#140 Growing

Lately I've been asking church members how they'd like to grow as Christians, if there are any areas where they'd like to improve their spiritual life. As Christians, we always want to be maturing, becoming more and more like Jesus. As pastor, I have the privilege and challenge of encouraging others to grow in their walk with Christ. Hearing what other people have to say about growing in their faith is also really interesting to me.

As I hear from others, I naturally think about myself and my own life. There are quite a few areas where I wish I was better at following Christ, but one that's been on my mind a lot recently is prayer. I'm pretty comfortable praying, both privately and in public. I've made some progress in truly expressing my feelings to God. But I wish I prayed more often and more spontaneously. I wish prayer characterized my whole life instead of feeling like something I remember to do every once in a while. I think part of my struggle is an underlying desire to be self-sufficient. I don't want to pray about some things because I think I should handle them myself. Deep down I know that's silly. God's actions and our actions aren't mutually exclusive, and I really can't do anything without God empowerment.  Yet I still neglect to pray about lots of things.

But as bad as my foolish attempts at independence can be, an even bigger obstacle to my prayer life is my amazing ability to distract myself. Life is filled with little gaps: a couple minutes between arriving at an appointment and the event starting, a few moments spent waiting for someone else to arrive or get ready, that sort of thing. Once in a great while I think that a short space is a great opportunity for prayer. But much more often than I not I pull out my smartphone and read some worthless article that I'm only semi-interested in or I fret about all things I'd like to accomplish yet today or I spend some time rehashing an earlier conversation that didn't go nearly as well as I would've liked. It would be so much better if I could take even some of that time and pray for God's strength as I deal with upcoming challenges or ask for God to make His presence clear in the lives of the people I just spent time with or to thank God for answering some earlier prayers. But I don't work that way, at least not yet. Prayer takes work and commitment, and distractions are so much easier and too often even more appealing to me. It's clear that I could use some growth.

Grace and peace,
BMH