Praying on Asphalt
An Introductory Handbook on Prayer


-- Prayer

This side of the Garden of Eden, prayer hasn’t changed very much.

The experience of praying, speaking directly to God, whether silently inside our head, out loud under pressure, or joyfully in great assemblies, is not essentially any different than it was for Abel or for Deborah, to Ruth or her great-grandson David, or between Priscilla and Aquila on the preaching trail.

In fact, the strange and mysterious sense that flows through the Biblical account of the Garden of Gethsemane is that prayer for Jesus, in his earthly ministry, was not qualitatively different than it is when we are on our knees, at a turning point in our lives.

But we are haunted by the ghost of a thought that we are somehow farther from the sources of communion, more distant from the fountains of grace than they were in the deserts of the Holy Land. We know that our modern levels of distraction, the pervasive reach of media, the murk of “data smog” can all keep our brains buzzing, our tongues a’flutter, and our ears itching. We think, and we think we think it without pride, that we are different.

We are not. The television is not more diverting than watching the sky to see if rain will finally come to save our crop, the government expects “an average of 18.7 hours per taxpayer” to fill out a 1040 but they don’t come and steal our donkey, and you don’t sleep three generations to a room, four to a bed. Prayer was both possible, and hard, in the Old Testament and Colonial America, and you can pray with power and consistency today just as well.

-- Prayer Now

So if prayer is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow, why does it seem so out of fashion? One reason is that we’ve largely stopped teaching it, in seminaries and in congregations alike. Since the scriptures report that the prophets had to strip naked in the marketplace and smash crockery to get the people to pray in Judea 3000 years ago, odds are there’s long been a tendency to let prayer, like most hard work, slide. Call that tendency sin, and you see why the problem keeps cropping up.

And that’s the main reason we slip past the praying we can and should do. It is, make no mistake about it, hard work. Like building a stone wall, hammering out a tool in the blacksmith’s forge, or writing exactly the right sentence to communicate an idea clearly. Each tool, each piece of raw material, must be carefully assessed, put in place, and adapted to use, and the mind and body (remember sin?) keeps looking for the shortcut.

Like pottery or calligraphy, there is no shortcut. Or to quote Yoda, “There is no ‘try.’ Only do, or do not.” Which is where the convenient excuse of distraction comes in.

How do you pray? The beginning steps are actually quite simple, and effective, as long as you don’t confuse getting started with going on. If you learn stretching exercises, you will be more healthy and fit – if you use them to prepare for further exercise. If you just stretch out, and never walk anywhere or work out or whatever, you not only won’t get fit . . . you’ll probably stop even doing the stretching.

-- Pray in Worship

The first step in a healthy prayer life is going to church. Yes, I said go to church and worship. Most of the prayer is provided, by others or in the service materials, in the singing and the fellowship. Praying alone is important, but it can be the hardest way to start. Jesus says to do it, but he doesn’t say it’s where you should begin.

Here’s a hint while you’re there: take note of how much of the typical service is prayer. Listen to the words of what’s sung, by you or others: prayer. In the Bible readings: very often, prayers. The Psalms are pretty much all prayers (we’ll come back to that). Introducing or concluding any of the other active parts of the service, like offering and communion, is prayer.

Plus, most preachers will tell you that even when their sermon is not directly framed in prayer language, that’s what the message is in essence. An overheard prayer, so to speak.

If you’re keeping track, that’s basically the whole service except for announcements. And occasionally them, too. So go to church to get started in prayer.

-- Prayer Happens (if you let it!)

What will happen next is that phrases and echoes of the songs and hymns and anthems, bits and pieces of the doxology or pastor’s prayer or the readings will stick in your head, and keep coming back. That’s part of what Paul talks about in Romans 8: 26-7. One of the mysteries of prayer is that the initiative of prayer is with God (Col. 4: 2-3), who has opened the door for communion with us through Christ, and in the Holy Spirit can “stir us up” to prayer even when we’re not planning on it.

The larger mystery is that God has given us the freedom to say “no,” that our prayers not be forced or coerced, but free offerings of our heart. With a simple “yes” to God’s purposes, the heavy lifting and high-impact communication is done for us. Check Genesis 28: 10-17 to see that at work!

-- Prayer Is Not On Backorder

So grab ahold of those scraps of prayer that keep rattling around in your head from worship. If you were attentive through the service, you heard quite a few different takes and approaches to prayer, so why did the chunks stick that you’re hearing as if on a loop in your brain? Likely there’s a reason, and that gives you a starting point to talk to God.

Can I ask God questions? People really do wonder about such things, which tell me they haven’t read the Psalms lately (let alone Job, but that’s for later). Questions like “who will win the playoffs?” or “where will I find love?” are more “gimmes” than questions, and those seeking a better prayer life do well to avoid the gimme list approach.

But you can find models for prayer; you can find prayers you can just pray for yourself (no plagiarism policy in praying, I’m happy to tell you) by reading some of those 150 outcries to God. To roughly paraphrase, right in the pages of your Bible people ask “God, what were you thinking?” and “Lord, you’re joking, right?” Even “Hey, God, you promised, remember?”

There are of course great hymns (fancy word for prayers set to music) to faithfulness and steadfastness and God’s absolute trustworthiness. What you don’t need to fear is feeling left out of the game if you’re not feeling that way about your relationship with God today. Like the weather in Ohio, if you don’t relate well to the language of one Psalm, turn the page. You’ll find your place soon enough.

And the great prayers of the church are still cedars in Lebanon and pillars of heaven. The prayer Jesus taught when his disciples said “Lord, teach us to pray,” is found at Mt. 6:7-13, and Lk. 11: 2-4. The traditional ending that we use in church comes from Jesus’ ancestor David, and his prayer in I Chr. 29: 11-13. Whether you use that conclusion, say debts or trespasses or sins, these words are holy to us from their Source, and through use by our ancestors in family and in faith.

Note well, though, that Jesus says “pray then like this,” not “just keep praying this prayer, folks.” Jesus says “like” this, a pre-eminent model and example.

-- Prayer Is Portable

We did call this “Praying on Asphalt,” noting that for many, time in transit, commuting to work or school or just stuck in traffic, is a huge block of time that offers many a chance to pray. If that’s alright . . .

Is it alright to pray behind the wheel? Was it OK to pray while working like a donkey, flailing grain in a hidden threshing floor, like Gideon? Did Paul pray while driving a thick needle through hides in the agora of Corinth, working as a tentmaker? Wasn’t the Woman at the Well praying while doing the hardest labor of her day, carrying water back to her home?

Did John Wesley pray on shipboard crossing to Savannah? Do you think Francis Asbury spent time in prayer on horseback covering distances that still stun historians today during the Revolutionary era? Can you pray while driving? Point made, I trust.

Now, can you really pray while playing the radio, flipping through the satellite channels, thinking about grocery lists, grabbing the papers off the passenger seat when traffic comes to a halt (or slows)? Whether at home or even in church, the nets and snares of sin can grab us and pull us off course. Intention and commitment are important anywhere, just as you can’t really truly communicate with your children about their day at school while watching TV and thumbing through a book. If your kids know it, assume God knows it too.

For many, the car can truly be that prayer closet Jesus speaks of in Mt. 6:6, where distractions can be kept at bay and the cell phone is out of range. The Bible on CD plays just as well as Robert Ludlum or Danielle Steel novels, and with the average commute of 30 minutes in Licking County, you can “read” (hear) the whole New Testament in seven weeks and the entire Bible in less than a year. You’ll hear quite a few prayers of others in those 66 books from Genesis to Revelation, too.

-- Prayer Is Not Just Talking

We all have friends or loved ones we can be silent with, I hope! There’s a huge difference between being quiet (“Hush, dear, Daddy’s working – be quiet!”) and being silent with someone we trust and are comfortable around. Talking, sometimes, can actually mess up a perfectly good moment with those we love.

Silence is not a state we are naturally comfortable with as 21st century Americans. To give them their due, Job’s friends were silent with him for three days, and only gummed up the works when they opened their mouths. The powerful scene of the Risen Christ in Galilee at the end of John’s Gospel is introduced by a silent Peter and the Apostles sitting quietly together on the shore of the lake, until Simon the Rock said, “I am going fishing.” (Does this imply that fishing is a form of prayer? Some commentators say “yes”!)

How can we be prayerfully silent with God, waiting for whatever comes next in God’s time? One way the historic church has practiced is called “the Jesus prayer,” growing out of Orthodox Christian practice of Russia and the even more ancient Coptic Christian church in Egypt. Using Luke 18: 13 as its base, the prayer is “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner.” The practice of this prayer is to inhale while focusing on “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God,” drawing in blessing and glory and promise from God’s creation, and then to exhale through “Have mercy on me, a sinner” offering up our sin and brokenness and everything that should leave us. This simple prayer not only goes back to the Gospels, but comes to us through Alexandria and Constantinople and ageless monasteries atop Mount Sinai and on the shores of the Red Sea.

An even more simple version of this prayer is pray Jesus’ name, “Jesus” as you breath out, “Jesus” as you breath in. Some still ask, “Is that prayer?” Ask two people in love if simply saying your Beloved’s name to them is a conversation, a communion. Silly question, isn’t it?

-- Just Prayer

So where are we so far? If you want to explore this strange form of communication the Church calls “prayer,” you can 1) start with worship, where prayers are offered up for the taking and others pray around you and for you and with you.

2) The prayers from worship give you cues and starting points for your own offerings to the God who made us, loves us, and wants to save us for Eternity. It may be a verse of a song stuck in our head, a phrase from the prayers of the community that just won’t shake out of your frontal lobe, or it may be the sight of the usher kneeling at the altar when simply returning the offering plates. But that lasting imprint is God telling you (Rom. 8:26) where your prayers might fruitfully go.

3) Those prayers can work themselves out anywhere, emphatically including your car. Anywhere you can carve out a space and time for reflection, is a possible place for prayer.

4) Prayer is not just a “piling up of words” as Jesus reminds us (Mt. 6:7), but communication, even that root meaning of “communion.” Prayer is being in contact with God, and if over 90% of our communication with each other is non-verbal, then how much more so with the One who already knows our inmost thoughts? Prayers like “The Jesus Prayer” of Eastern Orthodoxy Christendom can take us beyond verbal prayer to prayerful communion.

There are surely those times when we need words, if only to find our way in the darkness we create for ourselves in confusion and slefishness. The acronym “ACTS” is a longstanding watchword for public prayer, helping those who are called to praying out loud, on behalf of a gathered community, to trace the steps of a) Adoration, or praise of God, b) Confession, where we admit our failings and shortcomings in the light of a just and mighty Lord, c) Thanksgiving, for the saving acts of God in Christ and the witness of the church to share that Good News. And in any prayer, you really can’t properly move to d) Supplication until you’ve put what you’re planning to ask under the light of those first three. A supplicant is one who knows they ask for that they cannot provide themselves, and have no right to claim on their own. We have the best, truest supplications when we have offered our adoration, confession, and thanksgiving to God who gives us life and all good gifts.

-- Prayer Opens the Door

What is beyond that door is God, and all God has prepared for us, in Time and Eternity. This brief outline, to pick up an earlier example, really is just a set of stretching exercises. Once you’ve got those down, you’re ready to build up the Body of Christ with the works of love and mercy: intercessory prayer for those in need, prayer protection for God’s servants, bearing one another’s burdens (Gal. 6:2). This is advanced work, and you will enter into those efforts when God calls you to it, and shows who you will be working alongside of in that vineyard.

Colossians 4: 2-3 sums up this little handbook for starting out in prayer very well (in RSV translation): “Continue steadfastly in prayer, being watchful in it with thanksgiving; and pray for us also, that God may open to us a door for the word, to declare the mystery of Christ.”