Tendons

A tendon (or sinew) is a tough band of fibrous connective tissue that usually connects muscle to bone and is capable of withstanding tension; tendons render function across a joint. 

You can stretch a tendon or rupture it, rendering the joint ineffective.  Then you will not be able to walk or use your arm, for example, to bear weight. The limb kind of flops there uselessly.

I think that prayer is somehow like a tendon.  It links us (as muscle with potential energy) to God ( the bone as the immoveable and pwerful dynamo), and when the tendon of prayer is healthy and strong linking us to God, we can do amazing things.  We can endure all kinds of tension and stress. 

However, when our prayer tendon is ruptured (and we have broken off communication with God) or stretched thin, (we are reduced to emergency or no real communication), we are rendered vulnerable to the enemy and discouragement, defeat, depression and all kinds of spiritual damage.

John 15:4 says Abide or dwell or remain in me and I will remain in you.  For a branch (or muscle) cannot bear or produce fruit if it is severed from the vine (or bone), and you cannot be fruitful apart from me.

I'm not sure why I am sharing this, but yesterday I watched an athlete fall to the floor in a game, a leg tendon obviously damaged as she limped off the floor.  And the picture made me think of how we walk around weak, as Christians, limping with stretched and ruptured tendons - made so by the neglect of real prayer, communcation with God, practicing the reality of his presencec and drawing power from him.