Prayer-less

I'm not sure exactly what's going on with people at Oak Mountain Prez and Paul Miller's book, A Praying Life, but putting the two together is powerful. Today, I started teaching a Sunday School series based on the book in the Generations class, and many of the us were deeply moved by the lesson. I was caught off guard by the emotions people were feeling, and I had to slow down with what I was focused on and pay attention to what was going on in the room. This is similar to what happened when I taught on prayer this past winter to another class. That was by far the most I had ever seen a class moved by what we were studying.

"For you, what about prayer is hard?"

My guess is that it comes from the deep sense of failure most of us feel about prayer. We know we don't do it well. Our lives are messy and confusing, and slowing down to pray about these things just makes us realize even more how out of control we are. Then, evil comes in and puts us to shame: "You know better...," "You should pray more...", or "God's not really listening...".

I'm thankful that there's hope ahead for this class.