Learning To Pray: 1. Mmmm Prayer????

I pray a lot but it wasn't always like this. I remember a friend calling about 10 years ago asking me to pray about a new anti-smacking law that was being put through parliament. My response was quite short and cross, "Friend, I can't even get my own kids to listen to me (aged 3 to 11) how on earth will I be able to change something in parliament!!!"

Then there was the time when my pastor was giving out jobs for a big event we were doing as church. I was at the end of the line (again surrounded by small children) so he suggested that I pray, which I interpreted as being incapable of doing anything more useful and/or he couldn't think of anything else to say!

Looking back I think this was a great place to start. I was under no delusions of my own importance and had no wish to hide my inadequacy under religious phraseology; I was much more desperate to get some kind of cure for my many feelings of uselessness and God had steered me into a place where He was really my only hope.

So my first attempts at prayer were calling into a seemingly endless void, "are you there God? Are you interested? Would you talk to me?" This went on for quite a while in amongst daily life of trying to keep house and look after aforesaid small children. Each time I tried to pray I would get a tangible picture of space and me on the edge of it just looking out with those questions, but little by little I began to exercise what I now know as faith and began to talk anyway into the darkness. There's an old Who song that goes “See me, Feel me, Touch me, Heal me” over and over again and that was basically my prayer, that God would recognise me in all those ways.

Amazingly, little by little He began to answer. I'd discover bits of the Bible that seemed to speak right into how I was feeling. I'd listen to a song that would make me cry. I'd go to church and cry. I was more hungry for God to see, feel, touch and heal me than I was for anything else, money, husband to notice me, pastor to notice me, children to like me - the list went on. It wasn't that I wasn't hungry for that stuff too - no super holy walk here - but miraculously I was convinced that all my hope of satisfaction lay ultimately with God Himself and that was what I was putting all my hope in.

It was a great place to start.

Karen Pilkington

2007-03-06