DN, Vol. 3: When God Strangely Resembles a Brick Wall

"Save me, O God! For the waters have come up to my neck.
I sink in deep mire, where there is no foothold; 
I have come into deep waters, and the flood sweeps over me. 
I am weary with my crying out; my throat is parched. 
My eyes grow dim with waiting for my God." 


- Psalm 69:1-3


Anybody who's prayed has experienced those times when it feels like you're speaking to a brick wall. After all, it's rare that anybody hears an audible response to their prayers, and, from an early age, it's sort of implied to Christians in church that prayer is a kind of one-way thing. I don't know how many pastors or church teachers would want to admit to this, but a lot of what we do and teach implies to our churches that they should not really expecting God to respond to what we humans have to say to him.

The scriptural truth, however, is that God is a God who hears our cries, who knows what's going on, and who is active and engaged with our world. God rescued the Israelites out of Egypt not only because it was his plan, but also because he heard their cries. The Psalmist in the passage I quoted above is expectant that God will hear his cry, even if his circumstances are beginning to cause him to worry. God is alive and active. God is not a brick wall.

But sometimes it feels like it.

Sometimes, especially when we pray, it just feels like we're talking to a wall or into the empty air. Sometimes it's hard to remember if any of our previous prayers have been answered, it's hard to remember the truth of scripture, and in those moments there's every motivation to think that prayer is a waste of time at best, and a foolish delusion at worst.

In my life and relationship with God, what I do during those times is I "reset" the way that I'm praying. I try to see if there are any mindless/automatic prayers that I'm doing and I examine whether I really mean those prayers. Most importantly, I ask God both whether I'm praying about the things he wants me to, and in the way he wants me to.

You'd be surprised how easy it is to let a prayer lead you away from God rather than to him. It sounds like a pretty easy contradiction to avoid, but actually it's really easy to slip into this. You can start praying about something with all of the desire to follow God in the world, but if we only pray by telling God what we want him to do and not asking him what he wants us to do and/or pray about, it is far too easy to let our prayer lead us away from God instead of to him. And if this is the way we're praying, is there any wonder why he wouldn't respond to our prayers?

If you're in this boat, let me encourage you to pray knowing that God wants to engage you, not just listen to you tell him what to do. And you can do this by making sure to ask the following:


- God, am I praying about the right things/people/situations?
- God, how should I pray about this? What do you want for this thing/person/situation?
- God, open my ears and heart and mind and soul to receive what you're saying to me. We can't make it just trying to steer this ship by ourselves. We need you.

DN, Vol. 2: Part 1b of Why Spiritual Plateaus can be Gifts

Edgar Martinez: Seattle all-star famous for his work ethic and disciplined training. 

Last week we began this series by looking at how spiritual plateaus [i.e. times in our lives when our prayers feel lifeless or empty, when our bibles feel like they have covers that just don't want to be opened] can actually be much needed bumps in the road that help get our souls out of ruts. Like painful symptoms that warn us of the presence of a dangerous disease, encountering spiritual plateaus in our lives can expose the presence of unnoticed wedges between us and God. The wedge we looked at last week was trusting a method to connect with God rather than God himself. The wedge we'll look at today is, simply put, living passively.  

I chose the picture above for a reason. I remember reading an article in ESPN the Magazine about Edgar Martinez's incredible training regimen. Although every professional baseball player is gifted with the exceptional ability to hit a small, fast moving ball with the specific spot of a relatively small wooden stick [there are many who describe the act of hitting a baseball as one of the most difficult in all of sports], Martinez set himself apart as someone who constantly worked at developing his gift, enabling him to play professionally into his 40s, despite the fact that he developed an eye condition that made it harder for him to see anything, much less a small object moving at 95 miles per hour [one training method I particularly remembered from the article was Martinez writing numbers on tennis balls, loading them into a pitching machine, and then reading the numbers as the balls flew by at nearly 100 miles per hour].

The reason why people like Martinez are the exception rather than the rule is something I think we all understand quite well. All of us have things that we know we should do, that, cognitively, we recognize as beneficial and good. And most of us have a hard time doing those things consistently, if at all. Unlike Martinez, the decisions that we make tend to be guided by immediate rewards: eating a candy bar instead of a salad, watching a movie instead of exercising, illegally downloading a movie instead of paying money for it, and...you get the idea. 

Spiritually, it would be an incredible mistake to think that making disciplined choices earns us any respect from God. Actually, God relates to us on nearly the exact opposite premise: we cannot earn his love and acceptance, he chooses to give it to us freely. But it would also be a mistake to think that God's desire for us is to live life settling for whatever choices are the easiest, most comfortable, or most immediately rewarding. Just because he welcomes me, as the song goes, "just as I am", doesn't mean I should stay there. 

When we hit spiritual plateaus, we get a great opportunity to look and evaluate what kind of spiritual discipline [if any] exists in our lives. For me, I find that what often leads to these times of spiritual dryness is living passively, i.e. not actively engaging with God, and instead settling for the most comfortable and immediately rewarding choices. In this sense, our relationship with God is really like any other relationship: if you choose to discipline your time and energy in investing time and actively engaging with a friend, you'll be rewarded with a vibrant and exciting relationship. If, on the other hand, you sit on your couch and just wait for the relationship to grow on its own, it is very unlikely to. 

So, how exactly should we actively engage our relationships with God? Everyone's different, but let me suggest a few disciplines that probably apply to all of us: 

1. Remind yourself of the truth of the good news of Jesus Christ in your own life 

"Therefore...we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ...God shows his love for us in this that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us." Every day we are bombarded with the message that we are not good enough until we have done this, bought that, or own this other thing. But the reality that Jesus' message proclaims is that, in Him, we are totally, utterly, 100% completely accepted, no conditions. We have nothing to earn and nothing to hide, no matter what our history is. It takes discipline to remember this, and the beginning of spiritual discipline is confessing this truth daily, if not more often.

2. Thank God

This discipline, of course, is related to the first. The truth is it's pretty easy to get caught up in what we don't have or like. But this obscures the reality about God and what he is doing in our lives and in this world, paving the way to complaint and envy. The discipline of thankfulness, regularly noticing and thanking God for what he is doing, keeps reality planted firmly in front of us, no matter how loud the message of advertisers, despair, or our appetite for things, status, and power becomes. 

3. Read Scripture  

I can't stress this enough: if you want to talk with God, you've got to read what he's written you. Truth be told, as much as I've had seasons in my life when every verse of the Bible I read seemed to jump off the page and into my life, I've probably had as many times when I could read entire chapters and not get a thing out of them. But that was never because there was a problem with Scripture. Especially when we don't feel like opening the Bible, we must dig into it. God's message to us in it doesn't change, it is the rock we need as we are tossed about by life. 

Devotional Ninjitsu, Vol. 1

One of the lessons I've been learning as a pastor is how impossible it is to preach without a connection to God.

Seems obvious, right? And yet it is so easy to get consumed with the "work" of ministry [preparing Bible studies, getting people and programs organized, meeting and counseling people] that I find myself with little time to just sit down and be in God's presence. I can spend all day encouraging people I meet with to reopen God's word, reassuring them that they will not regret spending time with him, telling them how important it is for us to be reminded that we are unconditionally loved and accepted by God through Jesus Christ, and hypocrtically not practice these things myself.

All of the great preachers, however, have also been known as great "prayer-ers". Though they certainly put in the work of researching both the Scripture and the cultural context that they preach to, though they take the time heavily investing in and loving the people that they preach to, their number one characteristic is that they, first and foremost, spend time with God. They meditate on his word not to glean some insight for their sermon or their blog, but because it is His word to them. They pray to him not so that their ministry gets bigger or more popular, but because quality time with someone is a key factor in any relationship, and their relationship with God is the most important one in their lives. And, because this time with him grounds them back in the Good News of Jesus Christ: that they are loved and accepted by God not because of their success, but because he has chosen to love us, they are primed to serve God [an unconditional choice, by the way, is in my understanding the only place true love can spring from].

Knowing this, why is it so hard for me to take the time to spend time with God? Why does the Bible seem so disconnected to me and God sometimes? Why is it that some days prayer just doesn't want to happen? 

My guess is I'm not the only one out there with these questions. 

As I've been wrestling with this, I've come up with a few thoughts, many of which I'm putting into practice and testing out. Over the next few blog posts I'd like to share some of these, especially the ones that have helped me to get back on the right track, with anyone who's asking the same questions I am. Let me close this post with one:

#1a "Spiritual Plateaus" can be a gift

I don't know too many followers of Christ who enjoy "hitting a wall" when it comes to their spiritual life. Spiritual plateaus [i.e. times in our lives when our prayers feel lifeless or empty, when our bibles feel like they have covers that just don't want to be opened] feel like attacks on our faith, the complete opposite of those seasons of passion, excitement, and hope in what God is doing.  

Yet I think hitting these plateaus actually can expose two major wedges between us and God. One such wedge that we can go for a long time without noticing is letting a method get in between us and God. Methods like following a particular bible reading plan or list of ways to pray can help us push away distractions and focus instead on what God is saying to us, but pretty soon our natural tendency is to start depending on the methods and not God. Our natural tendency is to start trying to control, and so when a method doesn't "deliver" like we're expecting it to, when we begin to feel ourselves hitting a spiritual plateau, we get frustrated.

Instead of getting frustrated, though, these are great moments for us to stop, look at what we're doing, and then ask God if maybe he's getting tired of us treating him like a spiritual candy machine, approaching him only in order to push buttons and get results: blessings, feelings of peace, even spiritual insights. Of course he wants us to receive those things, but those things should never become goals or gods in themselves, lest we forget where they come from. At these moments we have a great opportunity to repent of letting those wedges get in between us and God, throw them away, and confess to him once again that He, not the methods he gives us, is all that we need.

With all that said, it's important to remember that the second possible wedge is almost the opposite...

this is getting a bit long for this week. I'll post #1b next week. In the meantime, I'd love to hear your thoughts and responses. Are you in a spiritual plateau? What do you do when you get there? What is your devotional life like these days?