Little House on the Prayer-ie

I remember my junior year of high school I had this crisis time with God. I remember sitting for an hour after youth group with Tim telling him why God was super confusing to me and why it all seemed like this trick. There's all these paradoxes like, we seek to know God but we can never fully know God, we pray to God but God does whatever anyway. I think it was because my junior year was super busy and I often got up at 4 in the morning to finish my math homework, it's really hard to believe in God at 4 in the morning, and I'm not just trying to be cute by saying that, I'm serious. Anyway, I say all that because I still struggle with prayer. And usually I just kind of deal with it by either praying through it or not praying at all, but I'm going to be hanging out with middle school and high school aged kids this month at camps and I want to be able to pray better just in case I have to pray with them. And actually I think prayer is important to being a disciple and if I'm trying to make them disciples, I should at least know how to pray.

My prayer time sometimes feels like 4am. I'll walk into my room or Prescott or wherever with a lot on my mind, ready for quiet, ready for peace. Then I go to what I like to call sixth-grader-in-a-closet mode because all the sudden I have all these "am I doing this right" questions, like a kid playing seven minuets in heaven. All my prayer insecurities take over and once I finally start praying I wonder if God's even there anymore. God's a busy man right? actually no, not at all.

So finally I start talking then I don't know what to say. I remember this counselor at Mt Hermon saying something like, "God wants nothing more than to hang out with you." As I get older I doubt that statement more and more, but honestly sometimes I need that to be true. Sometimes I need God to listen to me talk about all the crap on my mind that no one ever asks about. Sometimes I need God to be my best friend. Sometimes I need God to "dry my eyes and count my tears" as Jars of Clay says. But often after I'm done telling God why I'm such a shitty Christian and making lame explanations for it all I hear is, "get over yourself white girl" and I don't know if that's God.

But I don't want to just go on rambling to God about stuff. I would never just uncensoredly tell all that crap to a friend, so why would I want to put God through that? There must be a certain propriety we have about prayer right? Or maybe not, maybe prayer allows us to drop all our fancy coats and clear off our make-up.

"Help us to not be so self absorbed with our own problems, but let us be the brother or sister to someone else that we so desperately need ourselves."- Pastor Steve prays these words every Sunday, and I'm glad. I think my self absorbency comes out most profoundly in prayer which I'm sure is missing the point. Well maybe.

I've got a lot of questions about prayer. So I think I'll blog about it again, but maybe later.