Rating:

Come as You Are

Author: Paul Miller

Prayer has always been hard for me. It’s a duty, a chore, and that’s not because the idea of talking to God is boring, but because I’ve fallen into a rut. It is necessary – required even – to pray for those around us, for family and friends, for job woes and life crises. Yet there is little to no variety, and soon our prayers become a list. Saying the same old things about the same old things. The flame of connection dies out, and the odious nature of a duty steps into place. Guilt replaces relationship. Tedium replaces spontaneous worship and conversation. We shut down and ultimately shut up.

With this common worry weighing on me as I joined the C.S. Lewis Fellowship, a yearlong intensive course of reading, studying, and working in groups to fully commit and live for Jesus Christ, I made a commitment to fix my languishing prayer life. What kind of Christian doesn’t like praying? Imagine the relief then when we were assigned A Praying Life as part of our November reading centered on the theme of, you guessed it, prayer.

Miller is instantly captivating for his total honesty. He takes the secret shame out of the confession. He has problems praying, and he admits to not being alone. Through stories, anecdotes, and sharing the deeply troubling moments of his life, Miller connects to readers as a friend, not as a bombastic preacher who knows better and could never sink to our level. He gets it, and that makes us trust him and engage with his solutions, even if they may not necessarily apply to our own prayer lives.

The book is somewhat disjoined, with the long additions of Paul’s own life, working with a severely autistic daughter and learning patience, communion, and yes prayer from the experience. While it might not make the best outline of getting from Point A to Point B, I appreciated the personal connection. This built trust. Miller was willing to showcase stories where he didn’t look great, to share his own struggles with prayers – everything from how he prayed to doubts over seemingly unanswered prayers.

All along, there were glorious nuggets of insight and quotable materials that perfectly summed up the situation and a compassionate, human response to our failures with connecting to God. The book made me feel better about my prayer flaws, and feel like with time and work, I could correct them. It made me feel forgiven by God, part of a Christian community, and able to pick myself up and reengage with God, no matter how many times I didn’t do it perfectly. Miller himself shows us examples of a fractured prayer time and then goes on to say that is part of life, but praying should continue, just like talking to a dear friend should continue.

Image by Arnie Bragg from Pixabay

Some elements that I found especially helpful included:

  • A successful prayer life does not have to be one filled with endless spiritual ecstasy. Stop chasing a feeling and just talk to God. Sometimes our worst prayers are our best.
  • The criteria of coming to Jesus is not spiritual prowess and perfection. The criteria is weariness. Come to God overwhelmed, come with a wandering mind, come with your life as it really is, not some rose-tinted version.
  • Pray like a child of God. Unlearn impersonal, pompous praying.
  • Mirror the gospel. Use the scriptures to pray. Use Jesus’ own words. Meditate on His words and use the gospel to walk through a prayer and ditch the rote repetitions that leave you feeling spiritually dry and mentally bored.
  • If you don’t pray, essentially you think that you don’t need God. This is wrong. The act of praying demarcates that we need God, we rely on Him.
  • Prayer is about being helpless. In other words, soliciting God’s help and admitting that we cannot do it (whatever the “it” is) without Him. Once again, this echoes praying as a child.
  • When something is important to us, we make time for it, no matter what. Prayer needs to be important to us.
  • God answers prayer. It’s not always immediate, not always what we think we want, but it is always what we need. Miller advocates keeping a prayer journal to track the answers over the years, to help us see that we are part of the story that God is weaving, a bigger picture than we can imagine or see in the day to day.
  • Pray for others to overcome their spiritual faults, just as you pray for their health and wellness, for good things and the absence of bad things in their life. Pray for their growth, for their individual spiritual needs.

Overall, A Praying Life is a book I can see myself reading again. It softened me, gave me hope, and gave me ideas about how to approach God. It also helped take the pressure off. God never said to be perfect. We cannot, that is why He sent His Son to die for our sins. Instead, God said to pray without ceasing. To come to him sick, imperfect, sad, worried, tired, distracted, and to keep talking to Him as our Father. We are not charged to have a spiritual ecstasy worthy of the movies every time we talk to God, but simply to talk to Him, openly. As the old rock song says . . . come as you are.

– Frances Carden

Follow my reviews on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/xombie_mistress

Follow my reviews on Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/FrancesReviews

Frances Carden
Latest posts by Frances Carden (see all)