Walking down Prayer Lane

 

Early winter--trail near a river

When life is hard, our natural tendency is to tell God, “I don’t like this problem. Take it away. Make everything all okay, right now!” But I have learned that God’s way is not to take us out of our problems, but to lead us through them as He shapes our character. At my life's lowest point--orphaned as a single 31-year-old--I chose to submit to God's wisdom and trustworthiness. Grieving, worn out physically, I clung tenaciously to promises of His faithfulness as I set about to read the Bible through in a recent translation new to me. Isaiah 30:20-21 was among passages that spoke especially to me:

Although the LORD gives you the bread of adversity and the water of affliction, your teachers will be hidden no more; with your own eyes you will see them.  Whether you turn to the right or to the left, your ears will hear a voice behind you saying, “This is the way, walk in it.”

I saw this work out in my life as God led me to caring, godly people. They were the real-flesh “teachers” who helped me perceive the changes I needed to make and the hope I needed to embrace.  But there was also that hard-to-describe sense of God right beside me, offering either a “don’t do that” or “go ahead” as I walked in faith to an unknown future.

Years later, in reading Edith Schaeffer’s book Common Sense Christian Living (Nelson, 1983), I realized I was discovering what 1 Thessalonians 5:17 calls “praying without ceasing.”  Here’s how Schaeffer described it:

It seems to me that this command [pray without ceasing] means we are to be constantly so conscious of God’s existence and so aware of His presence, that there is a very short gap between a sudden need of speaking to the Lord, and our actually speaking to Him.  I feel it means that we are walking so close to the reality of His being with us that we naturally talk to Him (in our minds, of course) when we are in the dentist’s chair, in the waiting room of a doctor’s or lawyer’s office, out on a tractor, waiting for a plane or bus, talking to someone who has just had a shock.  Whether it is a brief time of prayer or a long, long one, the atmosphere of the normality of talking to God is what I feel is meant by the command to “pray continually.” (pp. 210-211)

An old hymn goes, “He walks with me and He talks with me.” That doesn’t happen when our minds are cluttered with the “junk” of modern life. Even if we can’t get away to a little-used park trail, we need to find that serene space that is our “Prayer Lane,” and where we can hear God say, “This is the way, walk in it.”