Prayer As Our First Resort (PrayerLife)

Worship at Redeemer

I still struggle with attitudes that are not Christlike. This morning, while praying, I again confessed these things to God. I am asking God to get at the root of my attitudinal disease and pull it out of my heart. "Heal me, O God" is one of my constant prayers.

I pray for God to help me do what I cannot do myself. I left self-healing techniques behind decades ago. I do read, mostly to gain a greater understanding of whatever troubledness I am still attached to. But I believe that my real "help comes from the Lord, maker of heaven and earth."

Increasingly, when I am struggling, my first resort is to pray.

Henri Nouwen writes:

"Prayer is in many ways the criterion of Christian life. Prayer requires that we stand in God's presence with open hands, naked and vulnerable, proclaiming to ourselves and to others that without God we can do nothing. this is difficult in a climate where the predominant counsel is, "Do your best and God will do the rest." When life is divided into "our best" and "God's rest," we have turned prayer into a last resort to be used only when all our own resources are depleted."
- Nouwen, The Only Necessary Thing: Living a Prayerful Life, 93