In My Need

In the last 23 days of this new year, I have been hit by something that I had been trying to hide from myself for a long time. 

It came when I was pleading with God for life, while trying to prepare for a prayer meeting the next morning. I forget under what context the thoughts came, but all of a sudden, I realized:

I had been trying to achieve spirituality in my life so that I could eventually get to a place where I didn't need Him anymore. 

I long for neatness. Correctness. For not having crayons stray from the lines of the colouring book. Yet, in my spiritual life, I was trying to achieve the same thing. I longed for neatness. For orderly, scheduled God-things, and I had failed to work out my head knowledge that:

The more I know Him, the more I know I need Him.

I guess it can all be boiled down to my need for control. And yet, what state did He find me in? It sure wasn't in control of my destiny: "When we were utterly helpless, Christ came at just the right time and died for us sinners." (Romans 5:6)

The biggest area of my life that this has been surfacing in has been in my prayer life. I have been privileged this year to be in a position of some leadership in terms of prayer. As is my custom, as soon as I am allowed to control something... I. control. it. And it was frustrating me to no end. Why wouldn't this thing called prayer just fit into my nice, neat framework of life? Why was it such a big struggle? God, wasn't I asked to do this because somehow I was right? 

What if my rightness, was my "wrong-ness." 

All year I have been saying that this prayer ministry has been teaching me that I am unable, but those were just words that I was saying. I didn't understand them. They were the right things to say. 

Then again, today He hit me with something along the same lines as I was reading from Paul E. Miller's A Praying Life, that I have been reading through with my mentee. 

You don't need self-discipline to pray continuously; you just need to be poor in spirit. {pg. 66}

Prayer is not neat. It is not (necessarily) 20 minutes set aside to pray for missionaries and fellow students. It is a desperate gasping of the soul, "I need You - oh, I need You!" If I approach God thinking that I have anything to bring, any beauty of my own, any strength of my own mind, will, spirit or body, then I am absolutely fooling myself. 

A praying life isn't simply a morning prayer time; it is about slipping into prayer at odd hours of the day, not because we are disciplined but because we are in touch with our own poverty of spirit, realizing that we can't even walk through a mall or our neighborhood without the help of the Spirit of Jesus. {pg. 68}

My poorness may be the richest thing that I have to gain.