PRACTICE — Persistent Prayer
Prayer in persistence can be understood in three movements.
1. Say It Like You Mean It Don’t begin with grit or faith. Start with disappointment, naming your pain and need to God. He collects our tears, and we start by doing the same, dragging up our painful experiences of his perceived absence, silence, or rejection. Tell God your disappointments in prayer, and don’t water them down. Forget your manners. Tell it like it is.
2. Listen for the Question Invite God to show you the question beneath your disappointments. When you get to a deeper question, you’ll know you’re at the root. Beneath the circumstances left in the wake of your disappointment lives a question about the character of God. Is God really loving? Is God really listening? Does God really care about this part of my life? Is God all-powerful? Can God heal even this? Is God really bending all toward redemption? Remember, there’s a question hooked into God’s person, His character. Listen till you find it.
3. Ask God to Meet You in the Question Hold your deep question before God, inviting Him to bring healing. He heals through this process of pointed questions, so this question you’ve discovered holds within it the power of healing. Invite Him and keep inviting Him. He’s a miracle-working God who sometimes opens the eyes of the blind. He’s also a divine companion who sometimes stumbles around with us in the dark, wearing our pain alongside us. He’s a master healer. Our only role is to invite and keep inviting. It is through this process that you will discover the faith to ask again, to keep on interceding, to fill up that heavenly bowl. He is less interested in our asking out of duty or gritted teeth and more interested in the kind of asking that emerges from the healed heart of recovered faith.
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