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I tried — or at least I would like to think that I did. Several months ago, I went to the doctor so that he could tell me that my blood pressure and cholesterol were high. He wanted to start me on medication to lower both of them. I told him that I wanted to try to lower them by changing my diet and exercising more. I tried.
I tried, but my efforts were not enough. The next time I went to the doctor, he told me to keep exercising, eating the right foods, and to start taking the medication. So that is what I did.
Well, truth be told, that is not exactly what I did. I had been trying to eat foods that were better for me and exercising more. When that didn’t have the desired effect, I lost some of my enthusiasm for diet and exercise. OK, I was never really that enthusiastic about either of them to start with. However, I did start taking the medication.
The last time that I went to the doctor, my blood pressure was 114/80. He was pleased and so was I. The medicine did what it was supposed to do.
There are several ways that we connect with God and give expression to our faith in God. When we pray, we connect with God. When we worship together as a church or share a meal together in the fellowship hall, we connect with God and with God’s people. When we read the Bible and reflect on what it is saying to us, we connect with God. When we serve others, we connect with God.
There are other ways that God comes to us and connects with us. The beauty of the natural world can help us get connected with God. A scene from a movie or passage from a book can cause us to think about God and our relationship with God. As hectic as life can be at times, we need to appreciate all the ways that we can be reminded of and connected with God.
Whether we are choosing to engage in activities that connect us with God, or it is the seeming randomness of God’s spirit connecting with us, the ways that we encounter God and connect with God have different ways of impacting our growth and maturity as followers of Christ. While all of them play a vital role in growing our relationship with God, prayer is the one that feeds the roots of our faith.
Prayer is that space and time that we set apart in our lives in order to be with God. In that space and time, we listen for God, we are with God, and we let ourselves be known by God. Prayer is intimate and personal. Without it, we can drift away from God. It is the core of our ongoing day-to-day relationship with God.
What does prayer have to do with my blood pressure? Well, every morning, I take a pill so that my blood pressure will be what it is supposed to be. Every day I pray so that my relationship with God will become what God wants it to be. Maybe they are similar in that way, but spirituality is not medicine and chemistry is not theology. There is a mystery, wonder, and sometimes frustration in prayer. The results of prayer cannot be predicted as if it were a laboratory experiment. Yet in prayer, we do learn of God, and little by little we discover the person God created us to be.
Joy and peace,
Ed
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