Helpless

Warning: This book is not the kind I’m going to zoom through! Prayer, Does It Make Any Difference? Chapter 3 is titled “Just As We Are” and opens with this: “Sometimes I wonder if the words I use are the least important part of prayer. Who am I? And who is God? If I can answer those two questions, the words I pray recede. Prayer invites me to lower defenses and present the self that no other person fully knows to a God who already knows.”

The chapter includes the sections "Guilty," "Helpless," "Humble," "Doubting," "Honest," and "Exposed."

From the section titled “Helpless”: “Norwegian theologian Ole Hallesby settled on the single word helplessness as the best summary of the heart attitude that God accepts as prayer. ‘Whether it takes the form of words or not, does not mean anything to God, only to ourselves,’ he adds. ‘Only he who is helpless can truly pray.’

“What a stumbling block! Almost from birth we aspire to self-reliance. Adults celebrate it as a triumph whenever children learn to do something on their own: go to the bathroom, get dressed, brush teeth, tie shoelaces, ride a bike, walk to school. When the child stubbornly insists, ‘I do it myself!’ the parent takes secret pride in that independent spirit even when the child proceeds to make a mess of the task.

“As adults we like to pay our own way, live in our own houses, make our own decisions, rely on no outside help. We look down upon those who live off welfare or charity. Faced with an unexpected challenge, we seek out ‘self-help’ books. All the while we are systematically sealing off the heart attitude most desirable to God and most descriptive of our true state in the universe. ‘Apart from me you can do nothing,’ Jesus told his disciples, a plain fact that we conspire to deny.’”

How helpless we truly are. Thank God!

With that I wanted to share a little about how the Lord is answering the prayer I described in my post of December 31st, “The OTHER other Mary," when I surrendered my “safe place” to God. But I think that would make for too long a post (good excuse, huh?), so I’ll get to that in a future post, and leave you with this quote from one of my all-time favorite author/theologins, C. S. Lewis.

“The prayer preceding all prayers is ‘May it be the real I who speaks. May it be the real Thou that I speak to.’”