I wonder what it says that we have the audacity to be too busy for God. We comfort ourselves for not spending significant time in prayer because, after all, we pray all the time….don’t we? Well, if we are between a rock and a hard place, we pray. If the car coming toward us appears to be wandering out of his lane, we pray. If our child, or best friend, or brother, or boss seems to be making a bad decision, we might pray. Hmmmm, seems like all that praying is coming out of fear, fear that we won’t get what we want – even if what we want is a good thing. So we whisper up quick emergency flares! And from time-to-time, we whisper of “Thank you God” prayers, but I am not all that sure they are in the same proportion as the “Please God“ prayers.
Then there is that business of devotions…in general, soon after we pray the “sinner’s prayer,” we are taught that good Christians have daily devotions. Every day, we should spend some time reading the Bible, and maybe a devotional journal like “Daily Bread” and we should pray. So we squeeze that in somehow, feeling guilty that we don’t give it more time when someone brings the subject up, or feeling a bit sanctimonious that, after all, at least we did it, even if it was just before we turn the lights out at night.
Now, lest you think I am trying to say I am above it all and this is someone else’s problem, I’m not. I struggle with it like most other people I know. I do read a devotional journal and write in it most mornings, and I pray a bit most mornings, and I try to read something edifying spiritually before I turn the lights out, and I pray on and off throughout the day. But the bottom line, it takes way too little to interrupt me, to put me off schedule, or to squeeze into even that time.
I guess it all boils down to the fact that we have boarded a boat going down the river of life with no one at the helm, and we are at the mercy of the winds. Or maybe that’s a bad analogy. Maybe we are on that boat, but we keep the captain below deck. We peek at him from time to time, and ask his advice when the winds pick up so much that we can ignore them nor further, but in general, we just don’t think much of him.
So what do we do about this? I guess the first question really is Are we bothered by this? The second would be How much are we bothered by this?
Paul prayed in Ephesians 3:16 that God would give the Ephesians the power to be strong inwardly through his Spirit, that God would live in their hearts by faith, and that their lives would be strong in love and be built on love. As I read that, and have prayed that for myself and for others, I wonder if the reality is that God has done all that but we are too busy to notice. Just too busy...
