Chat With Chuck:

         “Beginning a Year of Prayer”

By Dr. Chuck Traylor

     I want to begin 2007 by offering to you a confession. When I first arrived to labor among you, I was fairly diligent in my prayer practice. At that time I wrote:

     “As I am somewhat prone to laxity in my spiritual discipline, I have found that I am at my most disciplined when I devote the first hour and a half of every day (following coffee, of course), including Sunday, to reading and meditating on Scripture, reading the work of a variety of conversation partners, and meeting God in prayer. This every day rhythm helps me to bring focus to my day and to consecrate the day to God. I end this devotional time with a brief prayer I have said every day since I became a Christian, ‘Lord, please help me today, because I’m not sure I know what to do.’ Surrendering the day to God gives me confidence that the Lord will guide me in all of my actions.”

     Well, in the past year and a half or so, I don’t believe that I have allowed God to guide me in all of my actions, because I have gotten “busy.” Instead of using that hour and a half every day to meet God, to listen to God, I have fed horses, read emails, read the newspaper, answered phone calls, driven to meetings in various places, dealt with administrative stuff and denominational bureaucracy, planned for staff reviews that won’t occur for months in the future, and, in general, justified my existence by my busy-ness. “No one can say Chuck Traylor isn’t working!” I self-righteously justified.

     Instead of “surrendering the day to God” I have surrendered the day to my calendar, my responsibilities, my busy-ness. I don’t even think I was really aware of this until recently, when the Rev. Dan Wolpert, pastor of First Church – Crookston, wrote in the November issue of “Light of the Northern Plains:”

      “We can easily look at a given meeting or function and ask, how much time did we spend praying, discerning, or in silence; and how much time did we spend talking as usual?  If the amount of time actually spent in spiritual practice (not a worship service, where we just do a lot of talking and being talked at) is less than 15% (the Sabbath figure of one in seven), then we can pretty much assume that our assertion that we prayed is not an accurate reflection of our true behavior.”

     As I reflected on what Dan had written, I found that I was terribly thirsty. My thirst wasn’t for water, or soda, or coffee. Rather it was a thirst for the living water of God’s Spirit being poured into my spirit. I realized that my engaging in spiritual practice and prayer wasn’t even close to the minimal 15 percent that Dan referred to.

     Even as I am writing this I find that my eyes are filling with tears because of the thirst my soul is feeling. I am reminded of what Kahlil Gibran wrote in The Prophet:

      “You pray in your distress and in your need; would that you might pray also in the fullness of your joy and in your days of abundance…And if you cannot but weep when your soul summons you to prayer, she should spur you again and yet again, though weeping, until you shall come laughing.”

     Frederick Buechner said, in Whistling In The Dark: An ABC Theologized:

      “It is no surprise that the Bible uses hearing, not seeing, as the predominant image for the way human beings know God. They can’t walk around him and take him in like a cathedral…They can only listen to time for the sound of him – to the good times and the bad times of their own lives for the words which out of his innermost secrets he is addressing to, of all people, them.”

      “They can only listen to time for the sound of him…” But to listen for the sound of God means allowing oneself the time to listen to the words of God that speak specifically to each of us. Jesus said, “I still have many things to say to you,” and, “When the Spirit of truth comes he will guide you into all the truth” (John 16:12-13).

     The late Father Raymond Brown once wrote:

      “The Spirit declares the things that are to come. The best Christian preparation for what is coming to pass is not an exact foreknowledge of the future, but a deep understanding of what Jesus means for one’s own time (emphasis mine).”

     Hearing God, and taking the time to hear God, that is what I have been neglecting. With the result that my ministry of late has too much been “Chuck-driven” instead of “Spirit-driven,” “busy-ness-driven” instead of “listening-driven.”

     My challenge, now, is to not turn my desire and my intention to listen for God in prayer into another task, another job. This is the very thing Dan Wolpert cautions us about in his new book, Leading A Life With God: The Practice of Spiritual Leadership (Upper Room, 2006). I have to avoid, as Richard Foster writes in his book Prayer – Finding The Heart’s True Home, thinking that prayer is

      “…something that needs immediate attention. It is the notion – almost universal among us modern high achievers – that we have to have everything ‘just right’ in order to pray…Our problem is that we assume prayer is something to master the way we master algebra or auto mechanics. That puts us in the ‘on top’ position, where we are competent and in control.”

     The very last thing I need is something else in which to be competent, or, God forbid, in control of. No, what I need is, as Foster says, to come “… ‘underneath,’ where we calmly and deliberately surrender control…” C.S. Lewis said that in prayer we need to “lay before Him what is in us, not what ought to be in us.”

      “All right, Traylor,” you say, “We’ve heard your whining and breast-beating. Now what are you going to do about it?”

     Well, the first thing I am not going to do is to, as Richard Foster says, is be discouraged by my lack of prayer. I am going to take his counsel that my very hunger for prayer is itself prayer. I am also going to attend to the wisdom of Mary Clare Vincent, who writes, “The desire for prayer is prayer, the prayer of desire” (The Life of Prayer and the Way to God, Still River, MS: St. Bede’s Publications, 1982, p. 8).

     The second thing, that I am going to do, is to begin to pray – again. I’m going to begin with silent prayer, with Simple Prayer, with the Examen Prayer, with lectio divina. I am going to commit to daily conversation with God, not on top of everything else I do, but as an essential part of everything I do. I am going to take time every day to spend time with God in prayer. Sometimes this will be during the “work day.” Other times it will be “outside” of work. But this time of being with God will become, I pray, the focal point of my day, and not just something added on to the day; the essence of my day rather than another task to perform.

     I also know that I need help with this discipline; I need partners in prayer. Therefore, I beg you to be my daily partners in prayer. Prayer, I believe, must be at the center of every ministry in which we engage, individually and together. Stan Ott says that “prayer is a non-negotiable requirement for vitality…Regular, constant prayer is needed because the relationship of children to their heavenly Father needs constant renewal.”

     My New Year’s resolution, which I am stating publicly so that you will hold me accountable, is to spend time every day in prayer. Each week I will put on my telephone voice mail the times I will be praying, and whether or not I will be praying in the Presbytery office, or somewhere else. I humbly ask you to join me in prayer during that time, using whatever prayer practice is most suitable to where you are and how you can best listen for God. If you are in Fargo, and you want to join me in this time of prayer, please come be with me. If you can’t pray at that particular time, please think of me, briefly, and make a time when you can pray.

     I believe that if I try to be faithful to this commitment, that God will bless my ministry even more than it has already been blessed. I believe that if we attempt to be faithful to a commitment to pray together, wherever we are, that God will work miracles in our Presbytery.

     Jesus said, “Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you” (Luke 11:9).

     I am going to start asking, and searching, and knocking, in ways I have not previously. Will you join me?

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