into the old couple in effortless union. Those are the years when love is won and lost.
Like love, prayer comes at the first and at the last, for sinners and saints, but all the years in between are the important ones. Prayer is about relationship, and that means fidelity is the only container within which it can truly flourish.
When I was seventeen years old, a senior in high school, a waterfront park lay right along my commute home from school. Regularly, multiple times a week, I’d stop there on the way home and walk the shaded paths of that park in unhurried, agenda-free conversation with God.
I’ve got stories of prayer walking with a mission, seeing sparks of revival in the early mornings at a public middle school. I know the prayer of intensity and fire. I also know the prayer of fidelity and love. On those afternoons at Philippe Park, I did not want anything from God. I had no plans I wanted Him to sponsor, no needs I was hoping He’d meet. There was no motive; there was only love. I wanted to be with God, so I walked and talked and listened.
“Praying is loving. And learning to pray means learning to love.”
— Johannes Hartl
A couple decades removed, I now imagine those afternoons were God’s favorites. There’s no way to know for sure, but I have a sneaking suspicion He preferred those meandering afternoon strolls to the early mornings with a school directory in hand and a vision in mind. Because on those weekday afternoons, it wasn’t about changing the world. It wasn’t about getting God to act the way I thought God should act. It wasn’t even about my own issues or needs. There was no function.
• We “waste” time with those we love. And I was stealing time with God because I love Him.
“Prayer does not mean much when we undertake it only as an attempt to influence God, or as a search for a spiritual fallout shelter, or as an offering of comfort in stress-filled times,” writes Henri Nouwen. “Prayer is the act by which we divest ourselves of all false belongings and become free to belong to God and God alone.”
Before prayer is about power or outcomes or heavenly armies and a righteous uprising, it’s about love. It’s the way we freely choose the God who freely chose us first. The way we express ourselves to the God who, in spite of everything, delights in us. The way we receive from the God who has endless stamina to offer Himself to a bunch of people who prefer self-sufficiency, tight jaws, and clenched fists.
The Heart of a Lover and the Discipline of a Monk
“Teach us to pray.”
That’s the request we keep returning to. Prayer is what people noticed about Jesus more than anything else. Prayer is the aspect of his life those who got close to Him were most jealous for.
Watching Jesus pray was like watching the closing scene from the movie The Notebook. You know the one. After the twists and turns of young, passionate, infatuated love, Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams have wrinkled and plumped into any other hobbling, elderly couple. They’re in a hospital room, both nearing the end. He lies down in her bed, wraps his arm around her, interlaces his fingers with hers, and they fall asleep for good, together. Dying, but still in love, still holding on to each other.
Everyone who has ever watched that movie gets at least a little misty-eyed during that scene because it meets us at the place of our God-given longing. We all want that intimacy and companionship. Everyone wants that, but there’s a reason the writer and director of The Notebook included only the honeymoon stage and the mature love in the end. It’s the most obvious reason: all those years in between are filled with nothing but ordinary fidelity. And fidelity is boring.
When you see the fruit of fidelity though — an elderly couple still in love — a thought runs through every mind: That’s better than anything I’ve got. I want that. That’s what the disciples saw when Jesus prayed — the fruit of fidelity. And they wanted it.
“Teach us the kind of prayer that leads to that.”
Teach us to pray, Lord! Let’s commit to lifelong, “boring” fidelity in our relationships with Jesus. Let’s build that beautiful love day in and day out so that we can reap the reward of mature love.
