Thinking about Prayer as Communication in a Close Relationship!

This Sunday as a Church we will look at prayer once again. Sometimes when familiar topics are presented the challenge is to take something familiar and present it so that it is faithful to scripture and connecting to our lives. So....we are going to look at prayer as communicating in relationship. These past two weeks I've spent every hour with a group of awesome high school students from Victoria British Columbia. We travelled down the west coast to Mexico to construct three homes for some under-resourced people in Col. Vicente Guerrero. Every day there was conversations taking place between the students, leaders and the new friends we found in Mexico. In those relationships I noticed that there is a huge range of communicating between friends. Speaking to each other is the most direct, but other methods of communicating were also visible. People hugging people, words of encouragement, laughter, corrections, adjustments, lots of laughter and in come cases...face to face confrontations...but all of it communication. I was wondering if just maybe we have been taught too seriously about prayer and not ventured into the relational aspect of prayer. I remember a quote from many years ago from Francois Fenelon. I will leave it for you to consider your relationship with God through prayer.

“Tell God all that is in your heart, as one unloads one's heart, it's pleasures, and it's pains, to a dear friend. Tell him your troubles, that he may comfort you; tell him your joys, that he may sober them; tell him your longings, that he may purify them; tell him your dislikes, that he may help you conquer them; talk to him of your temptations, that he may shield you from them; show him the wounds of your heart, that he may heal them; lay bare your indifference to good, your depraved tastes for evil, your instability. Tell him how self-love makes you unjust to others, how vanity tempts you to be insincere, how pride disguises you to yourself and others. If you thus pour out your weaknesses, needs, troubles, there will be no lack of what to say. You will never exhaust the subject. It is continually being renewed. People who have no secrets from each other never want for subject of conversation. They do not weigh their words, for there is nothing to be held back, neither do they seek for something to say. They talk out of the abundance of their heart, without consideration they say just what they think. Blessed are they who attain to such familiar, unreserved intercourse with God.”

Blessings as you converse with God in relationship.

Pastor Brian